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One surprise concerns what might be called the ideological charge that was originally behind
the whole idea. If we hear appeals to 'the English character' today, we tend to associate them
with nostalgic conservatism; Left-wing ideologues may even associate them with racism, an
evil traditionally located on the extreme Right. Yet the notion of national character was in fact
promoted by radicals and reformers who, around the time of the Great Reform Act (1832),
wanted to emphasise that the common people shared the same basic nature as the upper
classes, and were thus naturally entitled to share the task of government with them.
A second wave of discussion about 'national character' took place at the time of the second
Reform Act (1867): here too, liberal reformers made the running.
Another surprise comes when Mandler looks at the growth of racial and biological theorising
in the mid-19th century that is, in precisely the period between those two waves of debate.
Modern historians, obsessed with Victorian attitudes towards colonial peoples, have seized on
the writings of self-styled racialists as if they were central to the intellectual life of the age.
Mandler shows that they were fairly marginal, and that many treatises which began by saying
that race was an important factor went on to say that it had much less influence on people's
behaviour than laws, institutions, religion, and so on an old-fashioned 'Enlightenment'
approach which lived on for an extremely long time.
Also surprising, perhaps, are some of Mandler's findings on the 20th century his discovery
that the inter-war period was the golden age of 'national character'-mongering, for example, or
his claim that the image of the English gentleman began to occupy centre-stage in such
discussions only as an afterthought, in the period after the Second World War. (Only then, he
suggests, could both Left and Right finally agree on it the Right because it felt nostalgia for
gentlemanly behaviour, the Left because the old-fashioned gentleman symbolised so many of
the things it hated.)
This is a fascinating book, but for those who are not academic historians it will also be quite a
demanding read not because it is written in technical jargon (it isn't), but because it engages
quite strenuously with existing historical debates and assumes some familiarity with 19thcentury political argument. Much of the time, Mandler is concerned not with what people
actually thought about the English character, but with their thinking on the theoretical issues
that surrounded any such notion: theories of national identity, arguments about the scope of
the 'social sciences', and so on.
In the end, this book is limited by its focus on the writings of intellectuals philosophers,
social commentators and politicians. To what extent the emerging notions of 'English
character' got through to the ordinary population, via novels, plays and popular journalism, is
a question that remains unanswered, and it is strange to find that such an influential popular
writer as William Cobbett is not even mentioned.