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1809, 1812 and 1993: the contexts of Arcadia: Jonny Patrick

considers the significance of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century historical and political contexts in Tom Stoppard's
Arcadia
Author: Jonny Patrick
Date: Sept. 2009
From: The English Review(Vol. 20, Issue 1)
Publisher: Philip Allan Updates
Document Type: Critical essay
Length: 2,464 words

Full Text:
To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing ... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our
hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong (63).

Valentine here speaks of the joy of living at a moment where previous 'certainties' are shown to be wholly or partially false and the
world recovers some of its wonder and unpredictability. We might think of this as a disconcerting experience, but Valentine (and
Stoppard?) see such moments in human history as exhilarating and liberating. These periods, where all basic assumptions are up for
grabs, are sometimes known as paradigm shifts (a term first coined by the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn). Arcadia seems to
identify the period 1809-12 and the 'present day' (1993, when the play was first performed) as two such moments. The characters in
both periods are living through an exciting paradigm shift, symbolised by the fact that the garden is being dug up in both periods (by
Noakes in 1809-12 and by Lady Croom in 1993). These are periods of transition in technology (the birth of the age of steam in the
1800s, the rise of the computer and internet in the early 1990s), in literature, and, as we shall see in this article, in the politics and
culture of Europe.

Upheaval in European history: 'a Napoleonic fit'

In 1809-12, Europe was in political turmoil and its future was unclear. Since the French Revolution there had been wars across
Europe, and no political regime seemed safe. The Napoleonic wars are alluded to on a number of occasions in the nineteenth-
century scenes of Arcadia: Lady Croom says 'the whole of Europe is in a Napoleonic fit' (54), and when Thomasina tells Mr Noakes
that there is 'bad news from Paris', he replies 'Is it the Emperor Napoleon?' (115). The British had been fighting the French since the
1790s and Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor in 1804. The inhabitants of Sidley Park in this period are facing an uncertain
European future, with the map being regularly redrawn and war raging on the European continent.

The political situation in Europe in the early 1990s is similar: from 1945 to 1989 Europe had been divided between the democratic,
capitalist nations of the West and the Soviet-dominated communist bloc of the east and the cold war world order was in place. In the
mid-1980s this seemed to be a state of affairs that would last for many years to come. But in the autumn of 1989, a succession of
communist regimes was toppled, mostly nonviolently, to be replaced by the early 1990s with democratically elected governments and
free-market economics. In 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved, creating a range of independent states that had either never existed
before (for example, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova) or hadn't existed for at least a generation (the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania and
Estonia). The map of Europe was being redrawn.

Of great interest to Stoppard was the collapse of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth, in the autumn of 1989.
Stoppard had been a critic of Soviet oppression and a supporter of dissident writers since the 1970s. In his plays Dogg's Hamlet,
Cahoot's Macbeth and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour he had openly attacked the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. For him
the break-up of the Soviet Empire must have been an exciting time, when, as Valentine puts it, 'a door cracked open'.

The collapse of the communist regimes, however, also unleashed nationalist, religious and ethnic tensions that had been suppressed
and, as in 1809-12 (and for the first time since 1945), there was war on the European mainland. In 1991 a bitter civil war broke out in
the former Yugoslavia. The independent nations of Slovenia and Croatia were formed, and in 1992-5 the war ravaged Bosnia, as
Bosnian Serbs (supported by Serbia) and Croats fought against Bosnian Muslims. 'Ethnic cleansing', massacres, mass rape and
human rights abuses were rife.
Both 1809-12 and 1993 represent moments when 'everything you thought you knew is wrong': the future of Europe was changing and
exciting but also frightening. There is a strong sense that, beyond the apparent Arcadian tranquillity of Sidley Park and of the theatre
auditorium in 1993, European war is raging and potentially threatening, symbolised by the guns that are heard shooting offstage and
growing closer (17-8). Thomasina describes herself as having 'grown up in the sound of guns like the child of a siege'. As a young
woman whose lifetime has largely seen continuing European war, this is truer than she knows. Furthermore, as an English aristocrat
living in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Terror, when aristocratic government was overthrown and many members of the
aristocracy slaughtered, Sidley Park and Thomasina are besieged. It is possible to read the transformations of Sidley Park as
defensive works: Bernard first encounters the modern-day Lady Croom 'standing in a trench' (31) like a soldier.

An Englishman's garden?

In both periods the shape and governance of Europe were being debated and disputed, and a new kind of European Union was
possible. In both periods, the relationship between England and 'the Continent' was a vexed political and cultural issue.

