William Blake represents the united voice of England and the English people. This is an immense accomplishment. It is a rare feat to leave such a memorable and meaningful legacy within a nation that throughout its history has struggled to define itself. England, and its people have sustained numerous attacks from cynics who refuse to believe that the English have a unique identity and culture. Bizarrely, these are the same cynics who have become the greatest champions of Blake’s work. It is strange that they share their admiration with traditionalists, their ideological enemies.
However both camps are in agreement with Blake’s savage critique of the untrammelled industrialisation of England, and the pernicious effects of it. Anyone with emotional attachments to the English landscape feels the same way. Blake had a great insight into these sentiments. He had an acute awareness of the spirit of place, for him England was sacred. It is extremely unusual for any cultural figure to simultaneously appeal to the counterculture and to the Establishment. Very few figures aside from Blake resonate with two very different audiences.
However Blake transcended these arbitrary political categories. His convictions were solely spiritual ones. He maintained a profound belief, but his belief system also defied conventional religion. He also understood the universal follies of human nature, once describing anger as a tree growing with poisoned fruit. Other human follies are exposed in his writing. Blake was a visionary, a prophet, a poet and expert draughtsman and engraver. All of his imaginative and creative skills were honed from childhood.
His inspiration was also derived from the long walks that he took throughout London. He observed everyday life and reflected upon the remarkable and often disturbing scenes that he had witnessed. One morning was especially memorable. Walking through Peckham Rye he experienced a dramatic epiphany. He looked up and saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough”. Angels are a perennial theme in his art and in his poetry.
However his stellar reputation is a relatively recent development. Today he is revered as a seer and a genius, but in his lifetime he was condemned as a lunatic and a dissolute. He was castigated as a disruptive and subversive influence and was shunned by polite society. Consequently he struggled to make a living and lived an austere life. When he died, his friend and fellow artist George Richmond kissed him, closed his friend’s eyes and prayed “to keep the vision in”. The vision has waxed and waned over the centuries, but at the time of his death, his passing was left unacknowledged. He was considered just another obscurity. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the Bunhill Field dissenters graveyard in London.
However it wasn’t until 2018 that the Blake Society redressed this and paid for a new gravestone. Once more, the timing of this exposes a great paradox. It occurred at the peak of the vicious and vituperative “Brexit wars” when an ideological divide threatened to tear the nation apart. Paradox is at the heart of Blake’s sensibilities, he understood that it was vital in the journey towards moral and spiritual enlightenment,
“Without Contraries”, he explained, “is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human Existence. Opposition is true friendship”. Unfortunately, such challenging perceptions are too difficult to comprehend in a dying culture.
The emotional depth rendered in his poetry and art still evades most modern audiences who are more familiar with the shallow and trivial. Blake’s point has been made, a society that is more concerned with material accumulation is essentially a moribund one.
On the 10th September, 1931 the English author Isabel Colegate was born. Her most acclaimed work was her 1980 novel “The Shooting Party”. The narrative focuses on a society event on a grand estate on the eve of the First World War. It captures a place and time that has now vanished, as before the Great War there was a sense of familiarity and order. There were seasons, a pattern and a routine to life on the grand estates. Everyone and everything had a place in a fixed hierarchy.
On this particular estate, life revolved around the annual shooting party. The quarry were bred and reared to be prey at exactly the same time every year. Every creature played a part, from the lowliest moth to the most magnificent specimen of deer. It ran like clockwork.
However as the narrative unfolds, it soon becomes apparent that there are vague but palpable signs threatening both the social order and the cycles of nature. The first sign manifests itself in the form of a stranger arriving on the grounds of the estate. He arrives to spread subversive and dangerous ideas, disturbing the sense of peace and harmony. He makes a declaration in words that sound eerily prophetic, stating, “Until we can recognise the universal kinship of all living creatures we shall remain in outer darkness”. The atmosphere is redolent of an outer darkness and it strikes a chord within the reader, who senses that there is an inevitability to the brief existence faced by the animals. The reader accepts, albeit with resignation and sadness that these animals have no rights, and no agency.
These animals exist as the hunted and their fate is sealed immediately from the point of their conception. They remain a constant and interchangeable feature whose entire destiny is inextricably entwined with the earth that sustains them. Their lives are so short that their fleeting presence seems negligible.
It is a pattern of life that has a solemn futility to it. The lives of the agricultural workers who toil the land are an exact mirror of the brutal, limited lives of the animals. Nature appears like a cruel mimic, as these desperately poor men eventually succumb to the same meaningless deaths when they are hunted down and killed on imperial battlefields. Their lives are virtually the same, as the author readily admits. She can see the obvious parallels, she expounds upon this theme,
“The sacrifice now was not of men but of birds, handsome creatures, bred in every luxury a bird could wish for…fed, protected from predators, set loose for a few months of life in what was to be presumed might be a pheasant’s Eden, only to be cast forth by a whole host of rustic angels, bearing not so much flaming swords as sticks and whistles, forced to take to the air reluctantly- heavy birds, a flight of more than a few feet exhausts them-forced up and out to meet a burst of noise and a quick death in that bright air”. However, the ominous words of that stranger come back to haunt the hunters when tragedy strikes.
