"Never Been in a Riot"

presumably the guardian thinks its the fault of the tories and mail thinks its the fault of foriegners and melanie phillips thinks its the fault of the bbc and computer games. i have absolutely no intention of adding my voice to the storm of bullshit and anyway i wouldn't be able to make myself heard if i did 

the life and opinions of Andrew Rilstone

Not perhaps the most insightful thing written on the events of the other week but I can certainly emphasise with the sentiment. Inevitably, we all have our reassuring narratives to explain the causes of the riots.

I've seen a few things written on Facebook by both friends and friends of friends which I've had to restrain myself from responding to. It's not that I don't have my own prejudices about what's happened and the causes of what's happened. I just didn't want to get into pointless arguments. So many people on all sides have already made up their minds, and it's rare I think that much good will come from engaging with strangers on the internet, even if I can think of what seem like perfectly reasonable rebuttals of their positions.

Of course, I did mentally write a few responses.

I don't like violence. I'm a middle-class white person with a privileged education who was raised by parents who strongly discouraged any displays of violence in their sons (we were even forbidden toy guns). Which might explain why I've been attracted to so much violent entertainment over the years (although that's also partly the way I think our popular culture has gone, for better or worse). Still, most of the people involved in the rioting are probably the sort of person I'd cross the road to avoid. The sort of person I'm glad I don't have to be around in my daily life. But still, I won't demonise them and I have a lot of sympathy for the anger about social iniquity which is clearly part of the reason behind the trouble, whatever some on the right would like to claim in dismissing this as simply criminality or mindlessness. For sure, that must be a part of it. But it doesn't wholly explain it, and I don't know where you'd draw the line between criminality and all the other, equally plausible reasons.

I think my strongest, most overwhelming feeling was just how little surprise I felt. I read somewhere that both the TUC and Nick Clegg had predicted potential trouble in reaction to the government's current policies, so I know I wasn't alone. It just felt very predictable, even if the actual causes of the riots and their spreading to other cities include a multitude of factors beyond the economic. Which isn't to defend it, just to acknowledge that these things don't happen in a political and cultural vacuum.

I think what underpins my antipathy with so much of the rhetoric expressed by politicians and commentators is the almost wilfull ignorance and refusal to even try to place events in context. They don't know their history. Of course they don't! David Barker, Emeritus Professor at Leeds put this very succinctly in a letter published by the Guardian:

For many years I taught a final-year undergraduate course on the uprisings of the peasants and artisans that swept across large parts of 17th-century France. Buildings were attacked, their contents pillaged, crops destroyed and occasionally a perceived oppressor was killed. Had my students explained it all by simply invoking feral criminality they would have failed.

My own academic research is a slightly different period, England in the late 16th, early 17th centuries, but I'd made exactly the same association before I came across David Parker's letter (helpfully quoted on Facebook by several friends). A point I've come across in my reading seems to be that incidences of social disorder and rioting in early modern society were an instinctive form of protest on the part of the powerless, a means to articulate their grievances and even to 'negotiate' with their social superiors. Perhaps it's easier to make such a judgement when the events are centuries in the past. Or perhaps it's that the distance more easily enable them to be placed in context. I don't really imagine that early modern rioting was any less violent than what we saw this last week. There's no reason to suppose it wouldn't have been worse. And attacks on property and looting has probably always been a part of it.

What's also always been present is people who want to demonise those who threaten the social hierarchy. I'm thinking here particularly about a ballad I've written about in the chapter I'm currently engaged with. It appears in a collection called 'Strange Histories', written by the Weaver and ballad author Thomas Deloney. The earliest extant text is from 1602, although there's reason to believe there was an earlier edition. Personally I would favour the early to mid 1590s as the likely dating of its first publication, but that inevitably remains personal speculation.

I think many people who don't study the period in any great depth forget not only how violent that time was (as any time before the invention of a modern police force must have been) but also how politically and economically troubled the period of the 1590s was. The period when Shakespeare was first establishing himself as a writer of note and when so many classics of English Literature were being written. An aging queen, inflation, poor harvests, an increase in the numbers of the poor, popular discontent about the presence of so many foreigners in the country. I often think the 1590s must have been a pretty hellish time to be alive in England. So what if the greatest dramatist English literature has seen was producing great works for the stage if you couldn't find enough to eat?

The ballad I have in mind, whenever it was actually written, is a history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Most of the details are derived from Holinshed's Chronicle of English history. It's probably easiest to show what I want to say if I just quote a bit from my chapter in progress:

The rebels are repeatedly represented in unflattering terms. Just over half of the ballad is taken up with describing the violence of the rebels in terms which explicitly condemn them. They are “rude disordered franticke men” (52) responsible for releasing prisoners (22-24, 61-65), intimidating priests (53-54), murdering such figures of authority as the Lord Chauncelor and the Lord High Treasurer (45-7), burning lawyers’ books (33-4), destroying records (58-60) and attacking property. Attributing the motivation of the rebels to ‘envie, malice, and dispighte’ the ballad precludes the possibility that there could be any justice to their complaints. Their rebellion is stigmatized as a violent affront to social hierarchy and monarchical authority.

Excuse the academic language. Hopefully quoting myself doesn't appear too self indulgent. It's my blog after all! The numbers are line references, and I've also taken out a quotation. It's not describing an early modern riot of course, it was history for Deloney and the audience for whom he was writing, but it was probably written at a time when there were riots occurring. It wasn't easy to write about contemporary political events at this time. Deloney actually got into trouble in 1596 over a ballad he'd authored for precisely those reasons. So it's about a historical event but it could also be read as a response to contemporary political events.

