8.40 a.m. Bike lock key: check. Barcode key ring: check.

Our dress changes with the seasons, from long sleeves and gloves in the winter to shorts and vests in the summer. Some of us wear milestone T-shirts bearing the totemic numerals: 25, 50, 100, 250, 500.

Some of us travel not to our nearest Parkrun but slightly further, to our favourite, passing on the way the packs of poorly behaved blokes on bikes doing their aggressive laps of the park.

We arrive, lock up, maybe do some stretches. We look around for fellow regulars with whom to feed our Saturdaily dialogues.

We gather to hear the run director welcome us – and here we join in, cult-like – to ‘the best Parkrun in the world’. Sometimes we feel embarrassed about how patient the run director is having to be with murmuring people and barking dogs.

Then we walk to the starting line. On one occasion, just before we were going to set off, the director said to everyone, ‘Raise your hand if you think Parkrun is a good idea.’ Everyone dutifully raised their hands. Then he said, ‘Keep your hand raised if it was your idea’, and we all looked around to see a thin smiling man in sunglasses with his hand up – it was Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who founded Parkrun in 2004.

9 a.m. We are told to ‘Keep off the grass!’ and ‘Mind the puddles!’, or, if there are no puddles, ‘Mind the dust!’ Then there’s a countdown. Sometimes ‘Five, four, three, two, one’, whistle. Or my favourite is the charming amateurism of ‘Ready, steady, go!’

Then we’re off, overgrown schoolboys and girls doing cross-country, thundering towards the first left turn on to a tarmac path. Sometimes a trumpeter-volunteer even plays ‘Chariots of Fire’.

The 5K run is waymarked by kilometre posts, and the going to the first is uphill and for some of us decidedly sluggish. But at the top of the hill we get a view of the City and the Shard, which injects some competitive zeal into the stiff-kneed bouncing descent.

Ours is a one-lapper and what a devotee of the turf would call a ‘galloping course’. We turn left, and left again, pass the three-kilometre post in the shade of a wood, and then emerge on to what, for some reason, I think of as the Plains of Sarum, an old name for Salisbury Plain.

At this point regulars are aware of where everyone belongs, and who’s going slow or fast. The final kilometre is also uphill, but less sluggish than the first, as we give everything we’ve got. Parkrun is ‘a run, not a race’, but a run with certain race-like characteristics.

We finish and take our tokens and barcodes to be scanned by the wonderful volunteers.

At this point the runner-autists try to remember that the end of the run is the start of the real point: being sociable. For some it’s a bit like the locals’ response to Bill Bryson when he moved to Yorkshire:

[G]radually, little by little, they find a corner for you in their hearts, and begin to acknowledge you when they drive past with what I call the Malhamdale wave. This is an exciting day in the life of any new arrival. To make the Malhamdale wave, pretend for a moment that you are grasping a steering wheel. Now very slowly extend the index finger of your right hand as if you were having a small involuntary spasm. (Notes from a Small Island [1995])

Similarly, after running with someone for a couple of years, you might exchange the Parkrun nod. To make the Parkrun nod, establish eye contact, smile, and make a brief inclination of the head. If you’re feeling exuberant you might also initiate a conversation.

You might remember the idea of the ‘big society’ and its laudable attempt to create a culture of volunteerism. Well, never in the field of voluntary enterprise has so much been done for so many as by Parkrun. (Wikipedia comes to mind as a comparison.) This is why the first rule about Parkrun is you do talk about Parkrun – to get your friends to come. It’s not really a cult but it does have a culture, which I’ve tried to give a sense of – my little corner of it.

Once we’ve got our breaths back and had a chat, we disperse. Most of us probably go and enjoy a post-Parkrun coffee and feel that life is good. Then we start looking forward to next time: when Saturday comes.

Dedicated to all the Parkrun volunteers
Image credit ©George Hardwick

Cummings was born in Barnstaple where, after leaving school, he was an apprenticed journalist, but his real passion was naturalism, zoology in particular, which took him to London:

He rejected the prospect of a career in local journalism and aimed to gain a position in natural history at the end of his apprenticeship. In pursuit of this ambition he undertook a strenuous programme of self-education […] In 1912 he took up an appointment at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as one of the five new permanent staff appointed to the insect room, soon to be renamed the department of entomology. These positions carried considerable research and curatorial responsibility; his appointment was a remarkable achievement for one who had no formal training in the subject. (DNB)

He writes of London ‘spread out before me, a vast campagne’, but also calls it ‘a lonely place’: ‘London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.’2 Here is his journal entry from 26 September 1914 – it is representative of the ‘disappointment’ by which he defines himself:

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms—miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. […] I visit about two houses in London—the Doctor’s and R——’s [a friend’s] Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London—millions of them—and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.

