Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at his gate,

  God made them high and lowly,

  And ordered their estate.

  The landowner supposedly kept his side of the social contract out of a sense of duty, which was itself a tithe paid to privilege. As the nineteenth century progressed, this ideal was held up in contrast to the newly rich industrialists who, having missed out on the proper training provided by the public schools, supposedly felt no such obligations towards their workforce.

  The consolidation of the concept of Englishness was emphasised not only by the public schools but in such cultural enterprises as the Oxford English Dictionary, which began publication in 1884; the Dictionary of National Biography, which first appeared the following year; the National Trust, founded in 1895 to preserve both the landscape and important historic buildings; the National Portrait Gallery, which opened in 1896; and a National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain), which opened in 1897. England’s long literary tradition had been celebrated in Francis Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, which was first published in 1861 and, having run through twenty-three reprints in thirty years, was revised and expanded in 1891. The best of English lyric poetry, in Palgrave’s plan, would be disseminated throughout the world: ‘wherever the Poets of England are honoured, wherever the dominant language of the world is spoken, it is hoped that they will find fit audience.’

  Further education was another way of promoting national identity. University College, London, had introduced the study of English Language and Literature as a degree subject as early as 1828, but it was in 1893 that Oxford University created its own school devoted to these subjects with the intention of reaching out to students who had not received a classical education earlier in life. English Literature, it was argued, ‘deepened our sense of the import of nationality by giving the most intense and at the same time most manifold expression of it’. Indeed, early English Literature courses required a working knowledge of English history on the grounds that the study of literature alone was essentially frivolous and undisciplined, ‘mere chatter about Shelley’.As with literature, one of the principal concerns of history as taught in universities was how it reflected the character of a society or a nation. Arthur Quiller-Couch, who did much to promote English literature with such anthologies as The Golden Pomp: A Procession of English Lyrics from Surrey to Shirley (1895), the first Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) and the Oxford Book of Ballads (1911), recalled the experience of reading Edward A. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest (1867–76) and J.R. Green’s A Short History of the English People (1874), ‘in which as through parting clouds of darkness we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised’. The English Historical Review was founded in 1886, and in 1900 English history was made a compulsory part of education in secondary schools.

  An attempt to spread a proper appreciation of what it meant to be English throughout the population was one of the motivating forces behind the ‘missionary work’ carried out by undergraduates in the East End of London. Just as servants of the Empire brought the supposed benefits of English culture and education to the ‘natives’ of India and Africa, so young men from Oxbridge and the public schools spread their ethos among the urban lower orders. That this represented a kind of cultural takeover-bid was happily acknowledged: ‘Colonisation by the well-to-do seems indeed the true solution to the East End question,’ read the first annual report of the Oxford House Mission in 1884, ‘for the problem is, how to make the masses realise their spiritual and social solidarity with the rest of the capital and the kingdom.’ East Enders undoubtedly had their own notions of what constituted Englishness, but cultural cohesiveness was seen by the ruling classes as a way both of uniting the nation and countering the threat of rising socialism.

  Despite such missions among the urban masses, the countryside remained the true locus of ‘Englishness’. England has always been defined by its landscape. The ‘scepter’d isle’ of John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II is rural rather than urban: another Eden, a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself’. The idealised England of this period was characterised by extensive forests in which royalty and the nobility hunted game, dukes lived in exile and outlaws hid. And right at its centre, covering much of the county of Warwickshire, was the huge and ancient Forest of Arden, where Shakespeare grew up, which gave his mother her surname, and which is the nominal setting of As You Like It. The English landscape defines English poetry (from William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’), English painting (Constable and Turner) and English music (Elgar and Vaughan Williams). There are of course other, urban Englands, but the increasingly mythic rural one persists as an idea. Even as late as 1947, in the wake of a war characterised by the destruction of English cities by aerial bombardment, it seems inevitable that the first chapter of a book titled The Character of England (edited by Sir Ernest Barker) should consider ‘Land and People’, as if they were indivisible, and open with the description of a man lying on sheep-cropped downland in high summer. The chapter considers how man fits into this landscape, how he ‘has been deeply affected by the character of the small land-mass which time has made and he has called England’. Urban England is acknowledged, but it is seen as a comparatively recent development: ‘Towns came late to England and even then, in the Roman Province, not very successfully. In the fifteenth century sophisticated Italians mocked the English gentleman’s devotion to his own clods.’ The Industrial Revolution brought great change, but even in 1947 there ‘have not yet been many generations born in urban surroundings so deep that isolation from nature is almost complete’. The authors continue: ‘It is not that the worst towns lack their own startling beauties and a power to awaken the nostalgic devotion of their inhabitants. Yet we are, after all, one with our ancestors; and the inheritance from innumerable generations of lives spent in the closest contact with natural things is still within us. It is noticeable, for instance, that most poetic images still seem to well up from some store of non-urban, non-mechanical impressions, and wholly urban poetry is difficult to conceive.’

