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

into the discourse of preparation to defend it from threats as diverse as speculative builders and Luftwaffe bombs.

This book is concerned, then, with the period in which the discussion of English identity took on such importance because it could not be assumed that the nation itself would survive. It covers a period in which the problems that had become apparent in the nation’s social, economic, and material fabric in the turbulent 1930s—when speaking of there being at least two Englands was something of a commonplace for many observers—were thrown into sharp relief by the prospect of utter destruction at the hands of Hitler’s forces. In such a fraught atmosphere, questions of what the nation was, of what was worth preserving and of what, if an opportunity were granted, would have to be changed in the future became both urgent and vital. These questions were raised and discussed in many forums, and the responses were often varied and rarely bore a true resemblance to the postwar nation that finally emerged; indeed, the prevailing mood of postwar writing may be seen as one of disillusionment with what rapidly came to look like the lost opportunities of postwar settlement. The debate about the country’s identity, structure, and future direction, however, was certainly real, and many of the issues it stimulated are very much a part of the ongoing discussion of England’s identity today.

As one might expect, the subject of English identity and the uses to which it has been and may still usefully be applied is one that has received a great deal of academic attention in recent years. In her work Myth, Memory, and the Middlebrow, Ina Habermann addressed the concept of Englishness as a “symbolic form” in the interwar years, suggesting that the years before, during, and after the “people’s war” were ones of enormous change for the country and that “reconfigurations of collective identity and cultural memory” were needed to accompany this process.⁷ The same mechanisms, she argued, that had been used to address people “as consumers of goods and mass entertainment through advertising” were deployed in wartime through the news and entertainment media to make them feel like citizens who were invested in the country’s fate. Thus “a