Harold Bloom said that one of the reasons we read is that ‘we cannot know enough people profoundly enough’,3 and Cummings here shows the corollary, that we write because we cannot be known by enough people profoundly enough. In this spirit, literary criticism can be a sociable sharing of books and persons, which is my hope for this essay. My edition of The Journal is published by Faber Finds – reprints of ‘found’ classics – which feels appropriate.4 Finding and sharing books must be one of the most pleasurable things you can do – ‘with your clothes on’, as someone once said.

So what kind of person is Cummings?

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Roman London was half a square mile, about the size of Hyde Park. In ᴀᴅ 65 it was being rebuilt after the Boudiccan revolt, and a thousand years later Greater London – over six hundred square miles – was established under the government of Harold Wilson. To move between these, imagine an immense systole, which in a second contracts the pools of the Port of London, the chambers of Thamesis, and transports you along twenty-mile tributary-arteries to places that still haven’t quite accepted their swallowing by the metropolis, and beyond to those Home County swathes within the orbit, since the mid-1980s, of the M25.

In search of day trips I have found myself walking the waterways, always Thameswards and listening to an audiobook, through this zone, the grey-green belt, river basin of the Middle Saxons, country of the coal-tax posts, what Orwell called ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’. This is from the final sentence of Homage to Catalonia, published in 1937. The following year the Green Belt Act was passed, thanks to which, even ninety years on, much of it still isn’t very built-up, hence places like Crews Hill, in Enfield, now being proposed as locations for new towns.

What are these places like? They certainly don’t have the status of Hampstead. There are horses but they’re not horsy. There are England flags, standard of the displaced cockney. The unmaintained infrastructure is what the state thinks such people deserve – blocked paths, few benches, signs for trails and greenways, put up by various authorities, that last for a couple of miles and then disappear. I sometimes wonder how much it would cost to put all this right compared to a few hours of pensions and government procurement. But maybe if they spent a billion getting rid of all the litter and dog shit, it would just come back in a few weeks. They have the quality evoked by the word ‘chase’ in ‘Enfield Chase’ – half-wooded; half-enclosed but half-wild. I like them. I like the angler posing for photos with an enormous mirror carp he’s just taken out of the Basingstoke Canal. And I like the heedless birdsong sung over the dim roar of something, bourdon note of a distant organ. This is the score of the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’s manorial wastes.

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In his truly fascinating essay ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell distinguishes between two schools of literature, one with a political viewpoint and one with

a viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive—the viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it.

The latter is that of ‘a willing Jonah’.1 On the face of it, the writers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Prelude embody these respectively and therefore could hardly be less alike. One could even argue that they were able to become great writers only having experienced opposite realisations. William Wordsworth believed in the French Revolution as part of the world-process, was disillusioned when it descended into the Terror, and responded with the literary internalisation we call Romanticism. Orwell, on the other hand, looking back through his work, wrote, ‘it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’2 However, I will argue that in several areas they are alike in their significance, including with regard to ‘the whale’.

They both dealt in their work with post-Christianity and crises of faith, involved themselves in idealistic revolutions abroad, later evolved deep and influential patriotisms when Britain was threatened with invasion, suffered apostasy from the left for this reason, but then generated, in death, extraordinarily influential cultural legacies. Dying in 1850 and 1950 respectively, they did more to define Englishness in the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than almost any other figures.

Orwell made very few references to Wordsworth, but those he did make are significant. In a 1944 column for Tribune, he includes a list of English institutions: ‘tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to animals, Nelson, Cromwell and what-not.’3 (We would now include Orwell himself on this list.)

My subtitle is from Ruskin. He was talking about painters, but I think it applies to Wordsworth and Orwell:

All that the rest can do partially, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school.

The Englishest—and observe also, therefore the greatest: take that for an universal, exceptionless law;—the largest soul of any country is altogether its own.4

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1. Inside the Whale: Of Wanderers and Clergymen

I am not going to focus on The Prelude or Nineteen Eighty-Four, but two of my subjects’ most maligned works, Wordsworth’s epic poem of 1814, The Excursion, which Harold Bloom labelled ‘an aesthetic disaster’, and Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), which the author himself later called ‘bollox’.5 Neither of these judgements is anywhere close to being fair.