  Poetry celebrating the modern bustling city had in fact been very much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century, and after the Georgian interlude it had a revival in the Modernist period, so it was hardly inconceivable in 1947. However, the pastoral ‘tradition’ of English poetry proved enduring, and the location of A Shropshire Lad in a particular if largely imaginary English landscape was a major contribution to the book’s popularity and longevity.

  Recent debates in Britain about education and immigration have often focused on ‘British’ or ‘English’ values, which those on either side of the argument seem hard put to define, preferring merely to flourish the notion like a flag. In 2012 the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, decided that primary-school pupils should learn poetry by rote, a suggestion that many teachers felt was wholly retrograde and likely to put children off poetry altogether. When the issue was discussed on BBC Television’s Question Time, a member of the audience asked the panellists to recite a poem they had learned at school and explain how this had been ‘useful’ in their subsequent careers. The right-wing columnist and controversialist Peter Hitchens was the only panellist prepared to answer the challenge directly. He recited Housman’s ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, and went on to argue that to have such poems in one’s head was spiritually enriching: ‘I feel very sorry for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to learn them. Of course people need these things, and what’s more they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really fully conversant with its history or its character.’

  This particular poem was perhaps an inevitable choice for someone of Hitchens’ generation (he was born in 1951) both to recite and to take as representing part of what it meant to be British. Hitchen
s is not, however, alone in valuing Housman for his English qualities, as the assessment by Ted Hughes at the head of this chapter testifies. Hughes’s fellow poet Charles Causley described Housman as a ‘peculiarly “English” poet [and] undoubtedly one of our finest lyricists’. William Hayes, the Irish physicist who served as president of Housman’s Oxford college from 1987 to 2001, suggested that ‘the Englishness of Housman’s poetry is something which in the century has been approached only by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin, both warm admirers of his genius. The long-standing tradition of English poets who have drawn from all that is rich in the English landscape and tradition is recapitulated and carried forward in his poetry.’ For the writer and politician Roy Hattersley, ‘A Shropshire Lad is a great statement of English rural life and the nostalgia for our Arcadian past.’

  Housman’s determination that A Shropshire Lad should be both affordable and portable meant that people could take it with them when they set off to defend England and Englishness on those occasions the country came under threat. The book fitted very neatly into the pockets of military uniforms in both world wars. When the grandfather of the writer Salley Vickers set off for the trenches in 1916, his wife gave him a copy of A Shropshire Lad so that he could, as she put it, carry ‘a piece of England’ in his breast pocket. She also gave him a cigarette case inscribed with a line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCVII: ‘And thou away, the very birds are mute’. The cigarette case was returned to her after he was killed in action, but not the book. She therefore bought another copy to give to her son, who had been only a few weeks old when his father left for the front. When it was his turn to march away to his own war, Vickers’s father gave this copy to his new wife, telling her that if, like his father before him, he failed to return, he wanted her to have the book as a remembrance of them both. He knew most of the poems, and those of Edward Thomas, by heart and so carried them in his head rather than his pocket. This proved essential when, captured shortly before Dunkirk, he entered a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he would spend the rest of the war. To while away the time, inmates gave each other lessons; he taught modern poetry, with a particular emphasis on Housman and Thomas, both of whom kept alive his memories of the English countryside he so loved.

  If men such as this felt that they were carrying England in their pockets and in their hearts, what was this England, and how did Housman’s poetry come to represent it? Why is it that for many people ‘England’ has always meant an unspoilt rural landscape rather than the ever-changing urban world in which most English people live? What was the ‘England’ for which people fought in two world wars? Why were English composers at the beginning of the twentieth century so drawn to traditional folk song, and why did pastoral become the defining idiom, creating a national music that avoided being nationalistic? And why do these poems continue to attract composers, both classical and popular? What was it about this little book of sixty-three poems that appealed to people, and continues all these years later to appeal to people, and how did Housman come to write it?

  ‘Housman Country’ is very much more than a tourist-board notion, and in this book I go in search of a landscape that is not merely geographical, but also literary, musical, emotional, even, in the broadest sense, spiritual. In terms of accurate topographical measurements, the real Shropshire is not quite at the heart of England, but it is close. Much the same might be said of A Shropshire Lad, which has over the years embodied a notion of England’s land and character. Although people have used the book, so rich in allusions to real places, as a kind of guidebook to a specific English region, it could more accurately be described as a gazetteer of the English heart.