A minor member of the party is accidentally shot, and he dies of his injuries. In an instant, he is a martyr. A greater sacrifice of young men ensues when war breaks out. The aftermath of this loss was devastating, not just of youth but tradition, old money and hierarchical society. The diminishing members of the old guard who survived these seismic events were the last remaining witnesses of a vanished world. Their numbers continued to dwindle in the modern era. These changes simply swept everything of value away, Colegate reveals one character’s insights, stating, “Although he felt himself now too old to be able quite to make out what were the assumptions, orthodoxies, hypocrisies even events of the new age, he was certain that they embodied changes for the worse, a sort of mass loss of memory, and the replacement of the common understandings of a civilised society by the destructive egotism of a barbaric one”. Even now, the historic parallels seem strangely similar in our contemporary postmodern society.
On the 2nd September, 1973 the English academic, poet and novelist J.R.R Tolkien died. He was the renowned author of the “Lord of the Rings” novels and an esteemed professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He dedicated his entire career to the revival of a once distant and obscure culture, almost buried by modernity.
One of his main inspirations was the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, who proclaimed, “Hail Earendel, most bright angel!”. This was a devotional composed to an entity which we now understand as Venus, the morning star. When he read this he was so haunted by the power of the words that it summoned in him a deep atavistic longing, “I felt an unconscious thrill,” he said, “as if something had stirred me, half-wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words”. This remote voice from our ancient past reawakened him, and revived his dormant imagination.
Cynewulf’s verse explored the landscapes of the ancient kingdom of Mercia, a sylvan wilderness situated deep within the heart of England. This region of England is now lost to the realm of myth, aside from a few rural areas. It no longer exists in any meaningful sense as it has been transformed by the untrammelled forces of urbanisation. Tolkien spent his early childhood in Birmingham, in the shadow of Sarehole Mill. He remembered it as a blissful, bucolic existence. This peace and harmony was shattered by the First World War and the almost ceaseless drive towards efficiency and progress.
The First World War and its aftermath was a watershed moment in our history. It was devastating, not just in terms of the lives that were lost, but also in terms of the tremendous impact that it left upon society. The old aristocracy went into rapid decline due to the loss of heirs, and the increase in taxes on estates. This impacted upon every strata of society, especially those who relied upon aristocratic noblesse oblige. Consequently, new and malign political ideologies were stirring amidst an increasingly discontented and insecure populace.
This barren and austere world provided the inspiration for “Lord of the Rings”. He depicts the old Anglo-Saxon world as a paradise threatened by the forces of evil. This evil was personified by Sauron, the Dark Monarch who reigned over a nihilistic kingdom called Mordor. This was a military-industrial complex replete with black furnaces, munitions factories and slag heaps.
Tolkien was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme and had witnessed death and destruction first hand. He saw how the destruction of human life and the natural world was simply pitiless and senseless. He imagined an alternate world, and a more benevolent ruler, the polar opposite of Mordor. This was Aragorn, the exiled King who was due to return to deliver his people from the yoke of Sauron. These tales are rich in religious symbolism, and correlate strongly with the author’s Roman Catholic faith.
The Biblical allusions were deliberate and were encouraged by his friend and Oxford contemporary C.S Lewis. Both became convinced that modernity, and modern literature in particular was devoid of purpose, and essentially moribund. They both realised that the ancient world provided a fertile ground of inspiration and also contained vital moral lessons for future generations. Lewis was definite in his assertion that re-imagining this long forgotten world was necessary for those who “wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe or terror as the actual world does not supply”. Lewis maintained his own Christian beliefs, and were the source of his literary inspirations.
Clearly, the philosophies that dominated the modern, secular world have not delivered humankind out of its own misery. In fact they have compounded it. A society that prioritises economic and scientific progression and growth is essentially lost. The decline of spirituality has corresponded with a decline in empathy and humanity. In this mindless and futile quest to achieve perfection on Earth we have simply become less human. Our ancestors had much more profound connections, and thanks to the tireless work of poets, scholars and authors like Tolkien we have learned so many valuable insights.
On the 30th August, 1797 the English author Mary Shelley was born. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were radicals and intellectuals standing on the cusp of a new world. It was the first stirrings of “the Enlightenment”, a rapidly progressive age of cultural, scientific innovation and political change. Europe was soon convulsed by revolution and counter revolution. The old certainties were waning and dramatically new ideas were emerging in their place.
