Day and Robb

 Lichfield was a great centre of what we now call the Midlands Enlightenment (I'd prefer to call it Mercian myself). Erasmus Darwin was the focus, but there were other luminaries in town, none of them stranger, or more besotted with Ideas – specifically those of Rousseau – than Thomas Day. The link below will take you to a piece I wrote about him for Engelsberg Ideas –

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-madness-in-rousseaus-method/

And while we're at it, I also have a review of Graham Robb's The Discovery of Britain in this month's Literary Review, Britain's finest literary magazine. Here it is in its original form, slightly different from the printed version –

‘Given a certain lapse of time,’ writes Graham Robb in this exhilarating journey through British history, ‘all history is wrong, including the histories which correct the erroneous histories.’ This is a healthy attitude for a historian to have, and sits well with the kind of open, four-dimensional history that is Robb’s speciality, a history that makes room for ‘the surprising contractions, dilations and reversals of time’ – and, indeed, of space: as Robb points out, there has been a long tradition of overestimating the size of this ‘spindly, sea-wracked island’ with its improbable shape. In fact the island is so small that, in ideal conditions, thirteen pairs of eyes could see the whole of it from thirteen high points, and, wherever you are, the sea is never more than seventy miles away.
   Robb typically explores his terrain on two wheels (as in his classic The Discovery of France), and this history begins with the author and his wife returning from a French cycling expedition in 2018 to find the island of Britain effectively cut in half as a result of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ali. Later that day, Robb conceives the idea of ‘a social, geographical and political history of the British Isles based on the evidence of natives, nomads, invaders and immigrants, the mighty and the impotent, the blindingly famous and the utterly obscure. The narrator would refer to his own self-inflicted or unavoidable experiences as a child and young adult…’ He does indeed, and these scenes from his own life enliven and illuminate the narrative very effectively, not least because he spent his early years in such a variety of interesting locations with unsuspected historical depths, from the Scottish borders to the English midlands. In the village of Powick in Worcestershire, where he spent some of his early years, he found himself in a ‘time-muddled landscape’ where the present coexisted with strange remnants of a deeper past and ‘every weekday morning, an assortment of rural types left the pages of Anglo-Saxon and medieval history and processed along the road’. As a boy, he and his pals built impenetrable dens in a huge, ancient hedge bank, which he later discovered was just a stone’s throw from a secret nuclear bunker.
   As its subtitle suggests, The Discovery of Britain takes in a vast sweep of time, though the focus is of course on the history of Britain – little more than thirty lifetimes, as Robb points out (and a little over eighty lifetimes would take us all the way back to the Neolithic). As you would expect of the author of The Ancient Paths, his revelatory account of Celtic mapping and land surveying, Robb is keen to reclaim pre-Roman British civilisation from the calumnies of Roman history.  He is also keen at every point to unpick the banner headlines of history and show that, again and again, ‘history fails to confirm the fiction’. He demonstrates that even such things as the Norman conquest and the Saxon invasions were far from straightforward. Nor was the English Civil War as divisive as is generally thought: in most of England, away from such hotspots as Lancashire, ‘neutralism was the norm’. Likewise, only a tiny minority of parliamentarians voted for the king’s execution, and very few found it a cause for celebration. The English have always preferred peace and that ‘mysteriously efficient  process’ known as ‘muddling through’. The agrarian revolution undeniably happened, but resistance and ‘active ignorance’ – sticking to the old ways – survived all improvements, the past, as ever, not swept away but lingering to coexist with the present. As the landscape historian W.G. Hoskins pointed out, ‘Everything is older than we think’ – and, of course, more complex.
   The Discovery of Britain is at once broadly chronological and thematic, the author devoting chapters to such subjects as the English shire system, the coming of Christianity (and its peaceful coexistence with paganism), the development of the English language, the education system (or, for a long time, lack of system), the growth of London, the development of transport and the ‘social revolution’ of the interwar years, but it is no dry chronicle, being at various points intertwined with scenes from the life of the author and his family: Robb’s hitch-hiking experiences and glimpses of his early love life, memories of various sub-criminal activities, of being an undergraduate (and fellow) at Oxford, and of a period working, or rather skiving, for the London Borough of Lambeth. His parents’ wartime experiences are particularly interesting, his mother working as a nurse looking after prisoners of war in Edinburgh castle, his father working with the ARP in bomb-ravaged Hull. It is only as the story draws nearer to the present that things become less interesting; a history that has flowed along a tumultuous, meandering, never predictable course is canalised into something narrower, straighter and more familiar. Perhaps this was inevitable, but Robb’s account of the past few decades seems almost sketchy, and oddly selective. He pays due attention to sex abuse scandals in the church but makes no mention of the ‘grooming gangs’ in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere. Similarly, he entirely ignores the dramatic demographic changes of recent decades; for him the story of immigration seems to end some time back in the 1970s. This is a shame, but it doesn’t alter the fact that overall this is a brilliantly entertaining, learned and illuminating history, a worthy companion to The Discovery of France.