The English Nation-HomeTitles published between 1904 and 1911:

•The British Home of Today

•The English House

•The Modern English House

•The English Home

•The Growth of the English House

•English House Design: A Review

1. The island

2. The castle

3. The ruined cottage

Three tropes of the English nation-home:

The English nation-home as island

“This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,This other Eden, demi-paradise,This fortress built by Nature for herselfAgainst infection and the hand of war,This happy breed of men, this little world,This precious stone set in the silver sea,Which serves it in the office of a wall,Or as a moat defensive to a house,Against the envy of less happier lands,This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

-- Shakespeare, Richard II

The English nation-home as island

“Britain is possessed of two geographical qualities, complementary rather than antagonistic: insularity and universality . . . Ordered liberty, fitted to the complex conditions of modern civilization, needed centuries of slow experimental growth, and was naturally cradled in a land insulated yet not isolated”

-- Halford Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902)

The English nation-home as an enclosed, defensible space

Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland

Offa’s Dyke, Wales

“An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

“Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.

‘My own doing,’ said Wemmick. ‘Looks pretty; don’t it?”

I highly commended it. I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.

‘That’s a real flagstaff, you see,’ said Wemmick, ‘and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up—so—and cut off the communication.’”

-- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The English nation-home as a “ruined

cottage”

And thither come at length, beneath a shadeOf clustering elms that sprang from the same rootI found a ruined house, four naked wallsThat stared upon each other.

-- Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage”

The English nation-home as a “ruined

cottage”

“One might say that the lesson [Wordsworth’s] poems convey is that metropolitan culture . . . is now the enemy of Englishness, primarily because the city induces a forgetfulness of precisely the skill the poems teach—the skill of reading and valuing England’s memorial places.”

-- Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity