The Origins of Englishness

Midsomer Murders is English nostalgia at its best. Cosy, rural, pastoral countryside…. if it weren’t for the murders.

This is not a ‚Midsomer-only’ this but is the classic setting for English cosy crimes, including Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot en excellence. But Midsomer Murders goes one step further – and that’s why Betty Whittingale described Caroline Graham’s Barnaby novels as ‚Agatha Christie on acid‘: Midsomer County is, on the surface, an absolutely perfect chocolate box of ‚countryside’ landscape and people, pieced together in real life from many individual country houses, cottages, village greens and lakes. Absolutely cosy – and the murders are the complete opposite, perhaps making them seem so grotesque that we often have to laugh at them. (Or perhaps also because many of them are very artistic).

In German, ‚cosy’ is translated as ‚gemütlich’ (‚gemuetlich’ without the umlaut) or ‚heimelig‘ – ‚Heim’ (house) and ‚Heimat‘ (emotion for ‚where one feels comfortable and at ease‘) are in the words here. The opposite is ‚unheimlich‘ – and can be translated into English as eerie, scary and uncanny.
And Midsomer Murders plays with the extremes of cosy and eerie and we know that cosiness will return in the end thanks to DCI Barnaby.

 

The wholesome English countryside

I wrote “English nostalgia” at the beginning as the essence and driving force behind Midsomer Murders. There is an even better term for it: Englishness. Unfortunately, this anachronistic term is difficult to define. When did Englishness start? Was it the time of the Tudors? Or with Queen Victoria and the British Empire?

I was one of the historians who put the beginning of Englishness in the interwar period. It is also the time when the genre of the cosy crimes was born and in which Margaret Thatcher was a child. We know that the Barnaby novels have a strong anti-rhetorical-Thatcherite flavour, particularly evident in the Troy/Tory book character. Margaret Thatcher longed – and it is only human to do so – for the ‘good old days’ of her own childhood. A time that is now described as golden and glamorous, but which was in fact utterly meaningless and hopeless – for the rurality and the many English people. And it was into this void that the noble idea of Englishness was planted like a seed that immediately began to germinate. Its it blossomed again with the same yearning in the 1950s.

It all started in the 19th century with industrialisation and the associated urbanisation that came with it. Great Britain, and England in particular, was ahead of all continental European countries in terms of the speed of urbanisation. There were several factors behind this, which I will come to in a moment. But first let me set the scene: There was a sharp divide between the rich and the poor in the rural population. Many rural workers moved to the cities. The life and culture that characterised villages and hamlets until the 19th century disappeared.
The same thing happened to a whole generation during the First World War – they didn’t come back. This is also explored in Midsomer Murders in the episodes “Shot at Dawn (11×01 -> Battle of the Somme) and “Four Funerals and a Wedding (09×05 -> Skimmington Society).

It is the generation who were children during the war and young adults in the inter-war years, coming of age at a time when they had no ideals, no role models. The old men who started and fuelled the war? Just go away. We want nothing to do with you, because you are the reason why we are empty and the young survivors of the war are paralysed.

This is the emptiness and the trauma of the interwar generation. It is all too human to long for stability here, when the whole world is falling apart, governments are changing, inflation, stock markets and egoism are leading to several national and international economic crises. Crises that hit the (upper) middle class in particular, leaving many of them on the brink of the existential minimum.

 

The nucleus of the Englishness

By 1850, urbanisation in Britain was far more advanced than on the Continent, because it happened much faster here: by 1900, 80% of the population lived in cities, accelerated by an agricultural depression. Germany, by comparison, did not reach this level until the 1960s, because many people lived in the city only during the workdays, while their main residence remained in the countryside.

You might think that the landlords would have done all they could to prevent their tenants from moving away, but this was not the case. On the contrary, they began to become politically involved, so that their income came from politics and influence rather than from their tenants. In effect, it was simply a continuation of the Enclosure Movement.
The rural population was again too small to exercise political power on its own. And since there were no political representatives of the rural population, it accelerated the rural exodus all the more.

 

A little digression for those who want to know exactly: The Enclosure Movement is the term used to describe the dissolution of common rights in British agriculture, in which land that had previously been used in common was enclosed and used more intensively by private parties. The Enclosure Movement – which began in the 15th century but peaked between 1760 and 1832 – drove the commercialisation of British agriculture. High-yielding farms, especially livestock farms, were established on formerly communal land and woodland, without which the growing population could only have been fed by imports, as the export of British goods as part of the mercantilist raison d’état sometimes led to food shortages for the British population. By 1832, the medieval structures in Britain had all but disappeared. This development led to the impoverishment of some of the small farmers, who could no longer afford to buy the land and so had to give up land that had previously been available to all.

 

There was also a ‚back to the land’ movement in England at the end of the 19th century, but it was puny compared to the continent. Instead, in the inter-war period saw an increase in suburban development.

 

The pilgrimage sites for modern city dwellers

In inter-war England between the wars, the ‚back to the country’ movement was just a leisure activity for stressed middle class urbanities. People who longed for meaning and stability.
And they found this stability in romanticised anecdotes from a time when the(ir) world was still intact. For the English, this meant: before industrialisation, before urbanisation, before the hustle and bustle and the zeitgeist. Away from the stress and into an oasis of well-being. A place where can touch, smell, and hear nature, and where all stress immediately evaporates. And once you have regained your inner peace again, you make your way back. Until next time.
The so-called ‘countryside’ was timeless because it had been stripped of its historical roots and was nourished by memory itself.

