Hannah Rose Woods - Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain

Fascinating and timely, Rule, Nostalgia is an eye-opening history of Britains enduring fixation with its own past

Jeremy Paxman, bestselling author of The English and Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

Well-argued, timely and hugely entertaining. A great piece of popular history

Jonathan Coe, bestselling author of Middle England

Our national story is so much stranger than we think: this book brilliantly insists that we look at it afresh

James Hawes, bestselling author of The Shortest History of England

A great, scholarly history, and so searingly relevant. Hannah Rose Woods is clever, witty and perceptive. They dont make em like they used to; now they make em better

Dan Snow, author of On This Day in History

An utterly eye-opening and enthralling debut, clearly laying out our uniquely British obsession with nostalgia. Required reading for anyone who wants to use the term culture war. I absolutely loved it

Fern Riddell, author of Death in Ten Minutes: The forgotten life of radical suffragette Kitty Marion

A smart, entertaining and meticulously researched backwards look (quite literally) at Britains history of looking over its shoulder. Deconstructs the lure of the fictitious good old days and how they have been weaponised throughout history. Excellent

Otto English, author of Fake History

Outstanding. A thrilling, elegant and highly original interrogation of how we use our pasts

Musa Okwonga, author of One of Them: An Eton College Memoir

Nostalgia was once considered a terminal condition. Hannah Rose Woods suggests that the culture needs to book itself in for a check-up. Provocative and well-argued, Rule, Nostalgia offers the diagnosis that might lead us to a cure

Matthew Sweet, author of Inventing the Victorians

A triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britains relationship with its own past. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents

Peter Mitchell, author of Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves

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First published by WH Allen in 2022

Copyright Hannah Rose Woods, 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design Alex Kirby
Cover Photo Historic Royal Palaces/Bridgeman Images

Lines from MCMXIV from The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Lines from 1916 seen from 1921 from Selected Poems by Edmund Blunden (Carcanet Press) reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.

Lines from The English Spirit by Siegfried Sassoon reproduced by permission of the Estate of George Sassoon.

Lines from East Coker from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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ISBN: 978-0-753-55875-1

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It can seem as if Britain is a nation obsessed with its history, yearning for the stability and certainty of a vanished golden age. Or, as James Bond has it in the 2012 juggernaut Skyfall, were going back to the past where we have the advantage. At a time of change and uncertainty, amid fierce political disputes both over Britains past and its future, it has never been more important to interrogate the ways in which we remember the past.

I began writing this book in the final weeks of Britains exit from the European Union, when imperial nostalgia was being blamed for Britains inability to recognise that it was unprepared to face the challenges of the future. A few months later, I was legally confined to my home as a pandemic ripped its way around the globe, which newspapers and politicians told me I could make sense of by imagining it was the Second World War. And then the statue of Edward Colston was tipped into Bristol harbour, and historians were cast as unlikely enemies of the state, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested that telling the truth about slavery and empire was a cringing embarrassment about our history, and cabinet ministers accused historians and heritage workers of waging a shamefully unpatriotic campaign to do Britain down. And I want to find out what on earth is going on.

Nostalgia, however, has a long history of its own. For more than 500 years, British politicians, poets, novelists and social commentators have mourned the loss of older national identities, and called for a revival of simpler, better ways of life from Margaret Thatchers call for a return to Victorian values in the 1980s, to William Blakes protest against the dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution that were fast transforming Englands green and pleasant land, or sixteenth-century observers looking back to a Merry England before the upheavals of the Reformation.

Beginning with an exploration of nostalgia in the twenty-first century, I delve further back in time to uncover the nostalgias of the past, from the history wars in the present day to the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. While conservatives today yearn for the supposed Blitz spirit of wartime Britain, those who had lived through two world wars often yearned for the lost innocence of rural life, reimagining the Edwardian era as a long summer garden party free from anxiety and upheaval. The Edwardians, in turn, looked back longingly to a golden era of Victorian optimism a time before imperial competition, urbanisation and technological change were transforming their world at a seemingly ever-accelerating rate or else retreated into nostalgic visions of endless childhood through tales such as Peter Pan. And while the Victorians themselves have often been viewed as the apogee of national self-certainty, many, from Pre-Raphaelite painters to the Arts and Crafts movement, yearned to retreat to an era before the Industrial Revolution, valorising the spirit of medieval England. And before the Industrial Revolution? Eighteenth-century artists, architects and philosophers strove to break with the Middle Ages, looking back to the apparent order of the classical past, while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fierce battles over monarchy and religion continually rewrote the relationship between past, present and future. By the time we reach the 1530s, we find people nostalgic for a vision of home that looks very different to our own.