English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

Chapter 1

Setting out on an English Journey

The rarest land on Earth is in our keeping.

—Arthur Mee, Enchanted Land (1936)¹

We have genius, but it is dissipated in vain excursions. We have kindness … but without strength, of what can our kindness avail? … A nation of shopkeepers, we have lost our capacity to add up a bill, and we have forgotten that one day we must render an account.

—Beverley Nichols, News of England (1938)²

In the autumn of 1933 J. B. Priestley set out to travel around England and compose what he later called “a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt” en route. This account, published the following year under the title English Journey, was a popular and critical success.³ Although the title suggests that England is a unified place through which one may travel at will, the reality Priestley found was that the country was divided to such a degree that it was by no means clear whether it could be spoken of as a single entity at all. The title may suggest that one is about to read, as John Baxendale put it, “one of the deluge of