It was also a fraught and uncertain time in history. Ideas were perceived as dangerous, treasonous, heretical or blasphemous but amidst danger there was a groundswell of hope. The changing social and political fortunes in France provided vital succour to intellectuals and artists who observed that dictatorial systems could founder and fairer, more equitable societies were possible.
However the French Revolution was not seamless, and despite the hopes and aspirations of the newly liberated people it quickly descended into anarchy and violence. It seems ironic to reflect that a political system that was supposedly driven by reason eventually transformed into an arena of chaos.
The violence and terror that was unleashed did not deter luminaries in this country from championing their cause. The “Lunar Society” in Birmingham were prominent supporters, as a collective of scientists and philosophers they had great sympathy with the grand ambitions of the French revolutionaries.
The British public, however, were not so enamoured by them and their presence provoked riots. When a celebratory dinner was held to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, rioters broke into the house of Joseph Priestley and set fire to all of his furniture and books.
The riots continued for a week. Rioters daubed “Church and King for ever” on the walls. The continent of Europe was disintegrating, and there were genuine fears that the same devastating scenario would be replicated in England. Edmund Burke was one of the first to sound the warning bell. He outlined his many objections in a remarkably prescient letter to the Jacobite politician Lord Bolingbroke, written in 1757.
Burke’s words were prophetic, and it is incredible that he had enough foresight to realise what could happen in a post-revolutionary society. Utopia was a foolish pipe dream. He explains it all in startlingly lucid and convincing prose, clearly stating that “I have sometimes been in a good deal of doubt, whether the creator did ever really intend man for a state of happiness. He has mixed in his cup a number of natural evils (in spite of the boasts of stoicism they are evils) and every endeavour which the art and policy of mankind has used from the beginning of the world to this day, in order to alleviate, or cure them, has only served to introduce new mischiefs, or to aggravate and inflame the old”. Decades would pass before anyone took his warnings seriously.
In the meantime, scientists and philosophers continued in their ceaseless quest to perfect human society. It was met with a combination of admiration and scepticism. Coleridge was unimpressed, in spite of the initial enthusiasm expressed by his contemporary poet Wordsworth. He seriously doubted the claims made by these learned men and in a letter to him, he complained vociferously that the notion that, “Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state is contrary to all history, to all religion, nay, to all possibility”. Such cynicism was common. However a young poet named Percy Shelley was inspired by the bold theories presented by the scientists and thinkers.
According to literary legend, Shelley recounted these alarming scientific discoveries to his wife on that stormy evening on Lake Geneva when the assembled guests of Lord Byron were challenged to conceive ghost stories. Mary Shelley, haunted by the notion that life could be manufactured by godless scientists with supernatural ambitions, was stricken with a nightmare. In her diary she remembered this dream of “a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man…It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”. Now we recognise “Frankenstein” as the embodiment of science divorced from human ethics, the personification of a mortal man believing himself to have Godlike powers. This novel continues to resonate today.
London is a city of extremes. It is the financial, cultural and political capital of England and the centre of the global mass media. It looms large in the popular imagination as an exciting, vibrant hub of art and ideas. On the surface it offers opportunity, fame and wealth. However, beneath this glossy exterior lies a hidden seam of exploitation, violence and venality.
The Celtic word for “cruel” is “londos”, and the city is aptly named, if indeed this is where the name actually comes from. The most malevolent side of the capital, in an ironic twist, has created a new market of dark tourism. The Whitechapel murders and the mystery of the identity of the murderer remain a perennial source of fascination, and tours are conducted of the area to willing participants who are even prepared to pay good money for the privilege.
The murders were real events, but over the past century they have acquired the status of myth and legend. Most of the fascination focuses on the murderer and his motives yet scant attention is paid towards his victims. Everybody has heard of “Jack the Ripper”, but very few remember the names of the women he murdered. Not many people are aware of the personal details of these unfortunate women either.
However this is merely a reflection of a sad and pitiful feature of human nature. It seems that less interest is garnered towards ordinary lives but morbid curiosity is perpetually centred upon the evil doers. The media mirrors popular sensibilities but it also profits from the worst elements. Over time the victims of crime are gradually dehumanised, while the perpetrators are humanised and even sympathised with, because their personalities are discussed and analysed in obsessive detail. Human empathy is dwindling, while the most brutal and sadistic characters are lionised. It is a strange inversion of a civilised society.
“The Ripper”’s eleven victims were Emma Elizabeth Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles and tragically, a woman whose name and identity was never ascertained. They were all murdered in the Whitechapel district between 1888 and 1891, and the perpetrator was never found despite the combined efforts of the police and the local people. However the gruesome nature of these crimes were recorded for posterity by Inspector Dew. Dew was the police officer who attended the scene of one of the murders, he stated that “what happened there, the old nausea, indignation and horror overwhelm me still..It was all before me now, Jack the Ripper at his most devilish. No savage could have been more barbaric. No wild animal could have done anything so horrifying…On the bed, which was drawn obliquely across the small room, was all that remained of a good looking and buxom woman. There was little left of her, not much more than a skeleton. Her face was terribly scarred and mutilated”. The tawdry aspects of East-End existence were put under media glare for the first time.
