Albion: Origins of the English Imagination - Hardcover

Ackroyd, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385497725 ISBN 13: 9780385497725

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 2003

Synopsis

Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: The Biography with a book that once again plumbs the history of England and uncovers the continuities that link past and present. A dazzling, highly original exploration of English culture from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, ALBION demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality imbues every form of cultural expression—not just literature, but also painting, music, architecture, philosophy, and science.

In an intricate, expertly crafted mixture of narrative and theme, Ackroyd travels through time and across cultural categories as he seeks out the roots and the essence of the English imagination. With an irrepressible curiosity and contagious enthusiasm, he moves from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, Hogarth to Hockney, Purcell to Vaughan Williams, Inigo Jones to Edward Lutyens. His lively biographical sketches and incisive exegeses of the work of figures both well known and less familiar deepen our understanding and appreciation of our inherited culture. Like London: The Biography, ALBION contains unexpected treasures, including a thought-provoking look at immigration and assimilation and a delightful digression into the English obsession with gardening. Black-and-white photographs and drawings, and two lavish four-color inserts add visual appeal throughout.

Ackroyd’s talent for distilling information and presenting it with novelistic flair shines on every page of ALBION. It is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant and exuberant.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Ackroyd is the author of biographies of Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More, and of the bestselling London: The Biography. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Guardian Fiction prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the South Bank Award for Literature. He lives in London.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

“Ackroyd covers not only literature but art, architecture, music and almost everything else that has passed through the minds of the English…just one damn interesting thing after another.” -- Sunday Times

“Albion is an explosion, full of particles whizzing through air…crammed, digressive, learned, knotted.” -- Daily Telegraph


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

<p>Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed <i>London: The Biography</i> with a book that once again plumbs the history of England and uncovers the continuities that link past and present. A dazzling, highly original exploration of English culture from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, ALBION demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality imbues every form of cultural expression—not just literature, but also painting, music, architecture, philosophy, and science.<br><br>In an intricate, expertly crafted mixture of narrative and theme, Ackroyd travels through time and across cultural categories as he seeks out the roots and the essence of the English imagination. With an irrepressible curiosity and contagious enthusiasm, he moves from <i>Beowulf</i> to Virginia Woolf, Hogarth to Hockney, Purcell to Vaughan Williams, Inigo Jones to Edward Lutyens. His lively biographical sketches and incisive exegeses of the work of figures both well known and less familiar deepen our understanding and appreciation of our inherited culture. Like <i>London: The Biography</i>, ALBION contains unexpected treasures, including a thought-provoking look at immigration and assimilation and a delightful digression into the English obsession with gardening. Black-and-white photographs and drawings, and two lavish four-color inserts add visual appeal throughout. <br><br>Ackroyd’s talent for distilling information and presenting it with novelistic flair shines on every page of ALBION. It is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant and exuberant.</p>

Reviews

Even a writer as popular, prolific and inventive as Ackroyd can concoct a bore. Nevertheless, Albion is likely to succeed on his considerable reputation and the success of his bestselling London: The Biography. Here Ackroyd seeks to define and describe what he sees as distinctive qualities of the English imagination as they have developed since the country's beginnings. Quoting the 17th-century Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, he claims a cultural continuity-"we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again." But the Englishman, as Daniel Defoe remarked, and Ackroyd concedes, remained infinitely adaptable, having already assimilated waves of invasion and conquest-and become "Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman-English." Explaining that "mungrell" mingling in 53 thematic chapters, Ackroyd appropriates nearly every quality in literature and the arts for England (largely ignoring Ireland and downplaying Scotland). He cites love of gardens, worship of trees, cultivation of dream-visionaries, affection for eccentricity, affinity for morbid sensationalism, attraction to understatement, pleasure in alliteration, fondness for cross-dressing, passion for antiquarianism, ease with an empirical temper, relish for detective and ghost stories, penchant for portrait miniatures, creative adaptation of folksong. It is a sentimental stretch. Where London was animated by a brilliant exploitation of anecdote, Albion lacks its verve. Rather, it is armed with a goodly-and defensive-helping of "It has often been said," "it might even be said," "It is no surprise, either, that," and often bogs down in bland thesis and empty persuasion. Yet vastly learned and frequently engaging, it may prove good bedtime reading-a veritable night school. B&w and color illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Following the triumph of London: A Biography (2001), Ackroyd confidently and entertainingly delves into a far more elusive aspect of the English experience, the origins of England's distinctive, widely influential imagination. Albion is an ancient name for the island as well as for the primeval giant who made it his home, a clue to the two primary characteristics Ackroyd discusses in this marvelous synthesis: the deeply rooted connection between the English and their land and a reverence for the past. Ackroyd begins by discussing how trees became sacred symbols of life and continuity, and, as he does with each ensuing subject, whether it's the sea, stones, rain, gardens, music, painting, or ghosts, he presents a cascade of evocative examples, keenly interpreting various artists, composers, and dozens of writers, including Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Austen, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The English imagination is stoked by visions and leavened with wit, Ackroyd avers, forming not a linear progression but, rather, a shining circle that leads back to the "original sources of inspiration," be they Celtic, classical, or Christian. A master extrapolator and wonderfully epigrammatic stylist fluent in many disciplines, Ackroyd has created a key to English creativity past, present, and future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1



