Page 37 - History 2020

relative decline as later-arriving industrial rivals like Germany and the USA, (later

Japan and China) overtook us and toppled us from our global economic dominance.
However, Wiener points to talk of the “British disease” of the 1960’s and 70’s, and
attributes our inefficiency and poor performance to a managerial elite who had long
lost “the industrial spirit”. Mrs Thatcher was said to quite like this explanation. As a
school teacher at the time, this book was recommended to us as part of her
campaign to develop enterprise in the curriculum, develop links with industry and
run “industry days”, all of which I duly did my best to do. Sadly, the fashion wind
blew, and in came the inspection-led, league-table-obsessed cramming that I was

happy to retire from. This extension of Wiener’s thesis is more controversial. Some
historians accuse him of “declinism”, that is exaggerating the extent of Britain’s
decline after 1945. Sone deny it altogether, though this is also controversial. Maybe
this is a debate we should include as part of next year’s history.

England as a garden: summing up
There are two fairly obvious explanations for the massive cultural appeal of the

medieval during Victorian times. First, as we noted above, as a psychic security
blanket to help people cope with the unprecedentedly rapid and profound changes
of industrialisation. Second, the middle ages, as well as being pleasantly rural, were
also deeply hierarchical. Authority and tradition ruled the day. Monarchy and
aristocracy ruled the state. No sane Victorian seriously contemplated trying to turn
the clock back to 1400, but the profound changes of the era threatened radical
political and social changes; democracy, long denied, was beginning to stir. The
workers were finding their feet. An insecure and rattled Victorian elite could hardly

be blamed for seeing in medievalism a welcome cultural fashion which they were
only too happy to promote.

This last interpretation would be more convincing if we could find evidence that the
Victorian elite was feeling insecure. Surprisingly, as we’ll see in forthcoming sessions,
this is precisely what we do find. He elite was fearful of the threat of democracy,

anxious about the British Empire, and even worried that Victorian society itself was,
to quote one of the greatest Prime Ministers of the century, facing “disintegration”.

To sum up “England as a garden” contains many contradictions and paradoxes.
Looking back over his life in 1894, William Morris wrote, “Apart from the desire to
produce beautiful things, the leading part of my life has been and is hatred of modern
civilisation.” This was not the consensus of the Victorians as a whole, but it was the
firmly held view of a significant, and often overlooked, strand in its culture.