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Anyone looking for leisurely musings on William Blake, William Morris and JRR Tolkien will be disappointed in Peter Watson’s new book The British Imagination. It is not about any supposed British style or register, but about what shapes the imagining of “Britain” as a unit.
This is a mixture, according to Watson, of four elements: geographical, religious, scientific and “imperial”. There are the constraints and opportunities of being a set of offshore territories; a strong sense of providential vocation, reinforced by varieties of Protestant faith; a commitment to empirical science and technological advance; and a complex historical relationship with a shifting network of colonial and postcolonial societies.
Watson, a journalist and historian who has previously written about both French and German cultural history, neatly picks up the 18th- and 19th-century language of a “metaphysical empire” — a transnational achievement of soft power, represented by a variety of political and legal conventions and a serious investment in scientific research, as well as the English language itself. It is in this way that the — or a — “British imagination” has become a global phenomenon.
This metaphysical empire is the child of a military and mercantile imperial history, including active conquest and slave-trading, as Watson fully recognises. He sketches a cautious, if not always clearly framed, case for this history to be read as something other than an unrelieved catalogue of crime. He notes the (somewhat contested) research indicating that by the beginning of the 20th century, imperial trade was not a simple matter of wealth flowing unilaterally to Britain from a clutch of despoiled and oppressed territories, and acknowledges the arguments that we should not take it for granted that the profits of slavery contributed all that much to British prosperity or industrial development in the 18th century.
Watson’s 34 chapters trace the evolution of British identity across 500 years, beginning as an underpopulated and dynastically unstable state in the mid-16th century. It was transformed into a brashly ambitious player in the new Atlantic-oriented world, served by a generation of buccaneering traders, explorers and soldiers of fortune; becoming an influential presence on several continents, eventually as an unambiguously expansionist imperial power; and at last, a cultural and political magisterium, an apex of civilisation . . . in its own eyes. Even in a less than glorious postwar history, the “Anglosphere” — the linguistic and cultural heirs of British colonial expansion, including, for these purposes, the US — has continued to provide an impressive percentage of Nobel prizewinners in arts and sciences.
The strongest chapters are unquestionably those on science. Even where the exposition of technicalities is left a bit opaque to the non-scientific reader, there is no disputing the sheer energy and enthusiasm of Watson’s presentation. Too few cultural histories do real justice to what the concrete experimental processes were like leading up to the discoveries of James Clerk Maxwell in electromagnetism, or Francis Crick, and James Watson and Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA, or Alan Turing in computer science.
Watson admirably conveys the excitement of fundamental scientific intelligence at work; this deserves a place in any book on “imagination”. Far less strong are the chapters that deal with literary and artistic achievement. The accounts of 17th-century intellectual history can be confused and confusing. Watson’s narrative — which in several chapters leaps backwards and forwards chronologically over many decades — tells us, for example, both that the universities in the 17th century were a wilderness as far as “modern” (ie, experimental) research went and that significant discovery and discussion went on in university circles.
The treatment of literary movements and individual writers is breathless and not always accurate (the summary of Bleak House might puzzle readers familiar with Charles Dickens’s work; and the pages on WH Auden and George Orwell — to take one instance — are perfunctory). Too often these discussions pick up an aspect of a writer’s work — sometimes with reference to one or two recent secondary sources — but don’t do much to connect it with the wider story.
It is a pity that the summary of the main distinctive strands that make up the British imagination appears only at the start of the final chapter. If there is a thinner book trying to escape from this substantial one, it could have been organised around a clear statement of the four elements identified as shaping Britain’s self-mythology, with each section illustrated with more selective material.
As it is, there is no easily navigable path through. Not long after we have been told that no serious thinker believed in astrology after the mid-17th century, we are alerted to Newton’s occult interests. Sathnam Sanghera’s discussion of the imperial legacy is characterised as “extreme” and then praised later (rightly, I think) as “a good example of the way forward” in maintaining a proper awareness of the unavoidable moral tangles of imperial history. Watson never pauses to explain just how “Britain” came to be a synonym for “England”. Due attention is paid to the Scottish Enlightenment but Wales might as well not exist.
This is a book with much to offer — Watson highlights the role of scientific innovation in shaping British identity, gives intriguing insights about the contemporary Anglosphere and delivers a nuanced and appreciative account of the post-imperial and migrant contribution to modern English writing. But a leaner and organised version might have offered more and relieved the author from what is at times a rather frantic and unevenly successful effort to be encyclopedic.
The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II by Peter Watson Simon & Schuster £30, 544 pages
Rowan Williams was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012
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