Jeffrey Meyers argues that Orwell was thinking of A Clergyman’s Daughter when he wrote the passage quoted above about ‘lifeless books’, but it isn’t a lifeless book at all.6 The portrayal of twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Hare is touching, her experiences of parish life, hop-picking and teaching engage and inform, much as Orwell’s non-fiction does, and the Joycean experiment of Chapter 3, set in Trafalgar Square, was never going to be another Ulysses, but that doesn’t mean it has no merit. I suspect many of the negative assessments that A Clergyman’s Daughter has attracted exist partly because they were licensed by Orwell’s own.

The Excursion has been somewhat neglected since the end of the nineteenth century, but this makes its story of the Solitary and his despondency no less compelling. Moreover, it is widely thought to contain some of Wordsworth’s finest writing in blank verse, so to call it an aesthetic disaster is far too sweeping a statement. And even Bloom – that judgement notwithstanding – credits the poem with enormous influence:

[T]he Wordsworth who dominated nineteenth-century poetry from his own time onward was the author of The Excursion […] This Wordsworth, though he overtly preaches against the Solitary’s errors, nevertheless fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary.

For this reason, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’, no less.7

It would be a valid criticism to say that neither The Excursion nor A Clergyman’s Daughter is exactly ‘well-made’, but that need not concern us.

In The Road to Miniluv: George Orwell, the State, and God (1975), Christopher Small says,

By the time he was writing A Clergyman’s Daughter [Orwell] had, on the evidence of his letters, abandoned any religious belief […] but, if only in memory, he was able through Dorothy to say with intense conviction what in one aspect at least it was like. In the same way and with the same conviction he could describe its loss.8

Of Orwell’s religious belief at this time, his biographer Bernard Crick wonders, ‘was he uncertain himself?’ Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works, refers to Orwell’s ‘religionless Christianity’.9 And in another Tribune column from 1944, Orwell himself had this to say:

Western civilisation, unlike some Oriental civilisations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. […] the modern cult of power-worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. […] the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilisation. […] I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. […] Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. But the truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.10

Wordsworth sensed this early. With his famously perceptive hearing, he could discern the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the century to come. J. S. Mill said that in Wordsworth’s poetry he ‘seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.’ That is, when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation, but also (therefore?) from religion. Mill said he found Wordsworth’s poems ‘a medicine for [his] state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’, which is what afflicts the partly autobiographical figure in The Excursion known as the Solitary.11

In his youth the Solitary showed promise. He became an army chaplain and married, but then it all went wrong, as Wordsworth’s summary of contents puts it:

His domestic felicity—afflictions—dejection—roused by the French Revolution—Disappointment and disgust—Voyage to America—disappointment and disgust pursue him—his return—His languor and depression of mind, from want of faith in the great truths of Religion, and want of confidence in the virtue of Mankind.12

After the deaths of his wife and children his

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                                                                  Soul
Turned inward,—to examine of what stuff
Time’s fetters are composed; and Life was put
To inquisition, long and profitless! (III. 704–07)

In this state the French Revolution appeared as a cause and distraction into which he could throw himself with zeal: ‘To the wide world’s astonishment, appeared / The glorious opening, the unlooked-for dawn’ (II. 223–24):

Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering Bride,
And airy hopes my Children. (III. 742–44)

Another character, the Wanderer – a voice of ‘the great truths of Religion’ – describes the Solitary with a combination of sympathy and Burkean judgement: ‘he was sincere / As vanity and fondness for applause, / And new and shapeless wishes, would allow’ (II. 239–41). But with the Terror came a meaning crisis, and the Solitary eventually ‘sate down by very chance, / Among [the] rugged hills’ of the Lake District (II. 235–36). His ‘bare Dwelling’ (II. 359) can be identified with the real Bleatarn House, between the Langdales, and thinking about it now it reminds me of Barnhill, the isolated house on the Isle of Jura in which Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Returning to the period of A Clergyman’s Daughter, Christopher Small’s words could be applied to the Solitary:

[L]oneliness, from the beginning of her story, is Dorothy Hare’s lot; loneliness, it can be inferred, was [Orwell’s] continuing experience […] That this life was deliberately chosen makes no difference: the self-isolation of one who shuts himself away is not therefore less desolating.13