As far as I can tell, the actual details the ballad records aren't inaccurate. This was a violent revolt. Which is precisely the problem with so much of the rhetoric which has surrounded recent events. It's always easier to demonise people than to try and understand them. You could take Deloney's rhetoric out of this ballad, modernise the spelling, and would it look that different what what many are saying about the looters? It's not just that riots are always violent, that their causes are always rooted in a complex political, cultural and economic context. It's also that there's always someone around who will demonise the rioters, even if it's more than a century after the events occurred.

a masterpiece...

...because I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about how good this book is.

I have a vague memory of hearing that Lorna Sage won the Whitbread prize for autobiography for her memoir Bad Blood, probably when the paperback came out later that year. No doubt the story attracted more attention since she died only a week after it won. I see also that a few years later there a posthumous publication of her selected journalism, an honour I think can have been accorded to few academics who aren't Frank Kermode. No doubt her publisher was attempting to feed the interest generated by that memoir for a writer whose other writings were chiefly academic.

I shouldn't sound so snarky. This really is one of the finest books I've read in some time. I'm fairly sure I remember encountering her Women in the House of Fiction during my undergraduate degree. I don't think that will have been the reason why my mother bought her memoir though. In fact, I'm not sure if she ever read it. I've been noticing it on her shelves for a while now.

Almost the first thing which attracted me was brief excerpted the reviews just inside the front cover. They're almost as fascinating as memoir they advertise, and perversely perhaps, it's a few of these reviews I want to address here.

An unnamed writer from the Guardian sententiously opines "Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be...", a sentiment which, as someone who grew up in what was largely a very happy family I can't help but find rather insulting. Of course we had our difficulties, and of course I'm not so naive as to believe that all families are happy or 'safe'. I know several people whose experiences put the lie to that. But this is as insulting a prejudice as the Daily Mail assumption that all families are sacrosanct and special. You can't make such a sweeping a generalisation about an cultural institution which exists in so many different forms, and which everyone belongs to in some way or another. And it's not really the story that Lorna Sage tells. She describes her difficult relationships with her parents and grandparents with scrupulous clarity, but what also comes through is a love for these eccentric individuals. Whatever else they were, they were also her family, and she is equally conscious of what she has inherited from them. There seems very little bitterness, something a few of the other reviewers comment on, although Marina Warner also feels happy to label it a picture of a 'childhood hell'. That 'Bad Blood' of the title seems like a source of pride and creative energy as much as it might be intended as a badge of shame.

Rachel Cusk, writing for the Evening Standard, voices another unexamined prejudice when she claims 'This "memoir" has all the qualities of fiction'. Which is, quite clearly, also rubbish. The qualities it possesses are those of any stunningly written book, but these are not qualities which are the sole purview of fiction. There are a great many works of art found within non-fiction forms. Appropriating a book like this to the category of 'fiction' with Rachel Cusk's scare quotes makes a mockery of literary categories and privilages fiction in a way which is more than a little silly.

More silliness comes from Jonathan Raban, himself responsible for more than a few works of art within non-fictional categories, who wants to make a monument out of Lorna Sage's book: 'What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever been on the run'. It's interesting to think about this quote in the context of recent remarks by the Midsommer Murders producer who claimed that his show was 'the last bastion of Englishness'. The assumption in both cases is that there is a single, easily reducible 'England' that we can all agree on. On the contrary, I think that Englishness, like any national identity, is multiple, and no, that's not just because I'm an academic and 'multiple' identities is a fashionable term. It could be a fashionable term for all I know, but fashionabe or not it just seems to me to be self evidently true. The North is distinct from the South. Town is different from country. London is different from York. The Lake District is distinct from the Cotswolds, which is distinct from the Yorkshire Moors, which are distinct from the East Anglian Fens. Yet all of these landscapes and places are identifiably English to me.

At least Jonathan Raban doesn't try to claim that it is something which should be protected in some way. And Lorna Sage is exceptional at placing her story in its historical context. Appropriately for the literary critic she was, her childhood association with a local farmer leads to a subtle disquistion on Hardy and the farming life and culture which was (is) perenially in decline. Her story is one of post war social mobility, and it doesn't stop at its end, when she acknowledges that it was her daughter who became the future in the 60s. This is a narrative I've heard before, in autobiographical writings from Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Alan Bennett, Derek Jarman and others. I imagine that might be what attracted my Mum to it, because it's even, just about, my parents' story. They were born later, in 1950 and 51, and reached university at the tail end of the 60s, but I still feel theirs is a part of that same post war narrative. But each story is distinct, belonging to that person alone. If books were Lorna Sage's passport out of her family and social environment, as Marina Warner's excerpted review suggests, then it was a passport freely given to her in childhood. The changes British culture was undergoing at that point allowed a very clever girl to succeed where previously she might not have done, which is not to deny her agency in her own narrative. It's just to acknowledge, yet again, that we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing.

It's also a narrative that I feel has now become much harder to occur. For a variety of reasons, education no longer seems to carry the authority it once did. Everything is much more utilitarian now, and many of the post war gains have been eroded over the last 30 years. It's one of the reasons I find this period of British history so fascinating. It was far from a perfect time, because no time is perfect, but there was something positive in the culture then (although I would struggle to articulate just what precisely that is) which I wish hadn't been so willfully discarded.