Over two million copies circulate the country\u2019s bookshelves. It has been voted as the book \u201cmost representative of the nation\u201d. It\u2019s been namechecked by the King, mentioned in Parliament, and referenced in speeches about the role of the BBC. Even now, despite belonging to an entirely different era, seems to still be selling well. No, not Shakespeare, Dickens nor even Orwell \u2014 but Bill Bryson\u2019s Notes from A Small Island, with the author perhaps trumping all three in having once been described in The Guardian as \u201cprobably a great deal more British than most of the British\u201d.<\/p>\n
Where does the mystique come from? No country has ever allowed the journey of an American traveller to so decisively articulate its soul, not least a softly spoken Iowan with a penchant for silly place names. The mid-Nineties, as Alwyn Turner notes in A Classless Society, showed no signs of a Bryson lurking on the horizon. This, after all, was an age seemingly desperate to escape a cloying parochialism and rediscover itself in time for the new century. \u201cJohn Major hankers after a Darling Buds of May Britain circa 1955,\u201d lamented a Times leader a year before Bryson\u2019s travelogue, \u201cits relevance to the increasingly nasty and brutish world that so many of today\u2019s Britain endure is something of a mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two decades on, the reverse seemed to have happened. For if it seemed like we were edging towards Cool Britannia and Blair\u2019s \u201cNew Britain\u201d, the decade\u2019s most memorable speech ended up being Major\u2019s evocation of thick-set insularity, with its \u201cwarm beer\u2026 and old maids bicycling to communion\u201d. Starmer\u2019s recent party conference speech offered his own version of this collective reverie, with his \u201chalf-time oranges\u201d and fence painting. Yet the Prime Minister could barely compete with Bryson\u2019s more enduring take on Major\u2019s whimsy. For it is his formula of curmudgeonly humour and nostalgia that has come to set the terms of the nation\u2019s search for itself over the recent decades.<\/p>\n
Our literary travelogues are an incongruous paradox: both tomes of national reckoning and overindulged almanacs stuffed with historical curios and serendipitous encounters. H.V. Morton\u2019s In Search of England is a triumph of the genre, a book that wavers between religious experience and the triteness of a National Trust leaflet. J.B. Priestley, another inspiration for Bryson, went off again 10 years after Morton in the midst of the Great Depression with his motorcar and driver, at a time when the National Government feared communist insurrection. He discovered three Englands which both inform and overshadow Notes From A Small Island, the synthesis of which, to this day, no traveller \u2014 not even Bryson \u2014 seems able to truly comprehend.<\/p>\n
The first of these Englands entranced Bryson with the eternal mystery of parish spires, hedgerows and village eccentrics. The second, he found tricky and drab: the towns and cities, their \u201cleft behinds\u201d that even in the Thirties, like now, seemed lost in the shadows of the 19th century. But it was that last England that irked Priestley and indeed Bryson the most. In 1933, it represented the burgeoning ersatz of the American century: an unfamiliar, seemingly impenetrable world of suburbs, modernist experiments and individuals set free from the grasp of both provincial and industrial England. It was a place that Priestley anxiously regarded as belonging \u201cfar more to the age itself than this particular island\u201d.<\/p>\n
But today there\u2019s a new third England, one which looms over the national psyche and would give Bill Bryson a nervous breakdown. It is defined by a mixture of the new arrivals of the last two decades, who have added 60% to its population growth; the critical mass of the population who live increasingly free from the old hearth of media and institutions; the generation under 30 who have spent their formative years online and to whom even Bryson\u2019s pick and mix of patriotic fare seem alien. For any would-be traveller, this Britain can be glimpsed in its fastest changing places: Peterborough, Reading, Leicester, the suburbs of Birmingham, London\u2019s periphery.<\/p>\n
The nation\u2019s popular cultural establishments, shorn of any real interest in understanding this New Britain, now serve as a cosy escape. And Bill Bryson is the patron saint of this increasingly oblivious cult. To reread Notes From A Small Island today is a bit like discovering the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the origins of every fleeting phenomena that has worked to distract us from a Britain in the midst of wholesale change. From the whimsy of \u201cKeep Calm and Carry On\u201d (Brits, Bryson tells us outside a shop in Windsor, are \u201cgreat at pulling together\u201d), to the self-aware griping of \u201cVery British Problems\u201d and the geriatric charm of a Richard Osman thriller. This is what Bryson, after all, clings to: the queuing, the self-aware eccentricity, the playing up to type, all fuelled by the wistful determination to recover a happier trip to the country he took as a young man in the Seventies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe nation\u2019s popular cultural establishments, shorn of any real interest in understanding this New Britain, largely now serve as a cosy escape.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly this disguised trauma tips his affection for England into a self-parody, one that has become perversely useful as a stand-in for any national reckoning. The Nineties, like the Britain of 2025, was obsessed with brokering and mediating an understanding of Englishness. This was a foreshadowing of today\u2019s parlour game, with novelists and columnists eager to reconcile Britain\u2019s lost prestige and power with a new identity for the 21st-century future. Inevitably it ended up as a drive towards the lowest common cultural denominator. Julian Barnes\u2019s parody of the decade\u2019s penchant for existential taxonomising, England, England, was published at the height of Bryson mania. The Isle of Wight, crammed with the nation\u2019s symbols and icons, is transformed by Barnes into a theme park for tourists and emigres, an upgrade of the old nation shorn of its divided soul and reborn for a Global Britain. Plotting this New England, market researchers compile a list that could have fallen out of Notes From A Small Island: emotional frigidity, thatched cottages, black cabs.<\/p>\n
