The background contours of national feeling in England in the 19th century can only be sketched in outline here; many important facts and developments affecting the course of what in the 19th century was the world’s most powerful country, and most forcefully modernizing economy, must be left out of the account, since our focus here is on the somewhat anomalous aspect of English (or British) nationalism. In what follows, “English” and “British” will be seen as almost-synonymous terms, following the complacent usage of the period: “British” being used to describe the United Kingdom, or the Empire, with for its defining heartland and synecdoche an “England” whose particular landscapes and cultural patterns were seen as the British default. Any non-Englishness in Britain – a sense of a Welshness, Scottishness, or Irishness in loyalty or culture – was either seen as a subsidiary contrast note highlighting British unity by adding some differentiation to it, and perfectly compatible with it and its English default, or else as a separatist move away from British harmony or common-sense.

British/English loyalties had a long history of cultural expression prior to the Romantic period. The country’s ceaseless, centuries-long frictions with its neighbours and rivals (France, Spain, pre-1680 Ireland, the United Provinces) fed a chronic xenophobia as well as a patriotic pride in Britain’s naval and military power, insular independence, and unbroken traditions. This intensified as a literary trope in the sentimental comedies of the 18th century and in historians’ celebrations of heroes such as Caractacus and Boudica. The loss of the American colonies and the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, culminating in the invasion scare of 1803, did much to harden this xenophobic patriotism into a type of nationalism strongly bound up with the values of the Protestant state Church. Internally, the fear of revolutionary unrest destabilizing the constitutional order led to an ideal of historical stability (first advanced by Edmund Burke) and inter-class harmony, most famously formulated by Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Sybil, or The two nations (1845) and generally known as “One-Nation Toryism”. Ever since, British/English nationalism has by and large gravitated to, and enjoyed a privileged relationship with, the Conservative side of the political spectrum.

Throughout the 19th century, British nationalism presents itself in a radical duality. In international relations, it shades into popular imperialism: the notion of imperial strength, a Britannia ruling the waves, holds sway, and the country’s military prowess and stalwart colonial explorations are consistently glorified in brashly heroic terms. Domestically, an idyllic self-image of rural peacefulness, harmonious relations, and nostalgic traditions is evoked, where social relations are centred on the landowning gentry and nobility, bolstered by the spontaneous, traditionally entrenched and freely-attributed loyalty of country folk (e.g. in the work of Anthony Trollope). Evocations of incipient secularization, industrialization, and urban modernity usually function as a problematic departure from the country’s true identity. Such issues are thematized either as a diagnosis of the “condition of England” (first identified by Thomas Carlyle and addressed by the generation of his adepts, including Tennyson and Matthew Arnold) or else in order to provide a backdrop to melodrama (as with Charles Dickens). Among Carlyle and his followers, a sense of racial superiority took hold, without being fully argued out in biological or anthropological terms. It was felt that imperial greatness was a matter of racial predisposition and that the character of the island nation was determined by the particular genetic mixture of the tribes that settled England in the post-classical centuries. A discourse opposing “Anglo-Saxons” against Celts or something called “the Latin races” (not to mention the non-European inhabitants of the colonies) became ingrained. This Saxonism – a sense of kinship between the English and German nations – flourished in the 1840s and 1850s, fostered by the public role of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as consort to Queen Victoria, and by the flourishing of Anglo-Saxon philology linked to the names of Benjamin Thorpe and John M. Kemble. It expressed itself in a literary cult of King Alfred but declined from the mid-1860s onwards, as Prussia aggressively rose to power, the Danish and fervently anti-Prussian Princess Alexandra married the Prince of Wales, and figures like Matthew Arnold and William Morris heralded a Celtic/French or Scandinavian rather than German cultural interest.

The mid-19th century, in many countries a time of constitutional self-questioning, in Britain presents a period of stability and unquestioning self-confidence, even in the face of considerable social and economic tensions and crises in the imperial peripheries (such as the Irish Famine, 1845-48, and the Indian Mutiny, 1857). This imperturbable and complacent confidence in the nation’s identity is at the same time the hallmark of British nationalism and the reason for its relative unobtrusiveness. The Victorian cult of the upright English gentleman, the veneration of the ladylike qualities of English womanhood, and the proverbial horror of anything like falsehood or prevarication are implicit affirmations of the moral superiority of the Britons as a nation. Towards the end of the century, the Boer Wars and the rising power of Germany brought this latent nationalism to the political surface. Educationalists argued that more needed to be done to prepare children, especially boys, for an active role in maintaining the Empire, and “future-war novels” began to conjure up the possibility of an invasion by Germany. Poetic assertions of burning love for the fatherland became more frequent and salient, and in particular the stories and verse of Rudyard Kipling manifest a more strident awareness of colonial might and warlike prowess. Popular culture begins to express a fervent nationalism known since c.1880 as “jingoism”. At the same time the idyllic celebration of a harmoniously traditional and gentle countryside remained strong, often evoked in wistful contradistinction to the strife of modern life, even though the outlook of authors like Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman is tinged with a more tragic sense than anything in the Trollope generation. Both in paintings and in classical music (the “English Music” school) a consciously national inspiration and thematics become noticeable, and traditions like cricket, bell-ringing, carolling, or morris-dancing increasingly become objects of deliberate and affectionate cultivation in the decades after 1880.

The fervent war enthusiasm of 1914 followed an epochal shift in foreign policy, when Britain had turned away from its erstwhile ally, Germany, to form an alliance with its ancient enemy, France. The outbreak of the war was greeted (as in other countries) with fervent “jingoism” and self-confidence. The losses suffered over the next four years (and their stark contrast with the ongoing nostalgic glorification of England’s harmoniously peaceful countryside) became a common trauma, of central importance to English national feeling. That collectively experienced trauma inspired, and was kept alive in, a great number of public manifestations (monuments, ceremonies of remembrance, artistic treatments) – similar to the Great War’s effect in dominions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Notwithstanding the post-1918 rejection of Victorianism, the national self-image, invoking country-rooted, idyllic traditions maintained with stoic heroism in a violently changing world, would throughout the 20th century continue to determine English and British nationalism, as well as its cultural expressions.