Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Illustrations Chronology INTRODUCTION - Albion Patterns of Eternity CHAPTER - The Tree CHAPTER - The Radiates Old English CHAPTER - Listen! CHAPTER - Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? CHAPTER - A Rare and Singular Bede CHAPTER - The Song of the Past CHAPTER - The Lives of Others CHAPTER - A Land of Dreams CHAPTER - A Note on English Melancholy CHAPTER 10 - The Rolling Hills CHAPTER 11 - It Rained All Night CHAPTER 12 - The Prose of the World CHAPTER 13 - The First Initials CHAPTER 14 - Anglo-Saxon Attitudes Middle English CHAPTER 15 - The Alteration CHAPTER 16 - He Is Not Dead The Piety of England CHAPTER 17 - Faith of Our Fathers CHAPTER 18 - Old Stone CHAPTER 19 - Part of the Territory The Poetry of England CHAPTER 20 - A Song and a Dance CHAPTER 21 - Fathers and Sons CHAPTER 22 - The Foolish Giant Solitaries and Recusants CHAPTER 23 - The Mysterious Voice CHAPTER 24 - The Inheritance Women and Silence CHAPTER 25 - The Female Religion A Renaissance CHAPTER 26 - But Newly Translated CHAPTER 27 - The Italian Connection Mungrell Tendencies CHAPTER 28 - A Short History of Shakespeare CHAPTER 29 - And Now for Streaky Bacon Antiquarianism and English History CHAPTER 30 - Among the Ruins CHAPTER 31 - The Conservative Tendency CHAPTER 32 - A Short History Lesson In the English Tradition CHAPTER 33 - The Song of the Sea CHAPTER 34 - A Brief Excursion CHAPTER 35 - A Miniature CHAPTER 36 - I Saw You, Missis An English Bible CHAPTER 37 - In the Beginning Cockney Visionaries CHAPTER 38 - London Calling A Wealth of Characters CHAPTER 39 - An Essay on the Essay CHAPTER 40 - The Hogarthian Moment CHAPTER 41 - Some Eminent Novelists CHAPTER 42 - A Character Study CHAPTER 43 - The Fine Art of Biography Women and Anger CHAPTER 44 - Femality and Fiction Melodrama CHAPTER 45 - Blood and Gore CHAPTER 46 - Ghosts Philosophy, Mockery and Learning CHAPTER 47 - Practice Makes Perfect CHAPTER 48 - Prolix and Prolific CHAPTER 49 - Some More Dunces Green England CHAPTER 50 - The Secret Garden Looking Backwards CHAPTER 51 - Forging a Language CHAPTER 52 - The Romantic Fallacy CHAPTER 53 - English Music EPILOGUE - The Territorial Imperative Notes Acknowledgments Bibliography About the Author Also by Peter Ackroyd Copyright Page For Murrough O’Brien Illustrations “Trees V: Spreading Branches,” 1979, by Henry Moore (Tate, London 2002) Twelfth-century spiral markings, church of St Laurence Pittington, County Durham (Peter Burton and Harland Walshaw) Ornamental page with the beginning of the Gospel according to John, from the Lindisfarne Gospels (AKG/British Library) Photograph of Charles Dickens dreaming, 1861, by John and Charles Watkins (National Portrait Gallery, London) Stone portrait of John Donne in his shroud, St Paul’s Cathedral, London (London UK/Bridgeman Art Library) Ornamental page with monogram from the Lindisfarne Gospels (AKG/British Library) “Sir Bedivere throws the sword Excalibur into the water.” Manuscript illumination, early fourteenth century (AKG/British Library) Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII (National Portrait Gallery, London, loan, courtesy of private collection) Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dressed as Queen Guinevere and King Arthur, at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842, by Edwin Landseer (from the Royal Collection by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen) “Figure of Guinevere,” circa 1858, by William Morris (Tate, London 2002) “Guenever”: illustration to the Arthurian legend, by David Jones (Tate, London 2002) “Babooneries”: photographs by Peter Burton/Harland Walshaw and a selection of details from the Luttrell Psalter, c 1340 (AKG/British Library) The Chapter House of Wells Cathedral (Peter Burton and Harland Walshaw) “Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury,” by William Blake, detail (Glasgow Museums, Stirling Maxwell Collection) “Longways Dance” by Thomas Rowlandson (Tate, London 2002) 10 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism, pp 300 and 303 11 J O Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth: Poems, Volume One 12 Thurley, p 138 13 Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age, pp 