The theme park\u2019s purveyor was seen by critics as a stand-in for one of the decade\u2019s opportunistic spivs, a Murdoch or an al-Fayed. But the ultimate purveyor of Britain\u2019s cosy, post-national handrailed theme park was Bryson. Tasked with this fantasyland gatekeeping of bonhomie and repression, the writing in Notes From A Small Island offers the drearily familiar criteria for our own way of seeing the country now: England\u2019s landscapes are \u201cstunning, peaceful, beautiful and very nice\u201d. Cities, the small bits we get to see, are always impenetrable with \u201csprawl\u201d. Human beings, especially those still living, barely feature.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe trouble with English towns,\u201d we are told, arriving on the shores of Dover before the journey even starts, \u201cis that they are so indistinguishable from one another.\u201d Rather than a point of interest, such gripes always seem to deliberately peter out. The disappointment of a village on the Dorset coast, once enchanted by childhood memories, is resolved by a rant about the car park and bad pub food. There are English voices, but only as catchphrases, faint caricatures muttering anachronisms from the past. Bradford is so distressing that Bryson has to stop the trip and briefly go home.<\/p>\n
As Blair took power and enacted his New Britain, one where the nation would be \u201cyoung again\u201d, the reading public only became more obsessed with Bryson\u2019s England. In hindsight, its greatest cultural achievement was to launder England\u2019s reactionary provincial impulse, one which Blair and the modernising vision of New Labour sought to lance, into a sort of folksy, politically sterile jamboree. Notes remained a bestseller for the first two years after New Labour\u2019s victory. Then, 1999 saw Bryson unleashed on television: bearded, squat, a gentle lisp, like a child\u2019s cartoon bear for adults, holding their hand as he tried to explain post-industrial Liverpool on the eve of the new millennium. The remit for the nation\u2019s newfound cuddly and erudite uncle steadily expanded. In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, he was tasked by BBC News with trying to explain why a pair of teenagers had gunned down 16 of their classmates.<\/p>\n
A similar ploy tried on Australia in 2000 failed: Down Under was poorly reviewed. The soul of Oz, apparently, was too irreverent to be deciphered by a prying American tourist. But back in Blighty, Bryson\u2019s now decade-old travelogue had transcended the sum of its parts. In 2003, while Britain was invading Iraq and the country was being plastered by the \u201cpseudomodernism\u201d of New Labour\u2019s wave of civic building, the book was voted as most representative of the nation in a World Book Day poll.<\/p>\n
For Bryson, national treasuredom and its lappings ensued: honorary doctorates at half a dozen universities, including the Chancellorship of the University of Durham and the Presidency of the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2007. Detractors, like James May, were few. \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing I can\u2019t stand,\u201d he told viewers of Top Gear in 2004, \u201cit\u2019s beardy, sanctimonious, patronising Americans in tartan trousers coming to England and trying to persuade us to turn it into a museum.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBryson\u2019s now decade-old travelogue had transcended the sum of its parts.\u201d<\/p>\n
But nothing, not even Top Gear, could touch Bryson\u2019s rising star. By the end of the decade, he had partnered with the monarchy to present Icons of England, a collection of essays featuring everyone from Kevin Spacey to Benjamin Zephaniah, which further taxonomised an England that had become even more unfamiliar for most people over the preceding decade: village shops, canal boats and even a Majoresque evocation of the \u201cmist\u201d. Notes from Little Dribbling, the sequel, came in 2015 at the behest of the publisher, and apparently the nation. This almost-reluctant journey, via the \u201cBryson line\u201d through the middle of the country, seemed to take place in a world he now quietly resented. The British, he noticed in the Lake District, had begun to behave in \u201cquietly disgraceful ways\u201d when no one else was watching.<\/p>\n
He was the country\u2019s last acceptable reactionary. His gripes were those of a smouldering old colonel (bad manners, litter, an inability to recall the nation\u2019s basic facts), while he took refuge in the matriarchal decency of Angela Merkel and the \u201cshared experiences\u201d offered by Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards. Blithe anti-Americanism, in an age of populism, seemed the most acceptable way to complain. The biggest change among the British, he told Stephen Sackur in a Hard Talk Interview, one where he was bluntly accused of wanting to preserve the country in aspic, is that they had become more like his countrymen, \u201cquite self-centred in a way they never used to be\u201d.<\/p>\n
And still, amid England\u2019s current woes, Bryson endures as the nation\u2019s whisperer. \u201cThis is still a country that\u2019s pretty devoted to decency and common sense,\u201d he assured us after being pushed for some \u201cBryson Positivity\u201d in a recent Times interview promoting his latest re-release. But this could only fall on deaf ears. England, after all, is still in thrall to Bryson\u2019s pastoral whimsy. Nearly every bestselling travelogue in the past decade has concerned itself with the rural, the pastoral, a cult of anodyne heritage that has turned the old broadcasting establishment into a sedative. Yet at the root of these obsessions is one of the country\u2019s unspoken anxieties we still refuse to reckon with: will there always be an unchanging national character passed down through the generations and its national touchstones, with its recognisable set of quirks, idioms, eccentricities and jokes? Or is it fading into the future of a new country \u2014 that of the third England we have always quietly feared and never really wanted? Thanks to Bill Bryson, we still don\u2019t really know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over two million copies circulate the country\u2019s bookshelves. It has been voted as the book \u201cmost representative of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[168336,748,393,4884,168337,1144,8838,712,138749,168338,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-515679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-bill-bryson","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-england","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-new-labour","15":"tag-northern-ireland","16":"tag-nostalgia","17":"tag-scotland","18":"tag-travelogue","19":"tag-tweeness","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom","22":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115409344561827538","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}