For many people, life in post-World War I England was materially
and socially harsh, arguably worse than it had been before 1914.
Declining agricultural wages led to a depopulation of the
countryside and a drift towards towns and cities in search of work,
but the industrial foundations upon which the might of the
Victorian empire had been built were far from stable. As the
effects of a global depression permeated every aspect of the
nation's economic life, the social costs of industrialisation, so
often written off as the necessary cost of progress, became
impossible to ignore. Rarely can this awkward relationship between
the England of the history books and the England of the economic
slump have been illustrated more effectively than in the 1936
Jarrow Crusade - a march to London from the town of Jarrow in the
North-East, where the unemployment rate reached 40% in the
mid-1930s after the closure of the shipyards. Slowly, but with grim
resolution, the ranks of unemployed men, sometimes accompanied by
relatives and supporters, wove their way down the spine of England
towards the capital, where they hoped to petition the government
for a package of economic recovery that would breathe life back
into their shattered community. For the writers and artists of the
period this tension offered rich material for study, and we find 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 man-made. This book is concerned with
the period in which the discussion of English identity assumed such
importance because it could not be assumed that the nation itself
would survive. It is 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 to be 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 a sense of disillusionment with what rapidly
came to look like the lost opportunities of the postwar settlement.
The debate over 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 such, this book is a valuable addition
to collections in literature and history.
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