Life Among the English

Britain in Pictures #31

by Rose Macaulay

This book concerns the social life of the English from the ancient Britons through to the 20th century, finding a similarity of behavior across the centuries, from eating and drinking to dress and sport.

Genres: Nonfiction

96 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

Emilie Rose Macaulay, whom Elizabeth Bowen called "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century," was born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master. Descended on both sides from a long line of clerical ancestors, she felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill the early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville, and on coming down lived with her family first in Wales, then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There she began a writing career which was to span fifty years with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. When her sixth novel, The Lee Shore (1912), won a literary prize, a gift from her uncle allowed her to rent a tiny flat in London, and she plunged happily into London literary life.

From BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ros...

Reviews

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a funny little book. It was not a work of academic scholarship, nor was it a popularization, novelesque approach to telling about the development of England as a social and political entity. It was more like a pamphlet (pamphlets of old were longer, sort of mini-books) but if it was, what as the point (for pamphlets are most often written to deliver a point, and those most often themselves political)?

“Life Among the English” is a short review of the development of what the English love to call ‘custom’ from the days of the Romans until the early 20th century – food and entertainment and fashion and behavior. And we do love England, don’t we? We need look no further than Downton Abbey, James Bond, The Tudors or Notting Hill – all of which charm and enthrall us. My favorite novelist is W. Somerset Maugham, an Englishman of the Edwardian era – in every sense; and that is extremely cool (he was a spy during the war – of course he was – his novels overflow with England, especially ‘Human Bondage‘ which might be the best novel ever written). Empathy – it’s not something we are very good at (we are often punished for showing empathy these days, making us timid) and it’s not something the English are known for – except that it should be. So many of the great social movements started there. Lots of these described in Macaulay’s quirky little book.

It’s a fun little book too, to a point, but I would really have been interested to ask Rose Macaulay what she was getting at, who was the audience, why this of all the things she could have done (and did) with her talent. Alas I’ll probably never know…

One takeaway, however, for us these days struggling to understand the direction of the future: the English are a singular lot (English, specifically, not the Scottish or Irish or Welsh – this is a book about the English), with a particular way of viewing their island world which developed over many centuries. If nothing else, those who are still befuddled by Brexit might find some insight in Macaulay’s pamphlet. To understand just how diverse, just how different the English are from their neighbors across the channel. And is not diversity important?

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of a series produced as very gentle propaganda during the Second World War, Rose Macaulay’s take on what makes the English English adheres to the series brief of elegiac evocation somewhere between Powell and Pressburger, Thirkell and Betjeman. Macaulay brings the left-wing feminism of Time and Tide to the series, viewing the life of the nation through its women’s lives and letters, its parties and entertainments, meals and domestic spaces, as much as through its gentlemen’s clubs and public life. Slight but entertaining, with a lightly humorous tone underpinned by a love of what looked in 1942 at great risk of disappearing not just because of the roll of time.

[Greg Benham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing particularly illuminating, but elevated by Macaulay’s wit.

[Luciano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a lovely book!

[Cassandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Macaulay's first two novels earlier this year and enjoyed them. Based on the title, I expected this to be a sharp-tongued commentary on life in England in the 30s and 40s with lots of photographs. It is instead a quick skimming of England’s social history, fairly wry, mostly whole good-natured. I enjoyed it while reading it, and now do not really remember it.