ABSTRACT
In their attempt to map the contours of the national culture, Robert Colls and Philip Dodd argue that we are still living in the shadow of the significant changes that took place between 1880 and 1920. It was in these years, they suggest, that the idioms of national identity we now take for granted were first constituted in a recognizably modern form, that Englishness as we understand it was first articulated. This was the period, according to Dodd, when “the conviction that English culture was to be found in the past was stabilised,” when the “people of these islands were invited to take their place, and become spectators of a culture already complete and represented for them by its trustees.”1