The vulnerability of the poorest, most downtrodden women was exposed to the public and it generated an outcry. It led to a vociferous campaign to change the living conditions in the most neglected part of London. Acts of Parliament were passed to guarantee a minimum standard of housing and over the following two decades the East-End slums were demolished. The East-End still has an insalubrious reputation for crime, villainy and vice but it also has a proud history of community, jocularity and solidarity. That is the most important thing to remember.
On the 14th August, 1867 the English novelist, playwright and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy was born. His most famous and celebrated work was a trilogy of novels, collected and published under the title “The Forsyte Saga”. It is a saga following the trials and tribulations of the Forsyte family.
However it is wrong to dismiss the saga as trivial fluff, light entertainment or a fictional rendering of a cosy domestic drama. It contains a truly profound message. It is a caustic commentary of society, and a serious analysis of the motivations, impulses and inner lives of the characters.
It is almost a portrait of Victorian England itself, embodied within a very privileged but ultimately dysfunctional family. The cruelty, the vicious snobbery and the emotional repression that dominated the culture of England during that time is revealed in unsparing prose. It exposes the darkness beneath the fragile veneer of polite respectability.
Galsworthy’s magnum opus shares many similarities with the work of his near contemporary E.M Forster, who famously implored for us all to “only connect” in his novel “Howard’s End”. This was also a tragic social commentary on class division. Galsworthy, like Forster, believed in the transformative and transcendent potential of love. However love, like every other natural emotion is constantly stifled by the oppressive rigidity of social convention.
Galsworthy was averse to the worship of wealth and fulminated against the concept of money. He found it deeply unnatural. The characters are obsessed with it, almost to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. The Forsytes established a successful firm of stockbrokers, but it is soon revealed that the family have humble roots. There are brief allusions to their ancestor and benefactor, “Old Dosset” and fond anecdotes and memories relating to him are revived during private family reunions. All of the Forsytes sheepishly acknowledge that they owe him an immense debt for their privileged place in society.
Dosset only achieved his wealth through fierce determination and aspiration. However his descendants remain uneasy, and are terrified of losing their money, power and influence in society. They seem convinced that Dosset’s hard work in raising the social status of his family would ultimately vanish along with all of their money and assets.
Galsworthy was first and foremost a dramatist, and his plays provided the main source of his income. This influenced his fiction, as they are written like vignettes for the stage. The most illuminating scenes occur in the drawing rooms of the Forsyte’s palatial homes, but further drama unfolds amidst various social occasions, family outings, engagement parties and weddings. It is immediately striking to the reader that whenever the Forsytes are congregated together, there is a complete absence of familial warmth. The atmosphere is painfully formal. Nobody is prepared to express their true feelings, to do so would be perceived as shameful.
Shame casts a long shadow across the entire family. There are family secrets that could sink their public and professional reputations, namely illegitimacy, mental illness and domestic violence. Consequently every family reunion is an uncomfortable performance and the conversations are stilted. Topics are restricted to banalities. The emotional affairs of the family are off limits because it could spell their ruin.
The elders are cold, and are so repressed that they barely seem human. This contrasts starkly with the younger members of the family, particularly one of the sons who is sensitive, imaginative and artistic. He yearns to escape the world of money to fulfill his creative aspirations. His romantic instincts are sneered at and criticised in characteristically blunt and crude insults. This is a family that perceives everything through a materialist lens. As a result they have no understanding or insight into the importance of an artistic vocation. There is no delicacy or sophistication in their conversational exchanges and the sheer spite embedded within the most officious characters is quite disturbing to read.
Galsworthy felt quite strongly about the superficiality of this rarefied world. There is no authenticity or substance to this family. They seem incapable of expressing their feelings for each other. Weddings are not joyful affairs; they are purely practical ways to consolidate influential connections within the family and the most obvious means of extending the dynasty.
Marriage is strictly a business transaction and detached from emotion as he opines, “in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind”. It seems that any natural feeling has been suffocated by the relentless and almost mindless pursuit of material gain. This remote, functional pragmatism has also destroyed any latent sense of empathy and imagination.
The emotionally barren world of the Forsytes has a devastating and lasting effect on the most vulnerable members. The Forsytes are mercenaries, exploiting everything and anything for profit. One especially vocal and perceptive Forsyte realises that, “Art, literature, religion, survive by virtue of the few cranks who really believe in such things, and the many Forsytes who make a commercial use of them”. This appraisal is the most frank explanation of the Forsyte sensibilities. The cultivation of the soul is literally an alien concept to them.
