Albion - the Origins of the English Imagination [Hardcover]

Nobody is better equipped to write a book about the roots of the English imagination than the award-winning novelist, biographer, poet and critic Peter Ackroyd, and in Albion he has distilled a lifetime's work into a book of monumental proportions. This is a dense, poetic book about the origins of the English literary imagination, stretching from Beowulf through Shakespeare to the novels of Virginia Woolf and the music of Vaughan Williams.

Ackroyd confesses that "there is no certain description" of the English imagination. As a result the structure of this massive, learned book shares affinities with his recent bestselling biography of London. Specific themes and preoccupations are repeatedly weaved through short, sometimes allusive chapters as Ackroyd traces "the conflation of biography, or history, and the novel" across the evolution of "a mixed language comprised of many different elements and a mixed culture comprised of many different races". The result is a rich poetic tapestry that moves from an exploration of the cadences of Old English poetry to the creation of the modern English language in the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe and the great novelists of the 18th century. Ackroyd resists polemical definitions, but repeatedly returns to themes that for him create a quintessentially English imagination. These include a fascination with "the local and the circumstantial", "the English genius for assimilation and adaptation", and the recurrent interest in biography and landscape.

Ackroyd is at his best when establishing poetic connections and continuities between modern and medieval writers, but at times his reflections on the national spirit uncomfortably evoke the conservative nationalist historians of the 19th century. His inclusive vision of what he sees as the English imagination's "placism, as an antidote to racism" is unconvincing, as are his comments on his awkward formulation "femality and fiction". It would have been fascinating to see him develop these ideas through late 20th century transformations in the English imagination, but even without this (and at over 500 pages, the book is weighty enough already), Albion will delight many who regard Ackroyd as one of the most quintessentially English writers of his time. --Jerry Brotton

How does he do it? In the space of a few years we've had accessible interpretations of London and of Dickens. Now Peter Ackroyd is tackling a subject even more broad in scope - the origins of English culture - but with the thoroughness of research and liveliness of style common to all his non-fiction. The main thread of this 500-page work, as he phrases it, is with 'beginnings rather than endings'. However, Ackroyd still manages to make the most curious and playful of connections throughout the ages, whether it be Beowulf's intimidating influence on Dryden, or the Carry On films' debt to medieval mystery plays and their penchant for lines such as 'Com kis myne ars!'

'Albion is an explosion, full of particles whizzing through air-crammed, digressive, learned, knotted' Daily Telegraph --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

This title covers the whole of English cultural history from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, through the centuries, to numerous examples from contemporary times. Explorations include: forgery and plagiarism; ruins and antiquarianism; the English love of miniatures; and drag acts.

Peter Ackroyd follows LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY with a book which is equally original and even more magnificent in scope: it covers the whole of English cultural history from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, through the centuries, to numerous entertaining examples from our own times.

Peter Ackroyd lives in London. He is the author of biographies of Dickens, Blake and Thomas More and of the bestselling London: The biography. A number of his lectures (such as The Englishness of English Literature) and of his novels (such as English Music) have explored the theme of What is Englishness? He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, 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 Prize for Literature. His most recent book is The Collection, selected journalism, reviews, essays and lectures.

