Page 36 - History 2020

unreconciled. England was not to be recreated as Howard hoped; yet he remains one

of the more interesting and unsung heroes of the cultural movement of the rural
idyll, of England as a garden.

Martin Wiener: explaining the Great Escape
American historian Martin Wiener published English Culture and the Decline of the
Industrial Spirit in 1981. This ground-breaking book is a work of two halves. The first
part describes how Victorian Britain was “a nation, or at least an elite, at war with
itself.” This was a cultural war; but as he argues, modern experts on economic

development who have studied countries such as Japan and India who have
modernised and industrialised along the lines pioneered by Victorian Britain, find
that cultural factors are highly significant,

The culture war was between two conflicting visions of Britain: as “the workshop of
the world” (Disraeli’s phrase) and “England as a garden” (Morris’ phrase, later
echoed by Rudyard Kipling). How ironic, says Wiener, that the nation whose gift to

the world was the Industrial Revolution, should have taken such a negative view of
industry from the earliest stages. Wiener suggests two explanations. First, he argues
that aristocratic values “captured” the British industrial elite. Britain’s aristocracy was
more open than elsewhere. The rising industrial middle class did not elbow it aside as
Marx predicted. Instead, it reached an accommodation. But in the process, they
allowed themselves to be “conquered” by aristocratic values. They aspired to
become country gentlemen and bought country houses and estates. They adopted
aristocratic leisure pursuits. They abandoned the bourgeois inventiveness and cut-

and-thrust competitiveness that had made them, or their fathers, rich. They turned
their backs on the industrial world that had made them. They may have been the
creators of the modern world, but they did not see this as a matter of pride or
celebration. On the other side, many aristocrats invested in capitalist enterprises
such as mining on their estates and married their children to those of wealthy
industrialists. The outcome was a mixed elite, who turned their back on the culture of

industrialism.

The second part of Wiener’s explanation is about the speed of change experienced
by the Victorians. They turned to the certainties of medieval history coupled with the
changelessness of the countryside as a psychic refuge in an age of unprecedented
change. Even as they were creating the modern world, the Victorians sought solace in
Merrie England and the garden.

Wiener extends his interpretation into modern times. He argues that it explains

Britain’s progressive economic decline. Historians usually put this down to our