ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that the emergence of an image of ‘Englishness’ had a long history of development, arising out of the strains emerging in English politics in the 1880s and resulting partly from a general crisis in urban society. 1 A cultural response beginning in the 1890s and 1900s spread widely across English art, letters, music and architecture by 1914. A wide range of popular history books, novels and travel books were published between the wars with ‘England’ in their titles with many drawing upon this set of often backward-looking images in a variety of ways; 2 these works have been studied by a range of modern authors. 3 We should remember that the construction of a monolithic national discourse is never complete. The discourse of Englishness was continually disrupted by supplementary, alternative or directly competing images. 4 I shall not study the complexity within the representation of Englishness at this time but will turn to some of the ideas of national origin that exist within works of this date.
