BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

supposed inferior or backward peoples abroad. 16 England did not need a modern revolution,
Mandler adds, because the ruling class’s accommodation of gradual change kept the theory of
advancing civilization tenable despite popular racial Anglo-Saxonism and challenges to empire
incurred during the 1857 Indian Mutiny and later imperial rivalries. 17 According to Mandler, the
late-Victorian/Edwardian self-image of a “governing and colonizing people” reconciled English
national character with British institutions, and similar adjustments came with subsequent
changes. Theme-park rusticity arose in reaction to a post-World War I sense of isolation just as
Stanley Baldwin’s image of benign common sense, cooperation and good humor smoothed the
face of interwar economic turmoil. The image of the Little Man as hero during World War II,
followed by the kinder, gentler English idealist through years of social welfare and imperial
decline, replaced the Philistine and rugged materialist John Bull icon. 18 Mandler concludes that
such journalistic national character stereotypes and their propagandistic overtones, have not only
been ultimately rejected as anti-individualist but have also lost their peculiarly English flavor
now that the Whig progress narrative has become global. 19 Giving a similar upbeat assessment
16 The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony
Blair (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 29 and passim. Mandler’s argument
here recalls the civic/ethnic, modern/antimodern, progressive/regressive dualities that for Tom
Nairn make up the “Janus face” of nationalism. See Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 348-49.
17 Ibid., 59, 85, 90, 106-8. The chief proponents of Anglo-Saxon freedoms, medievalists
William Stubbs and Edward A. Freeman, actually credited early institutions as much as race.
The works cited by Mandler include, William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in
Its Origin and Development (1873-1878) and Edward A. Freeman, History of the Norman
Conquest (1867-1876).
18 Mandler, English National Character, 130, 145-48, 163-67.
19 Ibid., 240-42.
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