  II

  THE MAN AND HIS BOOK

  Some men are better than their books, but my books are better than their man.

  A.E. Housman, 13 September 1933

  To anyone taking the air on Hampstead Heath in 1895, he would have been a familiar figure: a determinedly solitary man in his mid-thirties, walking energetically, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts. Slight in build (he had been nicknamed ‘Mouse’ at school), neatly and formally dressed, his unusually small feet clad in elastic-sided boots, he would not have made much impression except for the fact that he was so often there. Anyone passing him might have taken him for a clerk, which had until recently been his job, though others might have detected something faintly military in his bearing.

  Hampstead Heath, some 790 acres of common land, was at that time an expanse of more or less wild English countryside, consisting of open spaces, woods and ponds, on what was then the northern fringe of London. It had long been a popular destination for Londoners in search of fresh air and healthy recreation, and from its highest point it commanded clear views right across the capital. It had strong poetic associations: Keats had lived in Hampstead, Coleridge in nearby Highgate, and the two men had first met while out walking in April 1819, introduced by a mutual friend. Talking non-stop, they had spent some two hours in each other’s company, walking at Coleridge’s ‘alderman-after dinner pace for near two miles’. When they parted, Keats went a little way before running back and saying: ‘Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!’ For his part, Coleridge carried away with him intimations of mortality, remarking to his companion after Keats had gone, ‘There is death in that hand.’ Amongst many other things, their conversation covered the topic of nightingales, and shortly afterwards, while listening to a bird in his Hampstead garden, Keats wrote his celebrated ode.

  The solitary figure walking there some seventy-six years later was also a poet, though he would not have stated this as his occupation and had not yet published a volume of his verse. When he did so the following year, some thought his poems more Classical than Romantic – having relinquished the life of a clerk, A.E. Housman was now earning his livelihood as a professor of Latin – but, like those of Keats, the poems were much concerned with death and the natural world. Housman lived at 17 North Road, Highgate in a house called Byron Cottage, named not after Keats’s fellow Romantic but, rather more prosaically, after a governor at a local school. It was about midway between the Heath and Highgate Wood, which had been Housman’s favourite haunt until the previous year. Highgate Wood was 70 acres of ancient woodland, a remnant of the vast Forest of Middlesex that covered much of what is now London, as well as parts of Hertfordshire and Essex. The wood had become the property of the Mayor and Commonality and the Citizens of the City of London in 1886, the year Housman had come to live in Highgate. A country boy, Housman had particularly valued the sense one had while walking in this untamed wood of being insulated from the surrounding late-Victorian urban sprawl, and he was not at all pleased when the authorities began tidying it up. In 1894 he wrote a letter to the Standard newspaper, which published it on 14 March. Before the wood was acquired for Londoners, he wrote, it was

  in a very sad state. So thickly was it overgrown with brushwood, that if you stood in the centre you could not see the linen of the inhabitants of Archway-road hanging to dry in their back gardens. Nor could you see the advertisement for Juggins’ stout and porter which surmounts the front of the public house at the south corner of the Wood […] Scarlet flannel petticoats are much worn in Archway-road, and if anyone desires to feast his eyes on these very bright and picturesque objects, so seldom seen in the streets, let him repair to the centre of Highgate Wood.

  Trees had also been felled on the north side of the wood, he continued, which meant that people would ‘soon be able to look at the railway when they are tired of porter and petticoats’. It appeared, however, that the authorities still had work to do: ‘there are a number of new red-brick houses on the east side of the Wood, and I regret to say that I observe no clearing of timber in that direction. Surely, Sir, a man who stands in the centre of the Wood, and knows that there are new red-brick houses to the east of him, will not be happy until he sees them.’ Walks screened from railway lines, red-brick villas, scarlet petticoats and adverts for stout were what
the correspondent needed in order to write his poetry, in which the contrast between country and urban living was a principal theme.

  The letter also suggests Housman’s customary mode of discourse, the ironic wit that characterises his correspondence and which he employed most savagely when discussing in print the editorial endeavours of his fellow classicists. Irony was equally a feature of his poetry, sometimes biting, sometimes rueful, the perhaps inevitable strategy of someone who had at an early age seen God’s works clearly and found them wanting. It was this that made A.E. Housman seem modern as a poet, even while the verse forms he employed were very traditional. If not a Modernist – not for him the free-verse experiments of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound – he was nevertheless, thought Louis MacNeice, the poet ‘with whom any history of modern English poetry might very well start’. Indeed, Housman was where MacNeice proposed starting a critical book titled Modern Poetry, which the Oxford University Press commissioned him to write in 1937.