From Wordsworth’s classless Cumbria to Orwell’s class-ridden East Anglia:

It was just half past five, and coldish for an August morning. Dorothy (her name was Dorothy Hare, and she was the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk) put on her aged flannelette dressing-gown and felt her way downstairs. There was a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs [fish] from yesterday’s supper, and from either side of the passage on the second floor she could hear the antiphonal snoring of her father and of Ellen, the maid of all work. With care—for the kitchen table had a nasty trick of reaching out of the darkness and banging you on the hip-bone—Dorothy felt her way into the kitchen, lighted the candle on the mantelpiece, and, still aching with fatigue, knelt down and raked the ashes out of the range.14

Chapter 1 describes Dorothy’s self-sacrificing life of holding the parish together and dealing with her selfish, unpastoral father:

Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as ten minutes would have denied that he was a ‘difficult’ kind of man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on the person nearest to him—usually, that is, on Dorothy.15

Her Christian faith is genuine but punitive: ‘She made it a rule, whenever she caught herself not attending to her prayers, to prick her arm hard enough to make blood come.’16 What takes her, with the Solitary, to a ‘want of faith’, is simple if clunky. She experiences an attack of amnesia – a mental breakdown, we infer – and ‘wakes’ in London with no memory of how she got there and eight days unaccounted for. Her excursion takes her to the hop country of Kent, Trafalgar Square, ‘a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London’,17 and finally back to Knype Hill. A longer essay than this one could compare her companion, the tramp Nobby, to Wordsworth’s Wanderer, and Chapter 4, in which she becomes a teacher at a ‘fourth-rate’ private school,18 to Book IX of The Excursion, since both function in effect as treatises on education. But I want to focus on the way in which, though her memory returns, her faith categorically does not, and her response to this. While working at the school, though ‘her faith had vanished’, she attends church and looks forward to it,

For she perceived that in all that happens in a church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something—it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness—that is not easily found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom.19

Aged thirty-six, in Grasmere, Wordsworth returned to being a regular churchgoer, and might have had some of the same thoughts as Dorothy – I don’t know. But she is much more black-or-white than any Wordsworthian figure, even the Solitary. After speaking to her atheist friend Warburton – to whom I will return in a moment – she reflects on her lack of belief. She is back to her selfless parish work, with ‘a big job on hand—costumes for a pageant that the schoolchildren were going to have on St George’s Day, in aid of the organ fund.’ Having put her glue pot on the stove, she considers

the deadly emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things. […] There was, she saw clearly no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of ‘progress’ with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. […] the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.20

There is a stoicism here, but aside from that it is hardly less bleak than the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a total departure from anything one finds in Wordsworth. In thinking about why, it is necessary to say a bit more about the kind of pin-pricking faith that Dorothy has lost. Back in her old life, in Chapter 1, bicycling home from her morning visits, she stops for a few moments’ respite in a meadow full of flowers:

Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognised, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship. Then, less than a minute later, she discovered that she was kissing the frond of the fennel that was still against her face.

She checked herself instantly, and drew back. What was she doing? Was it God that she was worshipping, or was it only the earth? The joy ebbed out of her heart, to be succeeded by the cold, uncomfortable feeling that she had been betrayed into a half-pagan ecstasy. She admonished herself. None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please! Her father had warned her against Nature-worship. […] Dorothy took a thorn of the wild rose, and pricked her arm three times, to remind herself of the Three Persons of the Trinity, before climbing over the gate and remounting her bicycle.21

The term ‘nature-worship’ was actually coined by Coleridge as a criticism of Wordsworth, and, while in theory Wordsworth would repudiate worshipping nature if doing so excluded God, in the practice of his poetry, it doesn’t. He discovers, and uncovers for us, no deadly emptiness at the heart of things, but ‘a bright and breathing World’ (III. 242) in which ‘the Virgilian magic of insects humming’22 is not a distraction from God but a sign of his benignity:

What other spirit can it be, that prompts
The gilded summer Flies to mix and weave
Their sports together in the solar beam,
Or in the gloom of twilight hum their joy? (IV. 447–50)

Nature worship goes with those other P-words of Dorothy’s – ‘pantheism’, ‘paganism’ – but there is an open, ecumenical compatibilism in Wordsworth that means such accusations can sit untroubled next to stoicism (which The Excursion also contains), what we would call Romantic humanism, as well as the soundest Anglicanism. This latter is embodied in the figure of the Pastor.