The human soul has no tangible meaning to the avaricious and grasping Forsytes, in their stubborn philosophy they contend that as the soul has no price then it has no value. This belief is unequivocal and uncompromising, the pursuit of something without worth to them is just a waste of time and effort. These unyielding beliefs seem fixed, as if set in stone. However when a prominent member of the family dies in a suspected suicide it disturbs all of their beliefs. Suddenly all of their obstinacy appears foolish and misguided. Humbled, and shaken they are forced to re-examine the direction of their lives.
Modern literary critics have interpreted the saga as a political treatise. These critics surmise that it is a book primarily about white male privilege, but this ultimately belies the spirit in which the book was written. The Forsytes epitomise a kind of masculine ruthlessness where women have no true significance, and the Forsyte’s rapacious endeavour does extend to the colonies.
However, Galsworthy was not writing a political tract, he was attempting to humanise a society that often felt bleak and dehumanising. It must not be forgotten that although Victorian enterprise helped to build the foundations of our modern society, it was often at the cost of many other things.
On the 7th August, 1941 the Bengali poet, thinker and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore died. His work was praised for its depth and compassion. His life, and his legacy was celebrated all over the world, but he was revered with particular devotion in his native birthplace, and this has consolidated over the decades. His writing and philosophy remain a formative influence in India and in modern day Bangladesh and he is still regarded as an integral part of contemporary Bengali identity.
Tagore became a prominent literary voice during the “Bengal Renaissance”. This was a unique period of Indian history when radically new ideas and artistic innovations developed. India was continually shaped and reshaped by multiple imperial conquests and occupations.
The British arrival moulded India in a truly distinctive way, but it was a double edged sword. The Raj helped to improve prosperity, educational prospects and health outcomes but with significant costs to the liberty and freedom of ordinary Indians. It was an imperial realm, the “jewel” of the British crown, but administered under martial rule.
India’s progression and dynamism as an emerging and thriving nation rested on this paradox. However unlike other imperial forces, the British were comparatively benign. The Mughal emperors, in comparison, were intolerant of the native religion and suppressed Indian identity. Islam was a violent imposition, and anyone who dared to resist was murdered.
In stark contrast, when the British colonised India many of the administrators acquired an affinity for Indian culture and history. One was an esteemed and respected judge based in Calcutta, Sir William Jones. Jones was overwhelmed by the extent of India’s rich classical past. Its wealth and sophistication rivalled Ancient Greece and Rome. He devoted his life to the preservation of India’s antiquity, mastering Sanskrit, translating ancient Indian texts and using this knowledge to uncover India’s hidden history.
Jones enthused about his new passion, declaring that the Sanskrit language was “more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either…the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes, than Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad”. However while the histories of Ancient Greece and Rome were detailed in written sources, India’s past left no trace.
It was a painstaking challenge to reconstruct the history purely from the remnants of archaeology. In 1794, the governor-general, Warren Hastings, became the patron of the Asiatic Society, and Jones was its original founder. The society recruited a collective of volunteers, mostly British civil and military officers who searched vast areas of the Indian countryside for historical artefacts.
The Bengal Renaissance coincided with this new effort to reclaim Indian identity and culture. The first notable figure was the Brahmin sage Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Roy’s gifts as an intellectual and persuasive polemicist were recognised by the East India Company who employed him as a translator. Roy understood that conciliation was the best tactic. He was useful to the British as he was an effective mediator and could even quell any nascent rebellion.
Roy was also an eminent scholar, a fluent linguist and expert theologian. He was also a practicing Hindu and was resistant to Christian conversion. In fact, he felt deeply affronted by the very suggestion. He criticised the British missionaries who “travel to a distant country for the purpose of overturning the opinions of its inhabitants and introducing their own”. In spite of this, he acquired an insight into the benevolent intentions of Christianity.
Roy attempted to reconcile and adapt to the religion, culture and sensibilities of the British. He acknowledged that the education system that was established under British rule was fairer and more equitable than the system that preceded it. Under the previous regime, education was restricted to higher caste Indians, as learning was conducted in temples or mosques where the so-called “untouchables” were forbidden to enter. The British built schools on public land, allowing every Indian child the chance to be educated.
Roy went on cultural exchanges, visiting officials in Britain and he soon became an instrumental figure. He managed to convince his fellow co-religionists that the practice of widow burning was heretical, quoting a verse from the 7th century Sanskrit poet Bana. Bana called these unnecessarily cruel and pointless deaths as a “mere freak of madness, a path of ignorance”. Roy’s pioneering work endeared him to the British, and to the Indians. However as Indian confidence grew, his collaboration with the imperialists was perceived with suspicion.
He died in 1833, but for decades afterwards his work was dissected and analysed, and his reputation was mixed. Many other Indian thinkers attacked him, and sought to eradicate him from Indian history. However Tagore soon became his greatest champion, and defended his allegiance with the British.