When William Wordsworth invoked 'the ghostly language of the ancient earth' he spoke more, perhaps, than he knew. The mark or symbol of the hawthorn tree is to be found in the runic alphabet of the ancient British tribes, as if the landscape propelled them into speech.The worship of the forest, and of forest forms, characterised the piety of the Druids in whose rituals the spirits of the oak, the beech and the hawthorn are honoured. According to the texts of the classical historians the centre of the Druidical caste was to be found in Britain, from whose shores the practitioners of magic sailed to the European mainland. The forest worship of the northern and Germanic tribes, who were gradually to conquer Britain from the fifth to the seventhc enturies, may derive from the Druids' ministry. That is why Hippolyte Taine, the French critic and historian who in the 1860s completed a capacious history of English literature, hears the first music of England in the fine patter of rain on the oak trees.
The poetry of England is striated with the shade that the ancient trees cast, in a canopy of protection and seclusion. Thus John Lydgate, in thefifteenth-century 'Complaint of the Black Knight', remarks of
Every braunche in other knet,
And ful of grene leves set,
That sonne myght there non discende
where the charm of darkness and mystery descends upon the Englishlandscape. In the nineteenth-century Tennyson recalls how
Enormous elm-tree boles did stoop and lean
Upon the dusky brushwood underneath
Their broad curved branches . . .
and in that tremulous dusk the trees themselves are images of peacefulness and protection.
In the penultimate chapter of Jane Eyre, before her final awakening, the heroine passes through 'the twilight of close ranked trees' like a 'forest aisle'. 'The Knight's Tale' of Geoffrey Chaucer is set in Athens but the funeral pyre of Arcite there is adorned with the trees of England rather than those of ancient Greece - 'ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler' - in a refrain which was in turn adopted by Spenser in the first book of The Fairie Queene where 'the builder Oake', 'the Firre that weepeth still' and 'the Birch for shaftes' are among 'the trees so straightand hy'. For Spenser in the late sixteenth century the trees prompt mythical longings, as if their ancient guardians might still besummoned by the vatic tone of English epic. The hawthorn was the home of fairies, and the hazel offered protection against enchantment; the great oak itself descended into the other world. It is Milton's 'monumental Oke'. As a child William Blake saw angels inhabiting thetrees of Peckham Rye; as a child, too, his disciple, Samuel Palmer, was entranced by the shadows of an elm tree cast by the moon upon an adjacent wall. Wordsworth stood beneath an ash tree in the moonlightand was vouchsafed visions
Of human Forms with superhuman Powers.
The same poet saw among yew trees 'Time the Shadow', and wroteother verses upon 'The Haunted Tree'.
The magical talismans of Puck, in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, are the leaves of the oak, the thorn and the ash which afford the children access to earlier times. As the Roman poet, Lucan, apostrophised the Druids of the English isle in the first century - 'To you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest.'In Piers the Plowman, composed in the fourteenth century, the divineedict of a later god ensures that 'Beches and brode okes were blowen to the grounde'.
These sources fill with vigour and energy the legends of Robin Hood, hiding himself among the trees of Sherwood Forest; he may bedescended from the English imp, Robin Goodfellow, but he is moreakin to the formidable figure of the Green Man. The fable may have begun in 1354 with the incarceration of a 'Robin Hood' for the poaching of venison in the forest of Rockingham, but no local orsecular origin can account for the power which this green figure amongthe trees has been granted.
By 1377 the 'rymes of Robyn Hood' were as familiar as household tales, and as late as the sixteenth century the local festivals of the Thames and Severn Valleys, and of Devon, were still associated with plays of Robin Hood. It is not necessarily an old, or forgotten, piety. In Women in Love D. H. Lawrence's twentieth-century characters, Ursulaand Birkin, drive among 'great old trees'. '"Where are we?" shewhispered. "In Sherwood Forest." It was evident he knew the place.'He knew it spiritually, atavistically. ' "We will stay here", he said, "and put out the lights."'
And then in the darkness they may have seen the Ash Tree of Existence, the Tree of Jesse and the Golden Bough. The Tree of Jessewas 'the first design to be integrated in England to fill a large window'. As part of the mournful decorations upon English tombstones, shields hang from trees. The palm-tree vault in Wells Chapter House, begunc.1290, endures as a memorial of sacred stone beyond the depredations of rain and wind and frost. In the biblical narrative of the Cursor Mundi, composed in English in the early fourteenth century, there are holy trees which owe more to English folklore than to biblical tradition; a heavenly light shines upon them, and they have an innate virtue which wards off evil and heals sickness. In an old English carol Jesus talks to a tree while still in his mother's womb, and images of the cross in English art are generally those of a lopped tree-trunk. In The Dream of the Rood, a meditation upon the crucifixion of Christ, the tree speaks:
ic waes aheawen holtes on ende . . .
Rod waes ic araered . . .
eall ic waes mid blode bestemed
'I was cut down, roots on end . . .
I was raised up, as a rood . . .
I was all wet with blood.'