While Dorothy’s excursion takes her away from her father, an extraordinarily bad rector, the Solitary’s takes him to Grasmere Church, home of ‘a country clergyman of more than ordinary talents’.23 As the Wanderer introduces the Pastor,

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                                              No feudal pomp […]
Nor feudal power is there; but there abides,
In his allotted Home, a genuine Priest,
The Shepherd of his Flock; or, as a King
Is stiled, when most affectionately praised,
The Father of his People. (V. 98–105)

A genuine priest, yet here is the Pastor a few hundred lines later, in full nature worship mode, describing the melting of April snow:

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                                     Go forward, and look back;
On the same circuit of this church-yard ground
Look, from the quarter whence the Lord of light,
Of life, of love, and gladness, doth dispense
His beams[.] (V. 540–44)

Unlike poor Dorothy, when the reader of Wordsworth sees that the lord of light is both God and the sun, she does not need to prick or even check herself.

The Solitary and Dorothy Hare are both semi-autobiographical figures who suffer life-crises and lose their Christian faith, but only the latter’s is presented as being irrecoverable. In the same year as A Clergyman’s Daughter was published Orwell wrote a little poem that begins,

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.24

He might have been the Pastor, in a sense, exactly as he says of the Reverend Charles Hare: ‘A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home.’25 Orwell would not even have had to be a rector to be happy, but merely a vicar! Either way, he seems sure that happy vicars and rectors are ‘anachronism[s]’, and there is no ‘genuine Priest’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter. ‘The novel insists’, says Michael Levenson, ‘on the obsolescence of both the Anglican faith and its social / institutional practice.’26 Specifically, Dorothy’s friend Warburton insists on this, and the first part of Chapter 5 is worth reading in full as a very entertaining tour de force from the point of view we would now identify as New Atheist. The wit is more Hitchens than Dawkins:

‘Surely I don’t take you to mean,’ said Mr Warburton, ‘that you actually regret losing your faith, as you call it? One might as well regret losing a goitre. Mind you, I’m speaking, as it were, without the book—as a man who never had very much faith to lose. The little I had passed away quite painlessly at the age of nine. But it’s hardly the kind of thing I should have thought anyone would regret losing. Used you not, if I remember rightly, to do horrible things like getting up at five in the morning to go to Holy Communion on an empty belly? Surely you’re not homesick for that kind of thing?’27

Perhaps, as Valerie Meyers writes, ‘Orwell was more interested in the social effects of dwindling Christian faith than the individual’s sense of loss’, whereas The Excursion is about exactly that.28 It concludes much more open-ended, with the Solitary taking his solitary way back towards Blea Tarn Valley, but not before signalling his willingness to continue his dialogue with the Wanderer:

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                                                     “Another sun,”
Said he, “shall shine upon us, ere we part,—
Another sun, and peradventure more;
If time, with free consent, be yours to give,—
And season favours.” (IX. 778–82)

In A Clergyman’s Daughter and The Excursion we find two responses to the problems posed to – I won’t say Western civilisation, but Anglican civilisation, broadly understood – by the withdrawing of the sea of faith, and they map on to Meyers’s distinction between the individual and ‘social effects’. Warburton is intelligent and selfish, and his atheism comes naturally and works quite well for him, but it can be viewed as a ‘luxury belief’ if one considers the widespread anomie about which we now hear so much, under headings such as ‘the meaning crisis’. Hence Dorothy’s instinct that church retains ‘something of decency, of spiritual comeliness’.

The work of Wordsworth and Orwell continues to do what it does nationally – in Ruskin’s phrase – because it speaks to what still bedevils us. At its least attractive, the choice is between the insufficiencies of scientism – ‘Viewing all objects unremittingly / In disconnection dead and spiritless’ (IV. 957–58), as the Wanderer puts it – and a C of E-themed fudge. It is actually the compatibilist Wordsworth who feels more of the moment, with talk of a ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity, as well as related phenomena such as John Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and Ted Gioia’s New Romanticism. Wordsworth is as good a guide as these, with, as Paul Fry says of the Wanderer, a ‘sense of his peripatetic vocation as an always-successful quest for significance.’29

But we have been too long ‘inside the whale’. The third of Dorothy’s P-words – after ‘pantheism’ and ‘paganism’ – was ‘progress’. When Wordsworth wrote The Excursion his revolutionary days were behind him, but Orwell wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter before his had even begun. As he explains in ‘Why I Write’, his experiences up to that point had

increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes […] but […] were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. […] By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

