Linda Colley's "Britons" = yet another stupidly boring seminar

Linda Colley’s Britons

Linda Colley’s 1992 book Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 attempts to determine the national character of the British Isles during the period in question. Principle to her study is a certain conception of the “nation” as an ideological construction which derives from specific cultural and economic developments. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, the conception of a unified national identity is itself highly problematic. It should not be understood as a collection of cultural or political essentialisms which originate in ethnic characteristics, but rather should be viewed along the lines of Anderson’s rather infamous edict as ‘an imagined political community’. With this in mind, it is possible to locate Colley’s argument that the British population was collected as an imagined community – and more particularly, that they came to define themselves – “in reaction to the Other beyond their shores” (6). Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Britain was at almost continual war with France, particularly as a reaction to Imperial (or in other words, colonial) interests. Indeed, Colley goes so far as to suggest the rather bold statement that “prolonged struggle tested and transformed state power on both sides of the Channel” (3), ultimately resulting in the emergence of key social institutions such as the Bank of England and a nationwide financial system.

The first chapter of her book seeks to determine the identity of the Britons, and more precisely to determine how the British people viewed themselves as a unified national body. The country was itself created in 1707 when Parliament passed the Act of Union, unifying Scotland, England, and Wales into one political entity. Despite some language differences, particularly with the Welsh, who did not give up their language until the twentieth century, the three initially separate countries had drawn ever closer together by trade. In the case of Scotland, there was also a monarchal connection through the Stuart Dynasty. There remained some disparities among the three regions, however. There was no shared Celtic identity between the Scottish and the Welsh despite their shared linguistic difference from England proper. As well, there was a fair amount of internal division between locales, evidenced, for instance, by the continued cultural strife between the Highlands and the Lowlands in Scotland and between the Northern and Southern territories in England. England itself was internally unified by language, economy, and a less geographically diverse terrain than either of its neighbours, yet the variety of local customs, foods, and literatures demonstrate that English culture was not homogenous. Indeed, it seems evident that the border zones between nations had more in common with each other than they did to the centralized authorities to which they were ostensibly tied. It should be accordingly noted that under such conditions any sense of national identity must be read in a heteroglossiac manner: “Great Britain in 1707 was much less a trinity of three self-contained and self-conscious nations than a patchwork in which uncertain areas of Welshness, Scottishness, and Englishness were cut across by strong regional attachments, and scored over again by loyalties to village, town, family and landscape” (17). Some of these cultural differences were negotiated by advances in infrastructure, communications, and trade, the latter of which being free of internal tariffs or duties in opposition to Continental practise. There was a great deal of internal mobility largely resulting from trade, and consequently, “England and Scotland ... experienced a much faster rate of urban growth in the eighteenth century than did any other part of Europe” (39). Indeed, the “relative sophistication of [Britain’s] economic networks played an important part in keeping this culturally diverse land together” (43).

The most significant distinction Colley makes in her study is the extension of the psychological binary of Self and Other – an important trope for Ego formation since Freud – to the more broad social construction of national identity, and indeed Britons saw themselves as God’s chosen people. Fundamental to this belief is the protestant reformation of the sixteenth century which led to an independent church in England. British identity was the reification of the perceived difference between the island Self and the continental Other. This difference did have an internal dimension as well, for the biggest internal conflicts surrounded the ideological gulf felt between Protestants and Catholics. By the eighteenth century, Catholics could not vote, and were indeed second class citizens. It was believed that all of the catastrophes of recent history – the tyranny of James I, the London fire of 1666 – were all precipitated by Catholics. Print was of vital importance in unifying the Britons within this ideological field. Daily newspapers were numerous by the early eighteenth century, and outnumbered those produced by continental nations. While London served as the locus for print (and indeed non-print) culture – many provincial editors relied on news from London to fill their dailies – protestant ideologies had infiltrated British culture to such an extent that the ideological fundament of the papers reflected a similar, while not totally monolithic, culture. Cheap publications such as almanacs, sermons, and broadsheets sold exceptionally well and were quick to produce, and consequently were widely available to the subordinate classes: “this enormously enhanced access to print was a vital part of the conviction that Protestant Britons were peculiarly privileged” (42). They were used as vehicles for the spread of anti-Catholic sentiments and other “history” lessons, and were frequently written “to demonstrate the country’s centrality and miraculous deliverance from popery” (22). Similarly, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which was as equally popular as the Bible, “linked brutal religious persecution with Roman Catholicism and foreign intervention” (27). The Martyrs were themselves associated with the commoners as well as the aristocracy in order to avoid, or at least hold at bay, any class antagonism.