11 and 13 53 ENGLISH MUSIC A L Bacharach (ed.), British Music of Our Time, p 52 Fuller Maitland in The Times, quoted in Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p 93 R Palmer (ed.), Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams, p ix John Caldwell (ed.), The Oxford History of English Music, Volume 1, p 63 ibid., p 131 ibid., p 135 ibid., p 191 ibid., p 484 ibid., p 178 10 ibid., Volume 2, p 15 11 Kennedy, p 131 12 ibid., p 137 13 ibid., p 169 14 ibid., p 170 15 ibid., p 347 16 J Day, Englishness in Music, p 18 17 ibid., p 25 18 Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams, p 19 Kennedy, p 20 C Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan, p 160 21 ibid., p 150 22 Paul Holmes, Vaughan Williams, p 57 23 Kennedy, p 370 24 Palmer, p 160 25 ibid., p 199 26 ibid., p 202 27 Caldwell (ed.), Volume 1, p 31 28 ibid., Volume 2, p 284 29 Heffer, p 37 30 Kennedy, p 157 31 ibid 32 ibid., p 302 33 Kennedy, p 211 34 Caldwell (ed.), Volume 1, p 22 35 ibid., p 120 36 Day, pp 51 and 158 Acknowledgments Cover: music-hall artist (reproduced by courtesy Hulton/Archive); Mr Monks from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens published by B Pollock, from Dickens House Museum, London; needlework picture embroidered in silk from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Monk from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer from the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California; child up a tree picking fruit from the Luttrell Psalter, Add 42130 f.196v., from the British Library, London Bibliography Auerbach, Erna, Tudor Artists (London: Athlone Press, 1954) Austen, Jane, Persuasion, ed D W Harding (London: Penguin, 1965) Axton, Richard, “Church Drama and Popular Drama,” in Medieval Literature, ed Boris Ford, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature I (London: Penguin, 1983) Ayer, A J., Logical Positivism in Perspective: Essays on Language, Truth and Logic, ed Barry Gower (London: Croom Helm, 1987) Bacharach, A L (ed.), British Music of Our Time (London: Penguin, 1946) Bain, Roly, “Clowns and Augustes,” in Victorian Britain , ed 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(London: British Academy, 1968) PETER ACKROYD Albion 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 Also by Peter Ackroyd FICTION The Great Fire of London The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light English Music The House of Doctor Dee Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America The Plato Papers NONFICTION Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession London: The Biography BIOGRAPHY Ezra Pound and His World T S Eliot Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More POETRY Ouch! The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems CRITICISM Notes for a New Culture The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures edited by Thomas Wright FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2004 Copyright © 2002 by Peter Ackroyd Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A Talese / Doubleday edition as follows: Ackroyd, Peter, 1949– Albion: the origins of the English imagination / Peter Ackroyd.—1st U.S ed p cm Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, c2002 Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index England—Civilization National characteristics, English English literature—History and criticism Arts, English I Title DA110 A26 2003 942—dc21 2002043571 www.anchorbooks.com www.randomhouse.com eISBN: 978-0-307-42465-5 v3.0 ... composer Arc = architect Caedmon (active 670– 80) W Bede (c 673–735) W Cynewulf (active c 790–8 10) W King Alfred (c 848–99) W Aelfric (active c 955–10 10) W Wulfstan (d 1023) W Geoffrey of Monmouth... Thomas Browne (1605–82) W John Milton (1608–74) W Peter Lely (1618– 80) A Andrew Marvell (1621–78) W John Bunyan (1628–88) W John Dryden (1631–17 00) W John Locke (1632–1704) W Christopher Wren (1632–1723)... (1812– 70) W Robert Browning (1812–89) W William Butterfield (1814–19 00) Arc Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) W George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) A Emily Brontë (1818–48) W George Eliot (1819– 80) W John