The Reverend Dr James Woodward

The Revd Dr James W Woodward

Books reviewed by James Woodward

Holiday Books 2003

After the wonderful activity and glorious sunshine of the Heritage Weekend I escaped for my annual holiday to Wales. The peace and tranquillity of Mid-Wales offered some wonderful space to catch up on some sleep and some reading. Here are some of my favourite holiday reads.

The Victorians by A.N.Wilson
A.N.Wilson is an extraordinary writer who combines attention to detail with humour. In The Victorians (Hutchinson 2002) he provides a panoramic history of the Victorians. He tackles the personalities, obsessions and follies of an age with real insight and skill. What is so good about his writing is that he has a feeling for the time and the place. Parts of society come to life, whether he is describing the undoubted love of Victoria for Prince Albert or the Chartists being photographed congregating on Kennington Green. He uses writers and artists such as Dickens, Kipling and Beardsley to depict the cross-currents in the cities, country and empire as urban workers, rural squires, aristocrats, politicians and industrialists struggle to resist or to adapt to the enormous consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

Wilson isn't reluctant to let his own views and opinions shine through the text. He imagines himself in Victorian England as a country parson with the means and time to be able to have a leisured and learned life. From a religious and theological perspective we see how religious belief was profoundly shaken by the work of Darwin and how Darwin's work became a phenomenon from the 1860s.

He describes at length the social injustices of the Industrial Revolution and it is shocking to read some of the more disturbing aspects of the work and activity of the British Empire.

This isn't a book for the faint-hearted - it is 724 pages (not possible to read held in one hand with a glass of wine in the other) but it is nonetheless well worth the effort!

Red Queen: the authorised biography
of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins
Readers of Temple Matters will now be familiar with my enthusiasm and interest in modern political biography. One of my political heroines is Barbara Castle and so it was a delight to read a new biography of her by an accomplished historian and journalist. Red Queen: the authorised biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins (Macmillan 2003) is an insightful and probing look at this most intriguing of politicians. Until the arrival on the political stage of Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Castle was the most vivid, the most successful and the most controversial woman in British politics. Everyone had an opinion about her, whether they thought she was a dangerous subversive or a national heroine. A Labour activist from her childhood, she became active in party politics in her early twenties, whilst at the same time breaking into political journalism.

Thirty years later she was the unexpected success of Harold Wilson's first administration, rising from a junior position to the inner cabinet in less than five years. But her radicalism, her flamboyant style and ultimately, perhaps, her gender caught up with her and she was frozen out. Since her death at the age of 91, she has been rightly regarded as a woman who could have achieved even greater power, had the boys' club cabal running the Labour party not prevented her from doing so.

Her uncompromising commitment to Labour's traditional values was, until the very end, a sharp contrast to the government of Tony Blair and New Labour. This is one of my best reads of the year - a portrait of a truly remarkable woman and an inside account of what it was like for a woman in twentieth century British politics and public life.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequal Self by Claire Tomalin
I must be one of the last people to have read Claire Tomalin's award winning biography of Samuel Pepys (Samuel Pepys: The Unequal Self). Tomalin establishes a unique empathy with Pepys. She finds her subject a man who is "both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet".

Pepys wrote his diary throughout the 1660s, "a period as intellectually thrilling as it was dangerous and bloody", and Tomalin's book vividly brings to life the tumultuous world of seventeenth-century London, where Pepys lived most of his life. His life spanned the execution of one king and the restoration of another and the book recreates both Pepys' public and private lives. From his early days in London and then in Cambridge, Tomalin unfolds the story of how this man rises through the bureaucracy of the restored king, Charles II to his position as energetic reformer of the Navy and successful husband to his vivacious, mercurial wife Elizabeth. But the book also deals with Pepys' personal tragedies, his struggle to secure patronage as a commoner, his frank and hilarious extra-marital exploits and the cataclysmic fire of London in 1666. This is really a wonderful book and tells of quite an extraordinary man who found the energy and commitment to create a new literary form, while also coming across as a generous, likeable, flawed human being. Tomalin's admiration for her subject is infectious - you'll enjoy this read.

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd
And finally to another prolific writer. Peter Ackroyd argues that immigration - of people, ideas, styles - is the key to Englishness in this survey Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Chatto and Windus 2003).

The subject of the book is ambitious - the roots of the English Imagination, and it takes Ackroyd on a journey from the country's earliest pagan roots - from Beowulf to Blake, from the Druids to David Hockney : what makes the English dream like no other people on earth?

He begins with the image of a tree, as revered by the Druids, and watches it growing through the true English culture. Other national emblems follow: stone crosses, rolling hills, illuminated manuscripts, breaking waves, sleeping giants. The message is one of continuity; the ruling spirit persists through time and circumstance.

Ackroyd sounds a worryingly xenophobic note when he reminds us that "no other European nation has kept its boundaries intact over so many centuries", as though unbreachability might be the clue to our uniqueness. In fact, his conclusion is almost the opposite.

It isn't our resistance to foreign influences that makes us English, he argues, but our ability to assimilate them: "Englishness is the principle of appropriation". We are a mongrel nation - highbred, heterogeneous, adaptive, accumulative, elective. Forget blood or genes, national traits come with the territory. The common ground we have is the ground itself, placism, not racism, should be the slogan. Ackroyd goes on and unfolds this subject with imagination and insight. In temperament, we English tend to be melancholy (perhaps because of the damp climate). When we express ourselves we prefer understatement, irony and self-deprecation. Our humour is bawdy and farcical. We are pragmatists, empirical, distrustful of theory. The local and the circumstantial move us, but not the universal or high -flown. We are good at portrait painting and biography. We love our gardens. Shakespeare is our greatest writer. No surprises there!

More original is the emphasis on our spirituality. England is a land of ghosts, Ackroyd says, and rather than condemn our spirit of antiquarianism as unhealthy (all that poking about in ruins), he sees it as radical, a way of reconnecting with pristine energies.

Ackroyd goes on : despite our practicality, we are also a nation of dreamers ("English is the language of vision") with a tradition not only of seers, but of fairies and elves. Perhaps it is the Celtic influence, he suggests, or the foggy climate, or being an island. Whatever the source of our visions - they are important to Ackroyd - and proof that the English imagination, so often caricatured as plodding, is imaginative.

I could go on with a whole range of illuminating examples that Ackroyd provides, and this book really has broadened and developed a much deeper sense of the English and Englishness. Ackroyd says something vitally important about England- that it relies upon constant immigration, of people or ideas or styles, in order to survive. In doing so he restores to the word English an inclusiveness it hasn't had for years. This makes this book political and a very radical message for the Church which seems to be failing in its desire to be inclusive and imaginative in thought and practice. Again, a demanding read that will reap benefits during these dark nights of autumn.

James Woodward