The Tree



When William Wordsworth invoked "the ghostly language of the ancient earth" he spoke more, perhaps, than he knew.

The mark or symbol of the hawthorn tree is to be found in the runic alphabet of the ancient British tribes, as if the landscape propelled them into speech. The worship of the forest, and of forest forms, characterised the piety of the Druids in whose rituals the spirits of the oak, the beech and the hawthorn are honoured. According to the texts of the classical historians the centre of the Druidical caste was to be found in Britain, from whose shores the practitioners of magic sailed to the European mainland. The forest worship of the northern and Germanic tribes, who were gradually to conquer Britain from the fifth to the seventh centuries, may derive from the Druids' ministry. That is why Hippolyte Taine, the French critic and historian who in the 1860s completed a capacious history of English literature, hears the first music of England in the fine patter of rain on the oak trees.



The poetry of England is striated with the shade that the ancient trees cast, in a canopy of protection and seclusion. Thus John Lydgate, in the fifteenth-century "Complaint of the Black Knight," remarks of



Every braunche in other knet,

And ful of grene leves set,

That sonne myght there non discende



where the charm of darkness and mystery descends upon the English landscape. In the nineteenth century Tennyson recalls how



Enormous elm-tree boles did stoop and lean

Upon the dusky brushwood underneath

Their broad curved branches . . .



and in that tremulous dusk the trees themselves are images of peacefulness and protection.

In the penultimate chapter of Jane Eyre, before her final awakening, the heroine passes through "the twilight of close ranked trees" like a "forest aisle." "The Knight's Tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer is set in Athens but the funeral pyre of Arcite there is adorned with the trees of England rather than those of ancient Greece--"ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler"--in a refrain which was in turn adopted by Spenser in the first book of The Fairie Queene where "the builder Oake," "the Firre that weepeth still" and "the Birch for shaftes" are among "the trees so straight and hy." For Spenser in the late sixteenth century the trees prompt mythical longings, as if their ancient guardians might still be summoned by the vatic tone of English epic. The hawthorn was the home of fairies, and the hazel offered protection against enchantment; the great oak itself descended into the other world. It is Milton's "monumental Oke." As a child William Blake saw angels inhabiting the trees of Peckham Rye; as a child, too, his disciple, Samuel Palmer, was entranced by the shadows of an elm tree cast by the moon upon an adjacent wall. Wordsworth stood beneath an ash tree in the moonlight and was vouchsafed visions



Of human Forms with superhuman Powers.



The same poet saw among yew trees "Time the Shadow," and wrote other verses upon "The Haunted Tree."

The magical talismans of Puck, in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, are the leaves of the oak, the thorn and the ash which afford the children access to earlier times. As the Roman poet Lucan apostrophised the Druids of the English isle in the first century--"To you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest." In Piers the Plowman, composed in the fourteenth century, the divine edict of a later god ensures that "Beches and brode okes were blowen to the grounde."

These sources fill with vigour and energy the legends of Robin Hood, hiding himself among the trees of Sherwood Forest; he may be descended from the English imp Robin Goodfellow, but he is more akin to the formidable figure of the Green Man. The fable may have begun in 1354 with the incarceration of a "Robin Hood" for the poaching of venison in the forest of Rockingham, but no local or secular origin can account for the power which this green figure among the trees has been granted.