He admired his work in Indian education and corrected his critics. He stated that “Roy had the full inheritance of Indian wisdom. He was never a school boy of the West, and therefore had the dignity to be a friend of the West”. Tagore, as a fellow Brahmin and Hindu followed his example, and continued in the proud tradition of learning and seeking wisdom.
Tagore’s most revered collection is “Gitanjali”, which was published in 1910. Three years later an English translation was published, entitled “Song Offerings”. These are powerful, lyrical meditations on the conflict between the spiritual and material, and the attempts to find a semblance of harmony with both. A truly harmonious existence is never truly realised, and it is intensely onerous for the narrator to find any degree of equanimity.
The narrator is engaged in a perpetual search for transcendence, but is continually thwarted by worldly concerns. Enlightenment is clearly a luxury and indulgence in a state of material penury. However, attaining wisdom is an example of true courage in a world inhabited by those who are fixated by superficial, earthly concepts like money, status and possessions. Very few individuals are brave enough to divest themselves of these elements to seek substance and meaning. Even now, his message of universal love continues to resonate, not just in the East, but all over the world.
On the 30th July, 1818, the English poet and novelist Emily Bronte was born. She was revered and celebrated as a visionary writer, illuminating a little known corner of the world, a world once viewed as ineffable, dark and strange. She articulated the feelings of solitude, and alienation, distinct life experiences inextricably entwined with the Yorkshire moors.
In her singular artistic vision, the moors are rendered characters in their own right. They are bleak, forbidding and inhospitable. They are not merely the barren backdrop to the drama, they are at the centre of the narrative and ultimately inform its direction. According to literary legend, she loved the moors so intensely that she could not bear to be separated from them, and even felt physically ill when she was forced to leave them behind.
Bronte was a prodigious and precocious poet, composing over seventy poems in her lifetime. However her literary fame, or perhaps infamy was secured with her extraordinary novel, “Wuthering Heights”. Her fellow poet, and near contemporary, Emily Dickinson praised it as “electric”. It is an astounding compendium of jealousy, revenge and unrelentingly savage cruelty. All of the drama and intrigue surrounds two wildly disjointed families.
However in spite of the tenacity, strong wills and highly spirited nature of all of the characters, especially Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw, fate ultimately intervenes. The burgeoning love between Cathy and Heathcliff is doomed from the start. Tragedy was a constant in Emily Bronte’s personal life, and she poured this into her writing. In a life shaped by upheaval, illness and death seemed the only certainties.
The omnipresence of death is yet another tragic consequence of living far too intensely, as Bronte herself ruefully admits, “she burned too bright for this world”. The whole novel is rich in similarly potent imagery. Most of the novel’s power and impact derives from her gifts as a poet and skills as a linguist.
One astonishing example is her expert use of alliteration to illustrate a scene. In one remarkably affecting chapter of the book, a lively and enthusiastic Cathy expounds upon the “woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy”. This unique landscape shaped her imagination in startling ways. The title itself originates from the peculiarities of this wilderness. “Wuther” means to howl or to eddy. On the highest peaks, the wind and rain create this unnerving and ghostly effect.
These moorlands are open, bare with black hollows and crags, and this astonishing phenomenon of nature is much more pronounced during the cold, dark months of winter. It is an almost supernatural experience to encounter it. Bronte’s profound ardour for her beloved moors is apt. It is truly poignant to read. The reader begins to acquire an insight into her feelings of loss and pain when detached from the natural environment. One especially moving episode reveals the depth of feeling, affection and attachment to nature and the wilderness when Cathy calls out for help during her enforced confinement, declaring in a frantic state of panic and desperation that “I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors…I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills”. Even the name “Heathcliff” indicates a love for the elemental.
Ironically, “Wuthering Heights” was once miscategorised as a romantic novel. The stark style of the writing and the darkness of the subject matter illustrate the exact opposite. Malice emanates from every page. Nature is cruel, and red in tooth and claw. It is pitiless, and unsentimental. Heathcliff is the embodiment of this cold, bleak and loveless landscape. He is merciless in his mission to destroy. However Heathcliff’s fate is unequivocal, he dies friendless and alone. He is returned to the same savage earth that created him. The novel’s bleak conclusion is unsparing, “under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers”.
The unsparing quality of nature was an ever present reality for Emily and her siblings. Emily succumbed to the same illness that took them away, and she died at the age of thirty. However no-one will ever forget her luminous presence and legacy.
On July 18th, 1817, the English novelist Jane Austen died. She was remembered as a pioneering writer and a literary role model who led the way for others. She played a vital role in establishing eighteenth century fiction, a genre of literature which was dominated by women. Women were not just prolific writers during that era, they were also prodigious readers. It was estimated that three-quarters of the reading public were women. Even today, women remain the biggest consumers of fiction, particularly romantic fiction.
