ABSTRACT
This short excerpt from Charles Dickens’s 1856 article ‘Why?’ is one of the most pertinent inquiries into the nature of national identity in all of Household Words. In the fi rst place, Dickens stresses both the arbitrary, fl uid nature of what comprises ‘Englishness’ and its simultaneous, compulsive hold on its subjects-its power of interpellation, as Louis Althusser termed it.2 Secondly, the choice of the term ‘un-English’ encapsulates the importance of contrast-of ‘others’—in the formation of a national character: what is English is most easily expressed in terms of what is not English. As Catherine Hall states, it is the very ‘assumptions about “others” which defi ne the nature of Englishness itself.’ 3 Finally, Dickens’s question underlines strongly the point that national identity is equivalent to religion in its methods and functions. He implies codes of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour, values and ‘moral conscience’ (as Ernest Renan was to defi ne the nation some thirty years later4) that resemble those rules of conduct that form the basis of most religious beliefs. Englishness, then, is not a static fact determined by geographical origin or parentage, but transitory and dynamic-it refers to instances of particular behaviour rather than to someone’s nationality.5 ‘Un-English’ is thus on a par with what modern colloquial English might term ‘not the done thing’.