While there was some tolerance of Catholicism – many knew a Catholic neighbour – Catholics could experience the same hostility as meted out to witches and heretics, particularly in times of war. Catholic nations were characterised by the British as slothful and inept, while Catholic values were themselves perceived as “upside-down” (36). The British did not experience the hardships of starvation and foreign invasion, and consequently there were no significant instances of civilian casualties or property destruction. “The relative absence of famine was a powerful aid to social stability” (37), and this stability led to a belief that Protestantism was indeed the more ‘righteous’ ideological path. Adversity to the ‘obvious moral corruption’ of Catholicism helped define a British identity as chosen by God: “suffering and recurrent exposure to danger were a sign [sic] of grace; and, if met with fortitude and faith, the indispensable prelude to victory under God” (29). Indeed, religion had so tied itself to political (national) identity that in 1688 and 1714 the rules of succession were altered to disallow Catholic claimants on the throne from gaining power. The Hanoverian George I, for example, himself of German origin, was given power by Parliament over fifty otherwise more eligible individuals whose sole detrimental characteristic was their adherence to Catholicism. To legitimate Protestant rulers, the divine right of kings, fundamental to English legal structure since Magna Carta, was itself suspended in favour of “divine providence and the people’s will” (48). Great Britain was allegorized as the new Jerusalem, with battles against Catholic states depicted as “the triumph of Israel over the Moabites” (31). Apart from the loss of some American colonies in 1776, Britain enjoyed a series of strategic victories: “it was easy ... for Protestant polemicists to argue, and tempting for the mass of men and women to believe, that it was the expulsion of those Stuart princes who had inclined toward Catholicism, and the unity of the island under a Protestant dynasty that had transformed Britain’s position in the world” (53) from the insular, rather marginal power it had been in the sixteenth century to the might of its Imperial control by the nineteenth.

Such an aggrandized sense of Self needs a potent Other with which to ontologically define itself. For much of the period in question, France occupied this hallowed position for the British consciousness. The country did pose a threat to British interests, as it had a larger landmass and population, could field a stronger and more numerous army, and was pointedly anti-Protestant. It was feared that the French would restore Catholicism to Britain and consequently return the country to the hell of its troubled history: “the prospect in the first half of the eighteenth century of a Catholic monarchy being restored in Britain by force, together with the recurrent wars with Catholic states, and especially with France, ensured that the vision that so many Britons cherished of their own history became fused in an extraordinary way with their current experience” (25). It is here that Colley’s argument falls slightly. It seems more likely that the Other was a religious rather than a national one, even though the two were one and the same in the case of countries such as France. The acceptance of the many Hugenots who fled the Continent to settle in England is proof that the British people did not equate foreignness as inherently corrupt. Furthermore, by stressing the importance of the British Parliament to national identity – the institution was idiosyncratic to Britain, for many such congregations had ceased to operate on the Continent: “Parliament was unique, splendid and sovereign, the hard-won prerogative of a free and Protestant people” (50) – Colley implicitly suggests an alternate avenue for Otherness that she does not explore. Parliament as a social construction represents a unique conflation of the individual and an ontological tendency for anti-individualism, for it was ostensibly used to represent the will of the individual as reified by social and legal structure. Many, even those Britons who lacked full citizenship for economic reasons, could bring their political desires before this institution, and this sense of agency for the otherwise marginalised was a potent force uniting the disparate peoples of Great Britain. The perceived Other is the individual who does not conform to the rules of political interpellation: “the Protestant construction of British identity involved the unprivileging of minorities who would not conform” (53). It might be possible to argue, however, that the more authentic Other in the case of the British consciousness is the irrational, to which both Protestantism and legal practise applied their medicaments. The Self evolved over the course of three centuries, manifesting as potent social institutions, such as Parliament and the legal code, which themselves signified Britishness more than any individual cultural practise. That these institutions were shared amongst the territories which constituted Great Britain signals the true unifying nature of the projection of Self-identity onto a national consciousness.

oh Humphrey Clinker, won't you ever learn?