The original culture of the rurality had been completely forgotten within a few decades. There was no connection to tradition, to what had been here before. Only glorified, anachronistic memories through stories and anecdotes. And on this basis of these, people created their own dream worlds – with the rural countryside as the cradle of Englishness and the manger in Bethlehem as the cradle of Christianity. It gave the people of the time stability and a cosy, hopeful feeling – and it stuck in their minds.

Rural England was now seen not as something outdated and past, but as something worth protecting and remembering. and remembrance. It was effectively placed under a preservation order. An image that only reached its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s (Thatcherism). For the rural idyll is one of the most striking ideologies of rural Englishness – associated with calm, quiet, conservative, stable, uncomplicated, natural, unspoilt, in need of protection from the physical and cultural advances of the expanding city.
In other words, Midsomer County.

Yes, there were real pilgrimages of city dwellers who travelled to the countryside as a place of pilgrimage and a fountain of youth.
And by travelling there en masse – which is also the great paradox of heritage tourism today – they caused the (supposedly) unspoilt nature to lose its originality through tourism and commercialisation. Capitalist developments are needed to make tourists feel comfortable in their search for pre-capitalist, stress-free tranquillity: New roads, comfortable beds in accommodation, opportunities to visit places that are actually closed. So urban subcultures emerged in the countryside. The rest of the rural population got to know the sometimes militant ramblers (you can’t block public footpaths!), the nature and building pre- and conservationists, the dancing jazz lovers, the nudists and many more.

The fact that more and more middle-class people owned cars in the inter-war period helped the whole development. Tourism in rural England in the 1920s and 1930s was profitable not only for local institutions, but also for travel writers, nature writers and the car and fuel industries – whether as a ‘day run’ or a ‘country weekend’. Driving into the countryside is also marketed as an easy-to-manage adventure that, thanks to new roads, allows you to reach the holy places quickly and comfortably. You don’t even have to get out of the car if you don’t want to or don’t have the time.

 

Bright Young People

The young, lost generation of city dwellers filled their emptiness with parties, music and excess. The main thing was to distract themselves from the depressing reality. But it didn’t fit in at all with the image of the picturesque countryside. I’ll come back to the preservationist and organicist initiatives another time, but here I want to talk about Evelyn Waugh and his work ‚Vile Bodies‘.

Waugh was a contemporary of W. H. Auden and George Orwell. All three writers were disillusioned with the English class system, but their literary expressions and ideals separated them. Auden looked forward, Waugh backwards, and Orwell moved in an ambivalent in-between world. Unlike Auden and Orwell, Waugh was a conservative. His satirical and cynical works lamented the decline of the aristocracy and traditional values. He idealised the pre-modern hierarchical society. Sounds familiar, right? As a traditionalist, however, he was anything but happy to see the urban distractions, such as jazz music and nudism, making their way into the countryside.

The 1930s felt like an earthquake zone where the world was unpredictable and unstable. Frenetic hedonism and moral vacuity characterised the period, especially among the ‚Bright Young People‘, a generation that sought to escape problems and responsibilities through frenetic pleasure.

Waugh was their preeminent chronicler. From a privileged middle class background, he went to public school, studied at Oxford and began his literary career in the late 1920s. In fact, he could easily have been one of those ‘Bright Young People’ himself. Instead, he wrote a book about them, which was published in 1930 as ‘Vile Bodies’.
In it, the ‘Bright Young People’ lived in a London that, in the spirit of T.S. Eliot, seems like an allegorical wasteland. Their world is empty, characterised by parties in endless variations and a longing for meaning, while everything – from love to politics – is perceived as fake. A symbol of emptiness and meaninglessness.

Waugh‘s characters communicate mechanically and in isolation by telephone or telegram, using superficial phrases and showing no real emotion. Marriage and other crucial life decisions are treated with in a banal manner. This narrative technique, which is deliberately fragmentary and disjointed, reflects the uncertainty and disorientation of the times.

Waugh himself experienced this emptiness not only in literature, but also personally. After his first divorce and his conversion to Catholicism, he described the sense of happiness and permanence as something that seemed infinitely distant to him and his friends. Waugh’s work depicts a world without stability, in which meaninglessness and nihilism reign supreme – a world that would finally fall into the abyss a few years later, 1939.
But not the longing for the healing, cosy, and comforting countryside that enjoyed a first revival in the 1950s and a huge one in the 1980s. A revival that resonates throughout Midsomer Murders – and with us.

 

Further reading

Englishness

• Mandler, Peter: Against ‘Englishness’. English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940. In: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997). P. 155-175.
• Kohl, Stephen: Rural England in Moderne und Zwischenkriegszeit. Zur Nachgeschichte eines literarischen Konstrukts. In: Poetica 27 (1995). P. 374-395.
• Croft, Andy: Forward to the 1930s. The literary politics of anamnesis. In: Malcolm Chase/Christopher Shaw (Edd.): The imagined past. History and Nostalgia. Manchester/New York 1989. P. 147-170.
• Chase, Malcolm: This is no claptrap, this is our heritage. In: Malcolm Chase/Christopher Shaw (Edd.): The imagined past. History and Nostalgia. Manchester/New York 1989. P. 128-146.
• Britain, David: ‚Rural‘ and ‚Urban‘ in Dialectology. In: Beatrix Busse/Ingo H. Warnke (Edd.): Handbuch Sprache im urbanen Raum. Berlin 2022. P. 52-73.

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

• Page, Norman: The thirties in Britain. London et al. 1990.
• Hynes, Samuel: The Auden Generation. Literature and politics in England in the 1930s. London et al. 1976.