Hence the ‘happy vicar’ poem, which he inserts at this point of the essay. But then, enter political purpose:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.30

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2. Outside the Whale

Bliss Was It in That Dawn

A lot has been written about Wordsworth’s involvement in the French Revolution, so I will quote only my favourite prose account, the poet’s own and a short one: ‘I went over to Paris […] at the time of the revolution in 1792 or 1793, and so was pretty hot in it’.31 He was on ‘the left side’ – le côté gauche – in the original sense, supporting the revolution against the ancien régime. (Louis XVI was not affectionately praised or styled the father of his people at this time!) Wordsworth’s famous poetic description of this period comes not from The Excursion but The Prelude, and was also published under the title ‘The French Revolution, As it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’:

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The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbours’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.1

This is Wistan, the Saxon warrior in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, speaking to the elderly Britons, Axl and Beatrice. The story takes place in the fifth century, after the Roman withdrawal and during a period characterised by Ishiguro as one of uneasy peace between Britons and Saxons, following brutal warfare between them and preceding the full-on Saxonisation that followed. But it is a fantasy novel, not a work of history, and Ishiguro says that his inspiration in filling the historical lacuna came from the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its wolves, giants, and wild men of the woods. The novel begins with the narrator saying,

You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. […] I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are.2

This is Britain before England; in effect – not in reality, but in the novel – Britain before history. The fantasy element, which will explain Wistan’s reference to the stirring giant, is that everyone in this society has been suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. To put it briefly, after the death of King Arthur, Merlin put a spell on the she-dragon Querig, who lives next to the cairn of the buried giant, so that her breath became a mist of forgetfulness that covered the land. Arthur’s last surviving knight – Sir Gawain himself – says that he is tasked with slaying the dragon, but for some reason has never succeeded in doing so.

There are very few references to the buried giant, but it seems clear to me that he symbolises tribal hatred. The narrator says at one point, ‘it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.’3 Axl refers to ‘this wretched mist’ because it robs him and Beatrice of their memories of loving each other, but the wider purpose of Merlin’s spell is to keep the peace by suppressing trauma and hatred, ‘a barbarous past hopefully gone for ever’, as Axl says.4 Ishiguro explained this in an episode of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A couple want this mist to go away because they want their precious memories back, so at the personal level this mist is a bad thing […] but from the nation’s point of view getting rid of the source of that mist is probably going to restart a terrible cycle of violence, is probably going to bring on a genocide.

It is for this reason, as it turns out, that Sir Gawain has not been trying to slay Querig, but has in fact been protecting her. It is Wistan who has come to slay the dragon and disinter the buried giant. When Axl realises this he pleads with Wistan:

I beg you leave this place, and let Querig do her work a while longer. Another season or two, that’s the most she’ll last. Yet even that may be long enough for old wounds to heal for ever, and an eternal peace to hold among us. Look how she clings to life, sir! Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.

‘Foolishness’, replies Wistan. ‘How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?’5 He cuts off Querig’s head and explains more:

My king sent me to destroy this she-dragon not simply to build a monument to kin slain long ago. You begin to see, sir, this dragon died to make ready the way for the coming conquest. […] look across this whole land. In every valley, beside every river, you’ll now find Saxon communities, and each with strong men and growing boys.

This is from the speech with which I began. Wistan goes on,

For you Britons, it’ll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you. You’ll flee or perish. And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace of your people’s time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended.6

Our finest living novelist has written a book about the stirrings of tribal hatred, published one year before the shocks of 2016 (just as he published Klara and the Sun one year before the release of ChatGPT). And why is it a dragon that dies to make way for the coming conquest? Because dragons are mythical. Querig’s mist represents the myth of the tribeless society, belief in which waxes and wanes. We could think of the myth as a necessary fiction, a noble lie, an aspiration; or sometimes, when toleration and trust are high, and we’re wishing, with Axl, that peace will hold, as a reality. This is why visions of a golden age tend to look tribeless.

Adam Curtis

[T]he sort of Britain that we wanted to go back to was the old-fashioned Britain, which had Union Jacks, and Empire, and stability, and order, and decency, and all that sort of thing.

