Table Of ContentABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandra Harris was born in Sussex in 1981 and was educated at the
University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, London. She is the editor (with
Laura Feigel) of Modernism on Sea and is currently Lecturer in English at the
University of Liverpool.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
A Writer's Britain
The Most Beautiful Villages of England
Bill Brandt
See our websites
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
CONTENTS
Prologue: In England
1 ANCIENT AND MODERN
2 CONCRETE AND CURLICUES
3 A GEORGIAN REVIVAL
4 VICTORIANA
5 FROM PURITY TO A PAGEANT
A Break for Refreshments
6 THE CANON REVISED
7 THE WEATHER FORECAST
8 VILLAGE LIFE
9 PARISH NEWS
10 VARIATIONS ON A VIEW
An Hour in the Garden
11 DREAMING OF MANDERLEY
12 HOUSE BUILDING
13 LITERARY ARCHITECTURE
Afterword: New Maps
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Sources of Illustrations
Index
To Robert Harris
and in memory of Rosalie Harris
with love and thanks
PROLOGUE: In ENGLAND
Toller Fratrum is a small village in Dorset, close to where the River Hooke
meets the Frome. Beside the farmhouse and a clutch of other stone buildings is
the tiny church of St Basil. It was mostly rebuilt in the nineteenth century, but
just to the left of the door as you enter, in the corner by the bell ropes and the
unused heater, is a decorated font that reaches further back in time. Long-limbed
figures with large moon faces, bulbously carved in deep relief, crowd together as
if there were not quite room for them all. Wide eyes look out from the sandstone
sides as they have been doing since the twelfth century – and as they were still
doing in 1936, when the artist John Piper arrived.
He had been driving through England with his partner, Myfanwy Evans,
photographing hundreds of churches and monuments. Standing in the draughty
gloom of a remote nave, he would dampen the stone with a sponge so that the
shapes were thrown into relief by his paraffin lamp. The light revealed some
long-forgotten wonders. Crouching to enjoy the Toller Fratrum font, he thought
about the primitive, expressive impulse in the art of his contemporaries. The
Norman carvings seemed to him to have all the ‘bigness and strangeness’ of a
portrait by Picasso.1 He focused his camera on a figure who might be Christ – or
Moses – and who supports the decorative rim of the font with raised hands. The
figure’s face and large arms look heroic, but beneath the little pleated skirt of his
tunic, he has shaky-looking knees. At eight hundred years old, the image still felt
close and alive.
Piper was thirty-two. After a false start as a lawyer to satisfy his father, he had
been to the Royal College of Art and made an inspiring group of friends. He
married one of them – Eileen Holding – but the marriage had broken down and
now Piper was in love again. It was an exciting time. All the talk was about Paris
and the latest abstract painting, and Piper was working hard on a series of
geometric constructions. He was also looking at the art of ‘England’s early
sculptors’, and thinking of an odd story from the thirteenth-century chronicles of
Peter Langtoft. It described a ‘wander wit of Wiltshire’ who went rambling off
to Rome to study the antiquities without ever having visited Stonehenge.
Appalled at his ignorance of his own country, the Roman antiquaries ‘kicked
him out of doors and bad him goe home and see Stonage’.2 This comic parable
appealed to Piper. All too often, he thought, we rush off to distant places without
giving a thought to the astonishing things on our doorsteps. More than anything
he wanted to ‘goe home’ and see not only prehistoric Stonehenge, but also the
boldly striped lighthouse at Dungeness, the gardens at Stourhead, old stone barns
in Oxfordshire, the lichen-patterned walls of Cornish chapels, the decorated
interiors of pubs, the theatrical architecture of country houses.
These were Piper’s personal enthusiasms, but in wanting to celebrate them he
was doing something more than personal. Other people were showing new
appreciation of such places, and by the late 1930s it looked to many observers as
if a whole concerted project of national self-discovery was underway. Artists
who had previously felt compelled to disguise themselves as avant-garde
Frenchmen were now to be found on English beaches sheltering their
watercolours from the drizzle. Anthologists (John Betjeman, Geoffrey Grigson,
Herbert Read) collected up the verse of eighteenth-century parsons or packed
vivid fragments of Romanticism into the tight compass of a paperback, while
tourists paused in lay-bys to consult some of the newly written guidebooks.
There were church murals, village plays, campaigns to save historic buildings.
There were Paul Nash’s megaliths, the erotic dramas of Graham Sutherland’s
landscapes, Vita Sackville-West’s old roses at Sissinghurst, Edward Bawden’s
copper jelly moulds, Bill Brandt’s photographs of literary Britain, Florence
White’s regional recipes. All these things – some large, some small – suggested
the many forms that ‘going home’ might take.
When war threatened, and when finally it came, the imaginative claiming of
England took on more urgency. This was the period of Virginia Woolf’s
cumulative, collaging novel Between the Acts (1941), T. S. Eliot’s return to
‘significant soil’ in his poem sequence Four Quartets (1943), Evelyn Waugh’s
grand memorial Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Osbert Sitwell’s expansively
nostalgic autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand! (1945–50). Writers and painters
were drawn to the crowded, detailed, old-fashioned and whimsical, gathering
souvenirs from an old country that might not survive the fighting. There is a
story to be told about this passionate, exuberant return to tradition. Romantic
Moderns investigates one of the richest periods in the arts of this country, and it
traces the extraordinary network of personal and cultural encounters from which
a modern English renaissance grew.
Several kinds of powerful logic are discernible in this turn towards home. It
seems partly to have been a response to the fiercely experimental ethos of high
modernism. The revolutionary manifestos of the 1910s and 1920s declared new
beginnings: the artist’s task was to free himself from the constraints of precedent
and ‘make it new’. He must rise above the accidents of personality and
Description:Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John