Napoleon's plans for the future of Europe were radical. He was an advocate of a kind of European Union under French control, with
the Code Napoleon forming the basis of a shared legal system. He planned a European customs union and a single currency and
redrew the map of Europe, breaking up old empires and setting up a semi-independent Poland. An invasion of England, and its
annexation to a greater Napoleonic Empire, was widely feared and had been a reality in 1802-5 when Napoleon gathered an invasion
force in Northern France and built a flotilla of naval barges. When Captain Brice asks of Noakes 'Is Sidley Park to be an Englishman's
garden or the haunt of Corsican brigands?' (13), he is discussing Noakes's reforms to the garden, but his words seem to express the
fears that England (represented by Sidley Park) will be overrun by invaders from Europe--Corsica was, of course, Napoleon's
birthplace. It was even thought that Napoleon might physically join England to Europe. During a lull in hostilities in 1802, the French
engineer Albert Mathieu proposed building a tunnel linking England and France. As fears of Napoleonic invasion grew, (unfounded)
stories of invasion via a tunnel circulated.

The major political issue of the early 1990s was the UK's relationship with Europe, particularly the question of whether the UK should
be part of a large federalist European 'super-state'.

The governing Conservative Party was increasingly split between 'Eurosceptics', who opposed further union and in extreme cases
called for withdrawal from the European Community or EEC (renamed European Union or EU in 1993), and 'Europhiles' who wished
to join the European single currency and see more powers passed to the European Commission, based in Brussels. Eurosceptics
were often, sometimes accurately, caricatured as xenophobic 'Little Englanders' clinging to outdated models of nationhood. They saw
the EU as a plot to erode national sovereignty and replace it with a vast, expensive, faceless and socialistic bureaucracy. This bitter
dispute damaged John Major's government of 1992-7 irreparably. The debate on the future of Europe had been ongoing since the
UK's entry into the EC in 1973. Membership was ratified by referendum in 1975. In 1988, however, Margaret Thatcher drew up new
battle lines with a speech at Bruges opposing further European federalism and centralisation, arguing that 'Europe will be stronger
precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It
would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.' In February 1992, the Maastricht Treaty was signed,
renaming the EC as the EU and proposing the creation of a single currency. Major's government signed the treaty, but Eurosceptics
in his party saw Maastricht as a surrender of British sovereignty, and the 'Maastricht rebels' narrowly failed to have the Treaty
rejected in Parliament.

The UK was also being physically joined to 'the Continent'. The Channel Tunnel that Mathieu had envisaged in 1802 was constructed
from 1988-93, with the official opening taking place in 1994. The tunnel is alluded to (the only direct contextual reference in the 1990s
scenes) when Bernard explains that the vital copy of 'The Couch of Eros' was found when the Nightingale country house was sold 'to
make way for the Channel Tunnel rail-link' (40). Importantly, it is the erasure of the separation of England and Europe that unearths
the key object in the attempt to reconnect past and present at Sidley Park.

Europhiles and Eurosceptics at Sidley Park

When the play was being written, then, and when it was first performed in 1993, the issue of UK-European relations was at the
forefront of public consciousness. Although there are no direct references to this debate in the 1993 scenes, or indeed in the play as
a whole, the 1809-12 scenes offer an indirect commentary on these issues, making Arcadia just as much a play of and about the
early 1990s as texts that refer more overtly to the political and cultural issues of their day.

In the nineteenth-century scenes, along with the actual war that is continuing in Europe, there is a kind of culture war within Sidley
Park between English patriots who are hostile to everything European, and those who are more open to European influence. This
battle between Eurosceptics and Europhiles allows Stoppard to reflect and comment on the major political issue of the early 1990s.
Head of the Eurosceptics is Captain Brice, a bristling, patriotic, military man hostile to Noakes's plans to allow Sidley Park to be
invaded by a 'Chinese bridge' and 'Corsican brigands' (30).

Echoes of Brice can be found in the modern-day Lord Croom, who is homophobic, 'won't have anyone in the house with a Japanese
car' (25) and would most certainly not be a supporter of the Maastricht Treaty. The 1809-12 hostility to Europe clearly has its roots in
the Crooms' distaste for and fear of the French Revolution and Napoleonic invasion, but it tends to express itself, typically for this
play, through arguments over landscape, architecture and mathematics. The question of who invented the calculus--the Englishman
Newton or the German Leibnitz--becomes a matter of Anglo-European rivalry. Newton's classical mechanics are a source of English
national pride and the challenge to Newtonian physics from thermodynamics (developed by the Frenchman Sadi-Carnot) is perceived
as an attack on English cultural and political supremacy.

