AS A research methodology, it would not pass muster nowadays; but, in the early 19th century, it was by counting the empty pews in rural churches that William Cobbett became convinced of the threat of depopulation in England.
Everywhere he looked, Cobbett saw the end of the England that he loved, its land cultivated happily and communally. That all came to an end with land enclosure; the capitalist ideas of Scotsmen such as Adam Smith; and “the Thing” — a term that he appropriated from the book of Joshua to encapsulate all the evils of modernity.
Cobbett was the subject of Patrick Wright’s The English Fix (Radio 4, Monday of last week), a three-episode series that explores notions of Englishness from times past. Needless to say, this was all couched in terms of our modern, Brexit-dominated politics.
But Cobbett is a big enough character to carry a programme on his own. He was a polemicist who could get dewy-eyed over an old lady who had never in her life travelled more than two miles from her home, but was at the same time a writer of broadsheets whose impact, in the words of William Hazlitt, was that of “a street seller selling pancakes hot off the griddle”.
Cobbett’s was a nationalism that was both communitarian and chauvinist. His anti-Semitism should perhaps come as no surprise but for its virulence; and yet, at the same time, he is not an isolationist Little Englander. In short, nobody in our current politics would find Cobbett ingratiating company.
One element of Englishness which seems never to change is our admiration for heroic failure. In Joe Queenan’s Archive on 4: A brief history of . . . failure (Saturday) it was we, the Brits, who won the prize for losing so gloriously and then celebrating the loss. In support of his caricature, Queenan laid his hands on a range of material from the BBC vaults, from Sir Charles Wright’s account of the discovery of Captain Scott’s failed Antarctic mission to John Sergeant’s catastrophe on Strictly Come Dancing.
To the American Queenan, it is preposterous that we celebrate David Livingstone, despite his abject failure to discover the source of the Nile, and yet have almost forgotten the name of the man who actually got it right, John Hanning Speke. Is it, as the academic historian Edith Hall suggested, that all this emphasis on the glory of failure is a propaganda ploy to encourage young men to get themselves killed? “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est” is easier to tell when the national psyche swells at the thought of the Light Brigade.
There are some failures that no amount of propaganda can reinvent; and the museum to Mao Zedong described by Colin Thubron in The Essay: Strange beds (Radio 3, Monday of last week), is now mostly derelict. Even in Mao’s heartland, the peasant farmers realised that the Great Leap Forward was a lie; and Thubron’s elegiac account of his visit captured the sense of an environment still exorcising the failures of recent history.