Search results for ""Englishness" "Continent" "Dickens" "Thackeray" "Gaskell""

Victorian Enghlishness and the Continent

2009

Dickens, Barrett Browning, Thackeray and Gaskell are all writers who examined Englishness in relation to the Continent (France, Germany and Italy. They all started from a nostalgia for a golden age, lost in England, but which they believed still persisted in those countries. This allowed them to point out the faults of the English ( feeling of superiority, hypocrisy), and their virtues (family feeling, hard work). The variations in these oppositions all tend to underline what could be seen as the true marker of Englishness, an openness to what is positive in other culture and a capacity to integrate what others have to offer whilst remaining themselves.