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I once opened a magazine to an article that began, "Everybody hates an Anglophile," to which I answered, "No, but everybody does hate a ______." Still, I understood what the writer meant. For many Americans, England remains the river of myth and history that branches into so many smaller rivers, including our own. We adopt its traditions; we claim a stake in its literary achievements. But some of us haven't faced facts. If the modern UK bears little resemblance to the country of Masterpiece Theater, and if the queen now hands out CBEs to people like Mick Jagger—well, we Anglophiles have the luxury of being an ocean away.
For the generation that came of age in the Twenties and Thirties, the older Britain was like an elderly relative, still present but fading fast. Novelist Penelope Fitzgerald describes such a world in an autobiographical essay from her posthumous collection The Afterlife. Remembering her childhood in Sussex, Fitzgerald writes,
From time to time Lady Denman, the most important benefactress in the neighborhood, took me out for what was then called a joy ride in her chauffeur-driven motor-car … . To me it was bitterly disappointing. You could see so much from a trap, where you sat high up above the fields and hedges, which seemed to be snatched away from the side of the road as the horse pounded forward. Not quite as good as a trap, but better than kind Lady Denman's Daimler, was a ride home on the last cow when they were brought in for afternoon milking. You had to sit sideways because a cow's backbone is as sharp as a rail and the view was limited, but the movement was delightful.
Fitzgerald, born in 1916, was the daughter of humorist and poet Edmund Knox, aka "Evoe" of Punch (he was the editor of the magazine from the Thirties through World War II). Her literary childhood was simultaneously old-fashioned and modern. Both her parents were products of Victorian vicarages, and, once children were born, they settled down into the old domesticity. Poetry, still widely popular in England, was the family trade, along with writing in general; even the Knox children scribbled away, confident of being published. Not far from this "homely" literary atmosphere, however, was the harsher climate of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury was happy to lift its stock by selling out the icons of the 19th century (Lytton's Strachey's Eminent Victorians was to Florence Nightingale as that whoopie cushion was to your 4th grade teacher: unfair but effective). Fitzgerald's Uncle Dilly was a close friend of Strachey and also Maynard Keynes, but she refers to her mother and father's world, in contrast, as "Georgian."
"Georgian" is a mostly forgotten term for a literary movement that was progressive but also romantic and accessible. The writers' names remain familiar: D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and G.K. Chesterton all appeared in the first collection of Georgian poets—a volume that sold an amazing 15,000 copies on publication. The publisher of that book, and patron of British poets generally, was Harold Munro, owner of the famous Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street. Nearly every great modern poet and many now forgotten passed through the Bookshop at some point, including the eccentric Charlotte Mew, whose biography Fitzgerald would later write. Children were also welcome; Christina Knox bought colored rhyme sheets at the Bookshop to decorate the nursery walls. "Although Harold and Alida [Munro] were," Fitzgerald says, "in their different ways, rather intimidating for a young child … cats, kittens, and dogs were needed as intermediaries; everything they published for children was successful."
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