Unlike poetry, novels and stories are still considered to be the primary domain of women. This longer form of literature is especially suited to women. Generally speaking, men tend to have a more concise mind while women approach, perceive and interpret the world in finer detail. Reason, theory and logic are the traditional preserve of men. Women are more interested in exploring the realms of sentiment, emotion and empathy. Feeling, rather than thinking, is at the centre of women’s territory.
It is extraordinary to consider that this uniquely feminine milieu was recognised as early as the late sixteenth century. One eminent and respected author from this period was Sir Philip Sidney. He prefaced his 1593 work “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia” with a direct address to the “fair ladies” who were especially keen on his courtly romances. Romanticism was in itself a very human response to the excesses of scientific enlightenment, when it was feared that cold logic would supersede emotion and destroy human imagination for good.
Austen’s novels were exquisitely drawn character studies. She calmly dissected the components of distinct human personalities. She felt no qualms revealing the vain, haughty and even ridiculous types that inhabited genteel society. She used levity, a distinctly English idiomatic technique to highlight these traits. Underneath all of this, however, was a sense of barely suppressed rage.
The comic, satirical tone in her books masks Austen’s genuine intention, to expose a tragic state of affairs where feelings must be repressed to maintain outward civility. As she outlines in “Emma”, “the true English style..is burying under a calmness that seemed all but indifference, the real attachment”. It is unwise to dismiss her fiction as light or frivolous, there is a serious point underlining all of her work.
Very few of her characters have individual agency, they are trapped by society’s rigid expectations. Class, as well as gender confines them. It is an almost loveless existence. Relations between men and women are purely transactional. Engagements and marriages are only facilitated to enhance social status. Families are only concerned about their economic and social position and engineer their sons and daughters future lives in order to secure this, their feelings are rarely considered.
All of her six novels are set during the Regency period of English history. She paints a landscape of grand country houses and conspicuous material wealth. Most of the drama centres around social occasions like balls, where most of the matchmaking takes place.
Austen’s portraits have created a distinct template, often imitated but never matched by contemporary romantic authors such as Candace Bushnell and Helen Fielding. Bushnell’s stark portrayal of the vicious, heartless dating scene of Manhattan has been interpreted as a modern adaptation of Austen. Similarly, Fielding’s eponymous “Bridget Jones” novels detail the romantic exploits of a hapless, but relatable heroine attempting to navigate the harsh and often unforgiving landscape of late twentieth century London. This is a strangely familiar landscape. It is exactly the same as eighteenth century Hampshire, it is a place dominated by pompous, arrogant and shallow men. We continue to take these satirical novels for granted, but they would not have been written without Austen’s influence. We must remember her important legacy.
On the 14th July, 1943, the British science fiction writer Christopher Priest was born. He was born and was educated in Cheshire, but he spent his childhood holidays in Dorset. The magic and mystery associated with that county, especially its castles, had a powerful impact upon his imagination. He developed a great insight into this region of England which, unlike the rest of the country, remains timeless, and more authentic.
When he left school he worked as a clerk in an accountancy firm, but his love of reading never waned, he was an avid reader. The work of H.G Wells and the speculative fiction of J.G Ballard left an indelible impression and inspired him to write his own distinct style of fiction. Priest later became a prolific contributor to science fiction magazines.
His uniquely prophetic vision of alternate English landscapes acquired a new audience of admiring readers. In 1972 he published his first full length novel. It was entitled “Fugue for a Darkening Island”, and in spite of the plaudits that he received at the time of its publication, in the decades afterwards it was shrouded in controversy owing to the politically contentious subject matter.
In the 2011 revised edition, Priest amended the text and prefaced it with contextual notes to avoid any unfair accusations of racism. In the novel, the main protagonist is Alan Whitman, a white English man living an otherwise unassuming life on the coast, until global events literally arrive on his doorstep. A refugee crisis from an unnamed African country has a devastating effect on the ordinary people living on the English coast. Hundreds of African refugees in boats pour on to the beaches, in a desperate bid to escape a war primarily engineered by American and European powers. Until this moment, it was just a distant event from a faraway place. However as the drama and the danger worsens, this global crisis becomes deeply personal for every citizen. Nobody emerges unscathed.
The British public are forced to become an unwitting part of this war, and the sleepy villages are transformed into a new frontier in this global conflict. They recoil in horror, and they are terrified of losing their culture, safety and identity. Consequently they elect a right-wing nationalist prime minister from a party called Reform UK. Once this hardline regime is established the African minority are compelled to create their own political party and militia called the Secessionists. This is in response to the Reform government’s main policy, a campaign of arrests and deportations, including Caribbean families suspected of sympathising or even being in alliance with the rebels.
