This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

On holiday, I used to find Nostalgie FM the perfect accompaniment to a drive through the Loire Valley. A non-stop blend of largely French hits from the sixties to the eighties, it was both a caution against and a potent agent of nostalgia. Most of the songs from this “golden age” turned out to be quite naff, but as the châteaux rolled by, the torch songs of Alain Souchon instilled a yearning for a past in which I had never lived. 

Indulging in pained regret for lost times might seem a harmless pleasure, but Hannah Rose Woods is here to warn it has become a pathological “fixation”. The Right, she argues, has “weaponised” nostalgia, tapping “inchoate yearnings about fading pride and glory” to fuel hatred against historians who are simply “putting the facts back in” to the national “storybook”.

Apparently, the first cure for this “peculiarly English affliction” involves refuting errors and egregious simplifications in Tory talk about the national past. Woods is an inveterate Tweeter and her Rule, Nostalgia often works like a book-length version of the “Hi, historian here” threads that infest that medium. 

The Government exhorted people to get through Covid by showing the Blitz spirit, but historians know German bombing caused as much fear and resentment as pride and resolve. Britons were supposed to Keep Calm and Carry On, “but this was a fantasy”, Woods writes, because the 1940s poster with that motto never entered circulation. The tea towels lied to us. 

Woods is more productive when she probes nostalgia as a cluster of emotions, rather than condemning it as a set of errors. For like all emotions, it can be usefully historicised. This insight shapes the basic structure and approach of the book, which is more ironic than irate. Our times seem to be gripped by nostalgia for the days before yesterday, but the sixties, seventies and eighties abounded with yearning for the simplicities of the Second World War. 

The thirties and forties were, in turn, full of voices lamenting what one of Orwell’s heroes called the “newness of everything”, pining for the sun-dappled afternoons of Edwardian England. The Edwardians themselves lamented the lost certainties of the high Victorian age and fretted that rural tranquillity was on the wane. And so on. Woods turns the periods of our history into Russian dolls of nostalgia, each nested within the other. 

It is an engaging literary device which palls as succeeding chapters ask readers to re-enact their surprise that apparently stable times were consumed with anxiety about losing touch with tradition. Woods says the “calmly elegant Georgian heyday” fretted about whether Britain should go global or remain a tight little island, while it would be a “hard sell” to claim that the age of the Reformation and the Civil War was an “age of contentment and stability”. Well, quite.

The further Woods progresses away from the “rancid Englishness” of the present, the more forgiving she becomes of nostalgia — or at least of wistful absorption in the past, which is not quite the same thing. She rightly sees that nostalgia has generally not been an obstacle to rapid social change — what bolder Victorians would have called “progress” — but has offered psychological compensation for them. 

Johannes Hofer coined the word nostalgia in 1688 to describe the chronic homesickness of Swiss soldiers for their mountain home. That etymology is important to Woods, informing perception that nostalgia has often raged most strongly among those who have moved away in service of the economy or the state: the Edwardian obsession with the lost worlds of childhood was marked among people who roved for a living. 

In one of many arresting vignettes, Woods recounts the writer Walford Graham Robertson’s shock at discovering soldiers flocked to his 1907 play Pinkie and the Fairies. It was “Aldershot” in the stalls and there was not a dry eye in the house as moustachioed men of empire wept as the fairies bid farewell to their child friends. She just as deftly makes the ironic point that it is usually technological changes that fuel nostalgia. People in interwar Britain fumed that ribbon development, roadside advertisers and messy picnickers were destroying the countryside, but the cult of rural old England owed much to the automobile guides put out by Shell. 

Although Woods presents nostalgia as an English vice, her book shows that British people have usually tempered and often condemned its excesses. She follows the Cambridge historian Peter Mandler in seeing modern Britons as a generally confident, firmly urban and cosmopolitan people who rarely wished to keep their heritage in aspic. 

She shows that Victorian working-class autobiographers did not regret the upheavals they lived through. Looking back on his life in 1880, one wrote that it would be a “misanthrope indeed who would wish the old days or customs back again”. There were plangent pastoralists at that time, but few thoroughly reactionary ones. 

Walter Scott’s Waverley novels fuelled the wistful romanticism of the early 19th century, but Abbotsford, the house he built with their proceeds, was the first in Scotland with gas lighting. For every Kenneth Grahame, who lined up Moley and Badger against weasel modernity in The Wind in the Willows, there was an Edward Carpenter, who fled the city for a Sheffield smallholding, the better to pursue his enthusiasms for vegetarianism and al fresco sex. 

Many of the ideologues proofed against nostalgia were Tories

Woods appreciates impresarios who found social democratic visions of community in the British past, rather than rum and trumpet narratives. She likes the early Victorian radicals who conjured up a mythical, pre-capitalist Olden Time of comfy manor houses and roast beef in which the English people were united. She prefers popular historians, such as the interwar Quennells, Marjorie and C.H.B., whose rather dull History of Everyday Things avoided politics to explore looms and ploughs, rather than Whiggish blowhards like Macaulay. 

And so there is “nothing new about current debates about history”: in every period, you will find not only nostalgics but firebrands calling for a break with the past. Woods shows that many of the ideologues whose certainties proofed them against nostalgia were Tories. Mrs Thatcher’s environment secretary Nick Ridley lambasted rural preservationists as “pseudo-Marxists” harming the economic interests of the countryside. 

When the Lady herself went misty-eyed over the Grantham of her youth and banged on about “Victorian values”, she did so not just because they were old, but because they were “perennial values” which could transform the present. That leads Woods to the subtle point that sometimes it is the “good guys” who are the nostalgics: Remainiacs sighing for French cheese after the Brexit vote and Corbynistas yearning for the days of Aneurin Bevan. 

It seems like only yesterday that parodies of centrist commentary kept telling us to “Read some effing Orwell”. Woods belongs to a cohort of millennial historians who insist their Twitter foes should read some effing history. Were the people who dragged Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour so different to the Cromwellians who poked out stained glass windows of saints? 

Leaving aside the question of whether these are comparable forms of iconoclasm, it overrates what historians can achieve. In her conclusion, Woods cites the young Herbert Butterfield on the duty of academic historians to insist upon the strangeness of the past. But she is too quick to dismiss the older Butterfield’s recognition that societies stubbornly require stories that historians insist are simple or wrong — not least because she overlooks the profound, if crabbed religious faith which led him to it. 

Even if revisionism could conquer the world as well as the internet, would getting Britons to close their storybook really solve Britain’s problems? Woods occasionally grants that nostalgia is a “universal human impulse”, which makes her thesis that it is a uniquely dangerous British phenomenon curiously parochial. 

If Second World War triumphalism caused Britain’s lamentable toll of Covid deaths, then what caused Germany’s? Does Mark Francois’s myth-making command wider social acceptance than Marine Le Pen’s? As Butterfield might have remarked, the urge to snap moral judgements is no less an enemy to historical understanding than the hankering to be at home in the past.