By 1377 the "rymes of Robyn Hood" were as familiar as household tales, and as late as the sixteenth century the local festivals of the Thames and Severn Valleys, and of Devon, were still associated with plays of Robin Hood. It is not necessarily an old, or forgotten, piety. In Women in Love D. H. Lawrence's twentieth-century characters Ursula and Birkin drive among "great old trees." " 'Where are we?' she whispered. 'In Sherwood Forest.' It was evident he knew the place." He knew it spiritually, atavistically. " 'We will stay here,' he said, 'and put out the lights.' "

And then in the darkness they may have seen the Ash Tree of Existence, the Tree of Jesse and the Golden Bough. The Tree of Jesse was "the first design to be integrated in England to fill a large window."1 As part of the mournful decorations upon English tombstones, shields hang from trees. The palm-tree vault in Wells Chapter House, begun c. 1290, endures as a memorial of sacred stone beyond the depredations of rain and wind and frost. In the biblical narrative of the Cursor Mundi, composed in English in the early fourteenth century, there are holy trees which owe more to English folklore than to biblical tradition; a heavenly light shines upon them, and they have an innate virtue which wards off evil and heals sickness. In an old English carol Jesus talks to a tree while still in his mother's womb, and images of the cross in English art are generally those of a lopped tree-trunk. In The Dream of the Rood, a meditation upon the Crucifixion of Christ, the tree speaks:



ic waes aheawen holtes on ende . . .

Rod waes ic araered . . .

eall ic waes mid blode bestemed

"I was cut down, roots on end . . .

I was raised up, as a rood . . .

I was all wet with blood."



Some lines from this Anglo-Saxon tree poem were carved in runes upon the great Ruthwell Cross, one of the English stone crosses which create a sacred topography of the nation. The Ruthwell inscription can be dated to the late seventh century, while in its surviving state the poem is believed to derive from eighth-century Northumbria; yet still the stone speaks, and the tree sighs.

On the territorial charters of Anglo-Saxon kings a hawthorn tree is generally employed as a boundary marker; it becomes the root of time and space, as a measure of continuity and ownership. In The Child that Books Built Francis Spufford remarks that "there was a forest at the beginning of fiction, too. This one spread for ever."2 The tree encloses a communal memory--"beyond the memory of anyone now living," as the medieval rubric was later to express it--and from it derives that sense of place, of literal rootedness, which is one of the great themes of the English imagination.

So in The Mill on the Floss George Eliot describes a country town "which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree." In "The Hollow Tree" John Clare, the nineteenth-century poet who laboured with the land, celebrates the "battered floor" of an anciently hollowed and hallowed ash:



But in our old tree-house rain as it might

Not one drop fell although it rained all night



Constable claimed that he could see Gainsborough "in every hedge and hollow tree"; the remark expresses an identification with the offspring of the earth itself, that local genius or deity to which we are bound and towards which we ineluctably travel. Of Gainsborough's landscapes, of trees and forests in profusion, Constable also wrote: "on looking at them we find tears in our eyes and know not what brought them." Gainsborough himself remarked that there "was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of any beauty . . . that I did not treasure in my memory from earliest years." And what of Constable's own paintings? "The trees," he wrote, ". . . seem to ask me to try and do something like them." An enthusiast once created an enclosure in which were to be planted all the trees of Shakespeare's plays.

The destruction of trees creates dismay and bewilderment among the English poets. When Clare's favourite elm trees were condemned, he explained that "I have been several mornings to bid them farewell." There is an English legend of a dying stag, sobbing when for the last time it enters its own familiar glade; this, too, is part of the genius loci. When Gerard Manley Hopkins watched an ash tree cut down, "there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of this world destroyed any more." "Inscape" is of Anglo-Saxon derivation, from "sceap" meaning creation with a passing obeisance to "instaepe" or threshold. The ash represents a threshold of creation, for Hopkins in the nineteenth century no less than for the ancient priests of Britain. There is, here, a continuity. In sixteenth-century tapestry the antlers of stags resemble the trees upon a hillside, as if all nature were animated by one aspiring spirit; fifteenth-century English mystics saw trees as men walking, a vision recalled by Tolkien in his legend of moving trees or Ents in The Lord of the Rings. "Ents" derives from the Old English word meaning "giants." Tolkien also refers to them as the "shepherds of the trees," thus reintroducing the shepherd as another figure beloved in the English imagination.

It was remarked of Thomas Hardy, in 1883, that he "is never more reverent, more exact, than when he is speaking of forest trees." The tree represents life itself, ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385497725
• ISBN 13: 9780385497725
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 560