Septimus shows a patriotic Englishman's pride in the man he pointedly refers to as 'Sir Isaac Newton' (108, my italics) when he
responds to Thomasina's enthusiasm for the German waltz by saying '[l]et them have the waltz, they cannot have the calculus' (107),
but Valentine has earlier in the play (though later in time) asserted 'It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English
say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus' (80), suggesting that he is
attempting to escape from the Anglo-European political wrangles of his own day into an apparently apolitical 'pure' realm of science.
Peacock's letter to Thackeray casts Septimus the Sidley Park hermit as a kind of patriotic anti-European mathematical warrior: he is
combating 'Frenchified mathematick'--that is, the Second Law of Thermodynamics--and attempting 'the restitution of hope through
good English algebra' (87).

The most enthusiastic opponent of a Little Englander perspective is Thomasina. She is open to and welcomes influences and
innovations from 'the Continent', presenting the 1990s audience with an appealing model of an English intellectual who is quite happy
to see herself as a European. She is delighted by Noakes's suspiciously (to Brice) foreign-looking garden, comparing it to the work of
the Italian painter Salvator Rosa (of whom her mother has never heard), and she embraces the waltz 'started in Germany!' (107). She
takes an iconoclastic delight in unseating the doyen of English mathematics, proclaiming that 'Newton's machine ... is incomplete'
(111). The great irony is that the 'Frenchified mathematick' that Septimus tries so hard, and so lovingly, to disprove, is not
'Frenchified' at all but comes to him through the English Thomasina.

Other characters have a more ambivalent relationship with Europe. Septimus, as we have seen, proudly claims calculus for the
English, but reads of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a French journal (108). Lady Croom expresses her patriotic horror at
'the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden' being replaced by a cosmopolitan landscape that combines suspiciously
alpine forests and crags with Chinese bridges and Egyptian obelisks (16).Yet by 1812 she has literally embraced European influence
in the shape of the Polish Count Zelinsky. In her very last speech she tells her daughter 'Ce soir il faut qu'on parle francais' (This
evening we must speak French) (116). Even in the depths of European war, 'the attraction that Newton left out' has led this most
English of aristocrats to open herself and her world to Europe.

Especially through Thomasina, Stoppard seeks to enter the early 1990s debate on Britain's relationship with Europe by offering a
very attractive portrait of a cosmopolitan mind free from patriotic defensiveness and enriched by European and indeed international
influences. Stoppard's own background places him in a privileged position in debates on Englishness and relations with 'The
Continent'. Czech-born, partly raised in India, educated in the English public school system, as enthusiastic about cricket as about
Russian history, Stoppard is the very model of the cosmopolitan European Englishman. His plays range from England (Arcadia) to
India (Indian Ink) to Czechoslovakia (Rock 'n' Roll) to Russia (The Coast of Utopia). Early 1990s Eurosceptics were determined to
see the UK and Europe as separated by sea, history, currency and culture, and some of the 1809-12 characters share this view.
Stoppard's answer is to point out and celebrate that England and Europe have never been truly separate. When Bernard describes
the pre-1810 Sidley Park as '[t]he real England', Hannah immediately points out that 'English landscape was invented by gardeners
imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors' (34). There never was a Little England.

Instead of purity, Arcadia offers us 'the mix': 'everything is mixing the same way, all the time irreversibly' (126). Just as the jam cannot
be unstirred from the rice pudding, the UK and Europe belong inextricably together.

Key terms

Arcadia

nineteenth-century context

Tom Stoppard

twentieth-century context

References and further reading

Stoppard, T. (1993) Arcadia, Faber and Faber.

Jonny Patrick teaches English at St Paul's Girls' School, London and is web activity consultant for THE ENGLISH REVIEW.

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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Philip Allan Updates

http://www.philipallan.co.uk/englishreview/index.htm
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Patrick, Jonny. "1809, 1812 and 1993: the contexts of Arcadia: Jonny Patrick considers the significance of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century historical and political contexts in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia." The English Review, vol. 20, no. 1, Sept. 2009, pp. 14+.
Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A208587503/LitRC?u=mlin_m_hds&sid=bookmark-
LitRC&xid=244ead63. Accessed 19 Oct. 2021.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A208587503