Perennial Empires: Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Pers ...

home’s preeminence has long since passed, the manor home has been absorbed into the twentieth- and twenty-first-century national imaginary as part of a larger conservative social and cultural phenomenon seeking to secure rural England as the last bastion of “essential” England. In his second chapter, Sebald meditates on the halcyon days of the English manor house. He prefaces the details of his visit to Somerleyton Hall with a lingering gaze upon the Suffolk landscape, where “save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization” (30). This image of a barren landscape with its “relics of an extinct civilization” goes against the vein of the idealized picture of the English countryside so often portrayed as the cornerstone of British culture and history.

Indeed, manor homes and the countryside surrounding them serve as talismans of Britishness and stand as some of the most visible material representations of the nation’s history.⁵ Yet for Sebald, everywhere evident in this landscape are signs of a civilization on the decline and of a culture past its heyday. Paraphrasing Patrick Wright, Paul Gilroy has labeled the “country house and its tainted splendour an important signifier of the contemporary ruralist distillate of national life” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 14). The pervasive air of decay which frames Sebald’s exploration of Somerleyton Manor establishes rural England as a space steeped in anachronistic practice but nevertheless glorified as a persistent cornerstone of English identity. Sebald reflects extensively upon his visit to Somerleyton Hall—a preserved relic of nineteenth-century industrial wealth in the form of a “dreamwork” mansion built by a self-made billionaire. The house seems formed out of flights of fancy: interiors lead imperceptibly into exteriors, and artifice merges with nature. But Sebald directs the reader’s gaze to the tainted façade of the mansion, pointing out, for example, that the Argand gas that once so brilliantly lit this pleasure palace was poisonous. As Sebald exposes more of the mansion’s history, he gradually reveals the circuits of lucre that sustained the height of the country-house system during an epoch congruent with the peak of nineteenth-century British imperialism.