RULE, NOSTALGIA! - A FEW (MORE) THOUGHTS

A new history of England's obsession with the good old days helps explain where we are, as well as where we came from

In the Sunday Times yesterday I reviewed a book I’ve been looking forward to (although that’s probably the wrong phrase) for a while: Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain, by Hannah Rose Woods.

It didn’t disappoint.

I thought I’d summarise what I wrote here and add a few more thoughts.

Most of the first part of this post is about American TV, then some stuff about Brexit and nostalgia, then I get around to medieval history. If you’re not interested in that, or have already read the review and don’t care to know any more, feel free to sit this one out.

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In my review I tried to explain where the concept of nostalgia comes from:

Nostalgia has been recognised for centuries and no particular nationality has a monopoly on it. The word was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a physician who noticed that Swiss soldiers fighting abroad seemed to be overwhelmed by a malady brought on by separation from their homeland. Hofer cobbled together the word from ancient Greek, combining the concept of nostos (a hero’s journey home; think Odysseus’s struggle to return to Ithaca) with the suffix -algia, denoting pain. It is related to terms such as the German heimweh — roughly, homesickness — and the Welsh hiraeth, a wistful longing for the Welsh landscape and past. Yet perhaps the best working definition of nostalgia I’ve heard comes from Tony Soprano in the first episode of The Sopranos: “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

I mentioned Tony Soprano for a reason - partly because it seemed amusing and bathetic to contrast Homeric epic to HBO crime drama, but partly because I am completely serious. It’s not particularly controversial to say that The Sopranos is the best thing that has ever been made for television. To my mind that’s because in any given episode a dozen deep philosophical ideas were in play under the guise of a mafia show with tits, wisecracks and violent slayings.

Anyway, the full Tony Soprano quote is worth hearing in full.

Tony Soprano: I dunno. The morning of the day I got sick I’d been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

Dr. Jennifer Melfi: Many Americans I think feel that way.

Tony: I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had pride. Today, what have we got?

Dr. Melfi: Did you have these feelings of loss more acutely in the hours before you collapsed

Tony: I dunno.

This is episode 1. We are learning about Tony and his problems for the very first time. And what we learn is that he is literally sick with nostalgia. His yearning for another time in American history is so acute that he is having panic attacks and collapsing. Of course, as we will subsequently learn, there is plenty more going on with him as well.

But his deepest concern, and in some ways the thing he never manages to overcome, is his sense that as luxurious as his life is, it is somehow not as meaningful or perhaps even as real as the lives of his ancestors. In the show he is often happiest when he is sitting along watching documentaries on the History Channel. Nostalgia is not just an idle feeling. It is an American disease, and Tony has it bad.

There are many more things we could say about the American obsession with the past as being by definition so much superior to the present that political and legal decisions have to be run through constitutional framing devices which explicitly lock them to a late-eighteenth century vision of the perfect republic. But you should probably go subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack if you want to get into all that.

Back to England, and the book. There’s no doubt that there is a strong thread of nostalgia (if we follow Woods’ slightly broad definition of an obsession with the past rather than a painful yearning for it) which runs all the way back from modern history to at least the Middle Ages.

I am fairly sick of history books that begin with hand-wringing over Brexit (I’ve read more than one of them this year) but in this instance, it seemed like it was an appropriate way to start.

Smartly [Woods] writes her story in reverse, revealing a longing for the good old days — mostly misapprehended — as an imaginative seam running all the way from the culture wars of the 2020s to the Reformation in the 1530s… Nostalgia — whether longing for the imagined past or a strange attachment to the real one — might be described as disappointment with the present, combined with a nagging fear of loss. (During the Brexit referendum, the Vote Leave campaign enjoyed far more success with voters once they amended their slogan from “Take control” to “Let’s take back control”.)

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Dominic Cummings’ writing lately. (It is a lot more thoughtful and generally levelheaded than his critics tend to allow in their caricatures and I say that as a person who was five years ago a fairly wishy-washy Remainer.)

As one of the main intellectual architects of Vote Leave, Cummings plainly believed in 2016 that the only way to create sufficient political disruption/energy/turmoil to fundamentally reform the public and civil services in a way that was explicitly about modernising Britain and making it fit for the second half of the twenty-first century was to blow up Britain’s membership of the EU.

Yet the only way to convince enough voters that this was the right thing to do that was to attack their propensity for nostalgia - in other words, to achieve a Brexit that was really about the future, Vote Leave needed to suggest/imply that Brexit was fundamentally about the opposite: reclaiming Britain’s mythical pre-EU past. Hence (as I wrote in the review) - take back were the key words in the Vote Leave slogan.

The calculation (I think tactically correct, even if I did not desire the outcome) was that voters are very good at thinking like Tony Soprano and yearning for a past just slipping out of living memory. They are very bad at thinking like sci-fi writers and willing into existence something they have never seen before, and don’t even know they need.

That’s an important insight which has as much application to politics today as it does to the study of history. I think?

Anyway. It’s nearly time for me to do the school run so I will just add this final note on what I wrote in the review, which is about medieval times. In many nostalgic visions of Britain’s history, one of its most romantic and lamented eras was the chivalric Middle Ages.

In the mid-19th century, pre-Raphaelite painters and Romantic poets found their ideals of beauty and morality in Merrie England, when Good Queen Bess was on the throne and standards were upheld by true knights and noble outlaws. Yet in the real age of Elizabeth I, artists were also obsessed with the idea of a lost paradise located just out of living memory… Perhaps the most famous nostalgic paean to England was that written in 1595 by Shakespeare in Richard II, when John of Gaunt pays tribute to “this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle”, bemoaning, of course, the fact that his wayward nephew Richard has brought the whole thing to ruin.

But of course, no one in the Middle Ages was going around boasting that they were living in some sort of golden age. In fact, at every moment for which there was cause to complain, rebels and political opponents of the government would condemn abuses which had led the realm away from the glories of, yes, a magnificent yesterday.

That was certainly true during the Magna Carta debates of 1214-15 - when the deepest desire of the rebel barons and their allies was often to undo all the innovations of Angevin government since the accession of Henry II and return the realm to the state in which it had (supposedly) existed under Henry I.

Likewise during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there were numerous attempts to ‘turn back the clock’. In the months and years leading up to the revolt, villagers across England repeatedly hired lawyers to obtain for them evidence from the Domesday Book, which they believed would show that their lords had illegally ‘innovated’ new limits on their freedom.

During the revolt itself the rebels made increasingly radical calls to do away with aspects of government they thought were betrayals of English history. John Ball asked at Blackheath:

When Adam delved and Eve span/

Who then was the gentleman?

A more nostalgic denunciation of the modern world than a plea to return to the prelapsarian life in Eden it is hard to imagine. And this was given crude political form a few days later at Smithfield, when Wat Tyler asked Richard II to do away with all lords and bishops and effectively return the English people to a state which could only possibly have existed in the Stone Age.

Needless to say this came to naught.

If you want to read more about either of those cases, I have written books about Magna Carta and 1381. But I do heartily recommend Rule, Nostalgia by Hannah Rose Woods, which is out any day now.