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

constituent parts of the country through which he has travelled, and as he drew these together in a closing chapter, Priestley made some of his most frequently quoted pronouncements on the state of the country he had seen firsthand. Ironically, Priestley found himself with time to dwell on the places he had visited in more detail than might otherwise have been possible because his homeward journey to London came to a standstill on account of heavy fog that made driving hazardous and provided an apt metaphor, perhaps, for the limited capacity of many in 1930s England to see beyond their own immediate vicinity and appreciate the life of the country going on around them. Indeed, to speak of the life of a country is, Priestley concluded, an error, for it overlooks what his experiences of the previous weeks taught him: that there are three Englands sharing the nation’s geographical space, each one distinct in its own way.

The first of these Englands is old England—“the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire; guide-book and quaint highways and byways England.”¹¹ Priestley employed lowercase lettering for “highways and byways” here, but it is hard to dismiss thoughts of an allusion to Macmillan’s series of guidebooks by that name, which was well established by the early 1930s. This is an England of real beauty, and Priestley certainly had nothing against it, although he counselled against romanticising it to the point of believing it possible to somehow return there. The second England is, one suspects, where he felt more at home, even if he was critical of its excesses: “the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls … mill chimneys, fried-fish shops.”¹² This was in many ways the material expression of the Industrial Revolution’s untamed nature—“a cynically devastated countryside, sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities.”¹³ The social costs of this England were high, too: it was an unforgiving place to those born outside of its elite, and it exacted a terrible toll on the first England, “the real, enduring England” of quiet harmony and order. “It had found a green and pleasant land and had left a wilderness of dirty bricks,” Priestley sadly