The presence of human bodies cen be readily traced in a variety of texts, and indeed through the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes the corpus humani has become a focal point of a great deal of contemporary literary criticism. While as a general principle I do not like to include biographical details of authorship as an entry point into textual interpretation, in regard to Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, there can be little to differentiate the author function from the theme of his novel. Each represents the same gesture to transcend a diseased and thus emphatically mortal body. Smollett’s text reflects the growing concern the author had concerning his own deteriorating health. It was in a very real sense a sentimental swan song to his profession, as the vitriolic social criticism of earlier works such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was constrained to a much greater degree in Humphrey Clinker. While some critics have awarded a certain austere respect to the text for being a more muted satire than the author’s previous works, Smollett’s last novel should not be misunderstood as a light social farce lacking a probing critical intention. As I will soon elaborate, the text becomes a locus for an ontological deferral, and as such serves to elaborate a meta-narrative of humanity seeking to postpone an existence which is by definition entropic.

The process of writing is itself key to this deferral, and acts as a mediator between the personal and the public. Like the social conception of the body itself, writing signals the entrance of an individual into public space, and yet simultaneously it is an antisocial activity in terms of its removal – or perhaps more accurately the self-imposed hermetic isolationism, a compartmentalization – of the author from their society. As Barthes was to describe in relation to the Surrealists, sometimes there can be too much literature as the body as res actualis is overlooked. As a foundational device for the narrative – here an epistolary, and thus somewhat fragmentary, structural trope – writing is both a gesture reifying an instant to consequently make it transcendent over the temporality of its initial context, and simultaneously it serves to obliterate the experiential existence of that moment. In other words, the process of writing both sanctifies and annihilates its subject with the same ontological gesture, and thus can be seen to reflect Camus’s notions of ritual suicide as a creative termination as elaborated in The Myth of Sisyphus. It is for this latter reason that the travel metaphor is elaborated in Smollett’s text, as Matt Bramble seeks continual motion in order to cure his degrading health and differ the ultimate sedentary existence as a body interred. At times, he seems to regret the drive to capture his experiences in textual form, and at these instances Bramble seems aware of the Janus nature of language as simultaneously formative and destructive of subjective experience:

My letter would swell into a treatise, were I to particularize every
cause of offence that fills up the measure of my aversion to this,
and every other crowded city – Thank Heaven! I am not so far
sucked into the vortex, but that I can disengage myself without
any great effort of philosophy – From this uproar of knavery,
folly, and impertinence, I shall fly with double relish to the serenity
of retirement ... the hospitality and protection of the rural gods;
in a word, the jucunda oblivia vitae which Horace himself had
not taste to enjoy. (155)

This Zen-like transcendence to which the Horace quotation refers – an exquisite and divine annihilation of the senses precipitated by an absolute and immanent subjectivity – is precisely the differal suggested by both the writing process and Bramble’s own quest for palliative care. It is a state of non-existence, of absolute silence which precipitates from an unending babble of voices. In a similar manner, Bramble terminates contact with his doctor when he is in motion, yet the journey itself precipitates the writing of letters explaining his current ailments in order to seek medical guidance: “as we shall be in motion for some weeks, I cannot expect to hear from you as usual; but I shall continue to write from every place at which we make any halt” (188). As readers, we are meant to question the nature of writing as an instrument for socialization – in this capacity, Bramble’s nephew Jery Melford proclaims the virtues of the growing popularity of female authors, “who publish merely for the propagation of virtue” (160). If writing must be seen as antithetical to the travel motif, at least in terms of their mutual temporal exclusivity, then Bramble’s letters (which, more accurately, should be interpreted as proselytisations and not epistolary documents in the traditional sense of “how are you dear friend?”...) should be seen as attempting to create an insular society tangentially associated with the bustle and turmoil of the urban masses. With Bramble’s complaints, Humphrey Clinker serves to document the growing fecundity of the middle classes and the alterations demanded by such a society: “all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest” (119). In actuality, just as Bramble’s diseased body gives the text its narrative drive, so too does the “diseased mass” represented by the urban centre precipitate the capturing of Bramble’s thoughts into the physical form of the letters he writes.