Civil war breaks out, and most of the country is engulfed in a conflict between the government loyalists and the African rebels. Even the most peaceful and sedate communities become embroiled in it, and emergency measures are enacted, including rationing. Whitman learns a bitter, harsh lesson as all of this unfolds before him, initially he is indifferent to the situation in Africa, but he is filled with pity when he sees the emaciated state of the refugees arriving on the beaches.
However these feelings do not last very long, as the country is rapidly plunged into chaos. Amidst the crisis he loses his comfortable middle-class job, his home and nearly loses his wife and daughter. Eventually, Whitman is given the address of a safe house, away from the worst of the fighting. He arrives in a remote location where he descends into a state of deep contemplation.
This is a prescient and prophetic book, rich in potent imagery. The images are raw and visceral, and illuminate the psychological sensibilities of an island people living under siege. It is clear from the thoughts that emerge from a humbled and pensive Whitman. He ponders his fate. While sat on the shoreline, he makes an important and pithy observation about the future destiny that awaits on the island, opining that “this small British island we lived on, resistant to invasion for so many hundreds of years, a coherent, eccentric, tolerant place rich in tradition, filled with a relaxed regard for history. The British were welcoming to strangers but also cautious of them and sometimes given to pointed but affectionate mockery after they left, but this time crucially, they had allowed a massively disruptive refugee incursion almost by default. Tolerance and eccentricity were luxuries of the past, and the British had revealed themselves as congenitally unable to react moderately to an extreme event”. He continues to reflect upon this theme.
He looks out on to the horizon, and overwhelmed by its beauty and serenity, remarks
“That sea, so calm and silver at low tide, was always a symbol for the British, the image of isolation and difference from the rest of the world…Yet the sea also suggested connectedness with that larger world, because the maritime heritage had taken the British out of the world, for good or ill”. It is extraordinary to read this now, considering the fraught political situation of today.
The book predicted our twenty-first century fears, particularly the prospect of civil war. These fears are evinced so vividly in this book. Priest had the foresight and immense courage to detail the possibly fatal consequences of excessive tolerance and kindness, and the psychological effects of apportioning inappropriate historical guilt. Two years later, he published yet another subversive work of fiction. The novel was called “The Inverted World” which presented human life on a planet measured in miles rather than years. The central protagonist, Helward Mann is a trainee guildsman. He is due to leave the confinement of the creche to serve his apprenticeship.
He is destined to work up an almost interminable career ladder in which his final position and destination is unknown. He is sent to the “city”, an urban metropolis functioning solely on tracks. Mann and the other apprentices are commanded by their bosses to maintain the tracks in order to ensure that gravitational forces remain at an optimal level. However he encounters other characters who are determined to sabotage these grand plans. This was yet another prophetic work which predicted the technocratic age.
At the time of its publication, the world that he depicted would have seemed unrecognisable, surreal and bizarre. However it is a totally different scenario now. In the post-millennial era, it is an eerily familiar landscape. It is a sterile, inhuman and artificial world, devoid of any feeling, particularly love. Only cold efficiency dominates. Notions of family ties, or individuality have been sacrificed to satisfy the ruthless ambitions of the globalist overlords, where human dignity is absent and everyone has been reduced to a machine.
In 1976, he returned with a book called “The Space Machine”, an homage to his favourite author, H.G Wells. One year later, he returned to familiar territory, his beloved Dorset, with the publication of “A Dream of Wessex”. Priest imagines an England colonised by extreme left-wing and Islamist forces, except a remote part of Dorset.
Ensconced within Maidan Castle is a clandestine project to recreate an alternate future-past vision of England through the power of psychological suggestion. One of the main characters is David Harkman, who, it is later revealed, is a semi-illusory figure hidden deep within the imagination of another character, Julia Stretton.
Stretton and Harkman are in love, and in spite of the potential dangers of this mental experiment, they are committed to the recreation of this England. When they reflect on the troubled history that inspired these developments they realise to their chagrin “that the worst result of the Soviet regime was the fact that English culture and society had stagnated. The country was ready for a social revolution of the same scale as the political revolution that had taken place at the end of the twentieth century”. It is eerie to read this book in the light of contemporary events.
The book demonstrates Priest’s predictive powers of imagination yet again. He explored the concept of Anglofuturism years before anyone conceived of it. Again, nobody at the time would have ever believed that English civilisation would be destroyed by malign political and cultural forces, nor would they have ever believed that technology could be used to manipulate the feelings and thoughts of a demoralised people.
Priest had an illustrious and productive literary career throughout the eighties, nineties and into the new millennium. His fiction focused on parapsychological themes, and the preoccupations of modern life, a mirror of his literary hero, Ballard. His career was cut short by a diagnosis of cancer, and it prevented him from finishing a biography on the author who ultimately gave him the motivation to write his own brand of fiction. His wife, the author Nina Allan completed the work. Priest died in 2024, but he left a vital legacy which continues to inspire.
Ponderings 