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

farther and farther into the countryside. Observers questioned the kind of society that the suburbs could foster, the environment in which people were now living and raising children, and the ever more tenuous bonds that kept England together as a whole, if indeed it were still possible to speak in such singular terms of a country changing in so many ways.

For the writers and artists of the period, this tension offered rich material for study, and one finds in works from this period discussions of the role of the community, the relationship between the individual and the group, the importance of domestic and public space, and the sense of connection (or the lack of it) between the people and the landscape, both natural and manmade. In some instances the writer or artist took a relatively conservative line, advocating a return to older, time-honoured forms of living in the midst of an ever-changing world. Institutions like the church and the gentry, seen as groups of people and represented through buildings in stone (the church and the country house) became part of the vision of a harmonious, prelapsarian England that valued tradition over change, where everyone was happy to know where he or she stood. The interwar period was also a time in which relations between levels of culture became more noticeable and more fiercely contested—as seen in the so-called battle of the brows of the late 1920s, in which highbrow university-educated writers and critics rounded on more populist middle- or lowbrow authors for failing to inspire readers to rise above their established tastes. Such debates and labels frequently fail, however, to do justice to the people who are stuck with them, as in the case of George Orwell, a socialist educated at Eton whose strong left-wing political beliefs led him to fight in the Spanish Civil War and whose longing for a revolution in England did not prevent him from finding delight in well-made cups of tea, politically incorrect seaside postcards, and the traditional pub.² In the course of this study readers shall also encounter John Betjeman, who began his career as an aesthete and a snob but who, through his poetry and radio broadcasts (and later his appearances on television), became “the nation’s teddy-bear,” taken completely into the hearts of those who would never have thought themselves at all aesthetic in their