It is with the character of Matt Bramble that connections can be made between Humphrey Clinker and the earlier, more overtly critical, of Smollett’s texts. Principally, movement suggests an antithesis to the urban settlement which seems most contrary to Bramble’s ideology. Throughout Bramble’s letters, the spread of urban development is likened to a cancer affecting the body politic, where social success and decay are made concomitant: “we live in a vile world of fraud and sophistication” (67). It is the masses, congregating in the largest urban centres such as London and Westminster, which serve as the locus for this particular discontent. Cross contamination between social classes is an unavoidable prerequisite for urban growth, and it is precisely this aspect of the masses which Bramble finds most objectionable: “the mixture of people in the entertainments of this place was destructive of all order and urbanity; that it rendered the plebians insufferably arrogant and troublesome, and vulgarized the deportment and sentiments of those who moved in the upper spheres of life” (80). Indeed, it is the urban centre as a hybrid entity that is most antithetical to Bramble’s sentiments, and yet Smollett’s subtle satirical impulses juxtapose the elder gentleman’s antisocial proclivities with the pursuit of his health, which is realized fundamentally as a socially dependant phenomenon. The spa represents the fluid boundaries suggested by urban spaces, and as such is a place of absolute biological community, whose organisms intermingle freely and promiscuously: “what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies perboiling in the kettle below” (75). This contamination is given a particularly potent satire by involving issues of the rich classes consuming the poor: “as we drink the decoction of living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath” (76). (As a thoroughly inconsequential aside, we can view Tabatha’s dog Chowder as representing the ineffectual complaints of the aristocracy against the presumptions of the merchant and lower classes stepping on their privilege and economic and cultural jurisdiction. In this guise, it is an interesting correlation that Tabatha gives up her dog the day she gives up attacking her servants.)

Bramble’s rejection of normative social discourse initially manifests itself in the fainting spell he experiences upon commencing his treatments. That the elder Bramble swoons at Bath represents a negation of the ontological priority for selfness. His rejection of society is ultimately a rejection of his own body, a jouissance gesturing to the oblivion in which he himself as a subject of social discourse and as a body interpellated as such within the public sphere is given absolute autonomy. As another aside somewhat tangential to this present examination, it is interesting to note that in one of his letters Bramble’s nephew makes it clear that bodies sublimated to public scrutiny, and in particular bodies which transgress social normalization, are mediated as abstract entities separate from the individual consciousness of the person involved. Thus, Humphrey Clinker, when falsely arrested for highway brigandry, enters the penal system not as an individual, but as a concept: “I saw the body [emphasis added] of poor Clinker consigned to the gaoler of Clerkenwell” (183). In light of this, it is possible to deduce, as Foucault has, that bodies gain individuality only when social norms have been internalized and the interpellative process can function in the interest of those who exercise power within social discourse. Bramble is aware of the interpellative controls imposed by society, and in particular that society creates the sense of Self and Body that stimulates health, and yet his aggressive condemnation of the English society of his contemporaries signals the jouissant suicide of the individual entering the public sphere. Indeed the public sphere is rendered organic in its depiction as a vile and corrupt – truly, a diseased – entity. It is disease which bridges the public and the private aspects of human existence. Bramble condemns the decay of the river Thames, itself an ecologically corrupted sign for the prosperity and development of the increasingly financially well-endowed London, as an urban pariah:

If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of
an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or
swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated
with all the filth of London and Westminster – Human excre-
ment is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is
composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in
mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying
carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings
of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers within
the bills of morality.
(152)

In a very real sense, the urban centre is a hybrid entity of biological and technological organisms; ochre and blood reflect urine and grease, and all are the vital and diseased fluids of urban civilization. It is neither individually but the two in conflation that Bramble criticises. His aggressive condemnation of the daily presses signals that the voice of this hybridity is bastardized in Bramble’s eyes: “the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation” (134). It is as though the epistolary form justifies the entrance of his own consciousness into the public sphere, whereas editorial content destroys the sanctity of opinion by means of the institutionalization of individual discourse. It is important in this regard that Humphrey Clinker himself is given little room to express his own sentiments. There are no letters written by Clinker, but rather his character and exploits are relayed through interpretation by the other characters. In a very real sense, Clinker serves as the pardoner for the masses to which Bramble is himself reacting. Preaching to improve their station – for example, he seeks to end the widespread use of common profanity, and thus equalize the virtues and sentiments of the different economic classes, to which Bramble responds: “there will be little or nothing left to distinguish their conversation from that of their betters” (132) – Clinker stands as a messianic figure for the soon-to-be-redeemed masses. He seems to be the manifest hybridity of urbanity, the country bumpkin who can mutate his appearance as required. His action, and more importantly his silence, designate him as a thematic inversion to Bramble’s xenophobic and decrepit existence. It is possible to wonder whether it is for this reason that many of the characters feel that he must be saved from the injustices of imprisonment, despite some evidence to suggest his guilt. At the very least, Clinker can be seen as a healthy (and almost universally humorous) alternative to the negational gestures elaborated by Bramble in his letters. By stoically accepting social discourse and obligation, Clinker represents the joie de vivre necessary to truly evade (while not avoiding) death.