This is Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh, who was a prisoner in Colditz during the Second World War. The quotation is from a 1995 series called The Living Dead by the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis. Curtis is fascinated by the myth of the tribeless society but does not believe in it. For over thirty years his films have guided viewers through the mist to the cairns of Britain’s buried giants, in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and in Ireland. He refers to himself as a journalist, though his films are also works of history – the common denominator being that the stories are everything. And his stories are often about when myths of tribelessness do not hold – a nagging sense, the return of things repressed. As Axl says, ‘Our memories aren’t gone for ever, just mislaid’.7 The episode of The Living Dead featuring Colonel Storie-Pugh is called ‘The Attic’, and begins with Curtis’s monologue: ‘Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on earth.’ Because, of course, his core period is not that of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, but of the Cold War. That is, his stories are told not at the beginning but at ‘the end of history’, and behind them lies not a dark-age blank, but everything, the deep pool of English history, which is like the pool in George Orwell’s Coming up for Air:

It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. […] At some time this pool had been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten.8

The thrill is that you cannot see the bottom, and if you swam down you would pass Pip and Magwitch, and Peter Bell, and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Cobbett and Hogarth, and King Lear and his Fool, and if you kept holding your breath past Chaucer and Malory, you might even meet a real knight, like Sir Gawain.

But I’m becoming mistified. Curtis will not allow the memory of a golden age or the myth of the tribeless society to stand. ‘The Attic’ posits that we are – or at least in 1995 were – in a mist co-created by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and examines ‘parts of Britain’s history that did not fit into [the] dream’, such as the assassination of Airey Neave by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in 1979. The thesis of the episode is voiced most clearly not by Curtis but by Patrick Cosgrave, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher: ‘We’re living in her version of Churchill’s version of British history.’ ‘But it’s a dream’, says Curtis from behind the camera, and uses Tony Benn as the countervoice of that form of tribal identity known as class division:

Her vision was of a Great Britain that had always respected authority and discipline. A hierarchical Britain. A Britain where people did what they were told and where the benefit was that you could hold your head up in the world. It is a view of history. It’s not by any means the only one, because it’s a view of history that’s only really been in the interests of a tiny minority of powerful people.

Curtis’s fullest expression of his own view of history is Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021), which might also be his best series about buried giants. He begins in London in the 1950s, with the dismantling of the British Empire: ‘What had […] not gone away was the fear and hatred, inside the minds of many of the British, of the others, the people the British had ruled over, who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.’ One who came, in 1957 from Trinidad, was Michael de Freitas, whom Curtis shows in a later interview lamenting the realisation that ‘we weren’t wanted’. De Freitas worked in Notting Hill as an enforcer for the infamous slum landlord Peter Rachman. Rachman was born in Poland and, Curtis explains, found himself in a Siberian labour camp during the war,

where he watched people survive by killing each other and then eating the human flesh. […] he ended up after the war in London, stateless and a complete outsider. That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody. For him, the differences between right and wrong were luxuries for the privileged. […] Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one.

He gave his name to Rachmanism, ‘The exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords’ (OED), a term coined, incidentally, by one Harold Wilson, in the Guardian in 1963, the year before he became prime minister. But Curtis’s interest is in the story beneath, which touches on what today get called ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘luxury beliefs’, though he avoids these terms. ‘De Freitas saw something deeper’, he says. Rachman

was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do. He was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live. His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people at the top of English society who would never think of themselves as racist, but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving into Notting Hill. […] De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper than just the working-class racism, that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. De Freitas gave it a name. He called it Englishism. It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy at the loss of their empire.

(A highly Ishiguran quality.) Episode One ends with a glimpse of something that will prove important – anti-immigration marches in 1968. In Curtis’s archive footage we can just make out a banner, which protests against Harold Wilson’s Race Relations Acts.

In Episode Two de Freitas is reintroduced as Michael X, saying ‘the people of pale pigmentation are people who are so barbaric’. I need to rely here on some outside explanation from the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro–Latin American Biography:

Michael’s involvement in radical politics began in 1965, when he heard the African American activist Malcolm X speak in London. Malcolm asked Michael to accompany him to a speaking engagement in Smethwick in the English West Midlands, a community then riven by racial divisions. The local Conservative MP had won an election with the slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” When Michael was asked his name by a reporter, he responded, “Call me Michael X.” […] Michael X soon founded the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), the acronym of which is Jamaican slang for “ass.” […] He used his skills as a hustler and his charm with women to procure financial support from many notable patrons, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Michael organized the first Notting Hill Carnival with the LFS [London Free School] that year, [and] converted to Islam[.] […] In 1967 [he] became the first nonwhite person charged and imprisoned under the 1965 Race Relations Act. […] He was accused of advocating the killing of white men for touching black women and for stating that white men were soulless[.] […] [In 1970] Michael and some followers were involved in an incident the media referred to as the “slave collar affair.” They lured Marvin Brown, a Jewish businessman, to Black House, where Brown was beaten, tortured, forced to wear a spiked slave collar, and led around by that collar in an extortion attempt. [Michael] and the men involved were arrested. [His] bail was paid by John Lennon[.]9

Curtis describes what I would call the folly – frivolity, even – embodied here in John Lennon. It didn’t matter that de Freitas was (like Malcolm X) a hustler and a pimp:

Many of Michael X’s supporters were the young white radicals who had moved into Notting Hill, into the very houses that he and the gangster Peter Rachman had run ten years before. Because Michael X was an outsider, the white radicals believed that he could see the system for what it really was. Like all revolutionaries before them, they had tried to appeal to the white working class and get them to rise up against the system. But no one seemed to be interested.

On the 1967 imprisonment, Curtis contrasts de Freitas with ‘The MP Enoch Powell [who] had also made a speech at the same time, violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged, and he carried on being an MP.’ This rather elides de Freitas inciting violence with Powell using ‘violent’ rhetoric (a permanently important distinction), but I will return below to Powell. Curtis closes by saying that de Freitas had ‘set out to confront’ his society, ‘and change the structure of power’, but ‘had unleashed violence that was lurking underneath’; that is, in the symbolism I am taking from Ishiguro, had threatened to wake a buried giant.

Jumping now to the final two episodes of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis presents another ‘imaginary version of England […] One that still haunts the country today.’ This England is older and deeper than the Churchillian idea of empire from The Living Dead, and less concerned with power than with peace. Importantly, however, it is another tribeless society. ‘At its heart’, says Curtis, ‘was a vision of a natural order in the countryside outside the cities.’ He is talking about the British folk revival of the Edwardian era, led by figures such as the collector of folk songs, Cecil Sharp. ‘His aim was to create a new kind of English nationalism […] The innocent rural people and their culture. […] an England where villagers lived in harmony and safety’. At the risk of condensing too much, the pay-off of this comes at the end of the series when Curtis reaches 2016. His thesis on Brexit is that ‘thousands of those who had been marginalised by the new global economy […] came to believe in that Romantic idea of England as a special place’. And he says of Donald Trump during his first term that ‘he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption’. Curtis closes with the following (remember this was 2021): ‘although Donald Trump is gone, and the Brexit deal done, what they both reveal is that underneath Western societies there are enormous pressures building up that will not go away.’ In other words, in his role as cultural seismograph, Curtis detects post-2016 tremors – the stirrings of the buried giant – even though Brexit and the first Trump presidency did little of what they promised.

The two most important dates in Curtis’s Emotional History of the Modern World are 1968 and 2016. What was the myth of tribelessness – our equivalent of Querig’s mist – that held during this period? Enoch Powell’s speech, referred to above, was of course the ‘Rivers of Blood’, but Powell was fired from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath and consigned to the back benches. De Freitas might have set out to ‘change the structure of power’ in Britain, but in 1971 he returned to Trinidad, leaving Notting Hill to become rich and cosmopolitan, home eventually to the ‘Notting Hill set’ around David Cameron.

‘The giant, once well buried, now stirs’, says Wistan at the beginning of his own rivers of blood speech. Do you feel this to be the case? Or is talk of tribal hatred inflammatory, hyperbolic, and irrelevant to the ‘modern’ Britain created by Tony Blair? New Labour became associated with the statement of tribelessness, ‘We’re all middle-class now’, the attendant hope being that we’re all post-racial too. But do we go about our days believing in the tribeless society, or just trying to believe in it for the sake of an eternal peace? Do some have the luxury of believing in it and others not? Does the celebration of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, and identity politics constitute a helpful panacean mist, or does it actually foreground the potential for tribalism? If we have been in a mist, where did it come from? The third and final part of this essay is about another essay – a forgotten essay, I should say in the Curtis style. It is about the origins of another mythical Britain, not the capital of a powerful empire, or a peaceful village, but having in common with those that it is ostensibly a tribeless Britain, or, as the title of the essay has it, ‘The Classless Society’.

The Classless Society

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