From Chaucer to Channel Four

‘Everything of value in our spiritual and cultural life springs from our soil.’ Thus spake Vaughan Williams; and Peter Ackroyd has undertaken a detailed proof of that proposition in this exploration of the origins of the English imagination. He has constructed a vast genealogical table, decorated with tiny marginalia, to identify the begetters of our national artistic consciousness, and to trace their lineage.

We English are the sum of countless cultural influences drawn from across our history. Ackroyd delves into the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and there identifies the four- beat alliterative line ‘in an insistent rhythm which will affect the whole subsequent movement of English poetry’. Over time the English have maintained their affection for those Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, using them ‘to emphasise practicality and individuality rather than the vapid learning traced with polysyllables’. Ernest Barker, commenting on our national character in the 1920s, believed the English language itself corroborated ‘a passion for individuality’ hinting at our inheritance of ‘some common substance of thought from some dim and distant past’.