David Trotter

‘It angers me to pass a grocer’s shop,’ declares the impeccably fogeyish hero of Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), ‘and see in the window a display of foreign butter. This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the prospects of England. The deterioration of English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people.’ Eighty years on, the prospects of England continue to be gloomed over. The evidence of deterioration mounts: not just butter now, but apples, cars, furniture. As for the moral state of the people ‘driving’ the cars and beating each other over the head with bits of the furniture … don’t even ask. Ryecroft’s hatred of a world in which an honest chap can no longer secure an ‘honest chop’ still plays its part in the politics of decline.

At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time

There is a poignant moment in the recent New Left Books volume of interviews with Raymond Williams when he is congratulated on the ‘combativity’ of his writings. Poignant because the neologism, however barbarous, answers to a real scarcity: the scarcity, in our cultural repertoire, of sustained polemical address: Not that our literary pages don’t witness occasional outbreaks of revenger’s tragedy. Indeed, most literary editors seem to keep at least one professional malcontent on the payroll, in case the general air of despondent calm becomes too oppressive (or perhaps just to make sure of getting their retaliation in first). But the ‘combativity’ of such stalwarts rarely extends beyond sporadic local skirmishing, and their bloodletting often seems hugely gratuitous. For our intellectual habits include attentiveness, scruple and a kind of anorexic wit: but not polemic.