University Technology of Santiago

(UTESA)

Presented by:

Tahis Romero

ID:

2-17-1799

To:

Teofilo Álvarez

Subject:

English Culture

Topic:

The North

Date:

March 15, 2023

The North

Performances of both national identification and national exclusion were the journeys to
England described in the preceding chapter. Traveling allowed for the formation of a cultural
and political sense of the Englishness territory through the consolidation of only a small portion
of that territory as containing fundamental national values.

The North was frequently erased or recast in acceptable forms in popular travel literature, as
was discussed in the preceding chapter. One illustration of the former is A. F. Tschiffely's quick
detour around Warrington; One example of the latter is H. V. Morton's restoration of Wigan as
an English country town. There were other ways in which the southern cultural hegemony
operated.

The North's construction as an English other and its own construction as a distinct expression of
English modernity will both be examined in this chapter. The journeys of George Orwell from
London to Wigan and Tom Harrisson from London to Bolton will be the subject of the first
section. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell's account of his time in Wigan and the North,
became a definitively inaccurate portrayal of the area, employing a repertoire of imagery and
judgments that remained influential for the next century.

Northern Journeys

The techniques that Orwell would use in his essays on national identity a few years later are
used in the first part of The Road to Wigan Pier. Vivid images removed from social contexts
replace argued political points. Announcing back from what, in his most Conradian vein, hecalls
'the foul heart of progress', Orwell presents the North as a defamiliarised Britain - a sort of
crude province inside the boundaries of the homeland.

Orwell followed his own advice and traveled quickly through Leeds, Sheffield, Wigan, and
Barnsley in February and March 1936, never to return. Despite being published by Victor
Gollancz's Left Book Club imprint, The Road to Wigan Pier stands out for its lack of mention of
Raymond Williams' "actual social and political network," which enabled him to access the
places of work and unemployment that he so vividly describes.

Postcolonial North
A thwarted political and cultural geography was woven into the images of the English North
that Orwell and MassObservation provided in the 1930s. According to Patrick Joyce, the "locus
classicus of a new urban industrial civilization" was what they represented as otherness.
Northern urban areas like Manchester and Leeds and townslike Bolton and Wigan were not
crude settlements past the fanciful boondocks of the Trent, however what current Englishness
really was.

In September 1931, Mohandas Gandhi went to England to represent the Congress Party at the
London Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform. During the course of his trip,
he spent a week in Lancashire's cotton fields and West Yorkshire's explaining the significance of
his anticolonialist khaddar strategy to those who were most likely to be affected by it. Khaddar
was his campaign to stop the importation of goods from other countries, especially cotton,
which Gandhi believed should be made in the poor Indian villages that were his primary
political focus.

Northern Modernities

The reciprocal relationship of nearby northern social customs furthermore, rising public and
worldwide developments was likewise prominent inthe totally different setting of English
mainstream society. Mid-century Lancashire comedians Gracie Fields and Frank Randle offer
opposing perspectives on the divergent modernity of expression that northern culture pitted
against dominant Englishness.

Gracie Fields reportedly began her performance in 1928 at the London Palladium by saying,
"Eee, by gum." It's just too extravagant for me! a line that established her identity as a Rochdale
mill girl who, through an embarrassing accident, ended up on the most prestigious London
variety stage. She asked her audience to "imagine we're in our front room and we're having a
bit of a "do"" in 1933 at the Holborn Empire.

Thus, Fields reversed the process of "othering" that was depicted in Orwell's and Harrisson's
northern journeys and established an identity by carefully balancing regional and national
identities. It was a process that shaped her entire professional life. For instance, a lunch that
her record company EMI hosted at the Trocadero cabaret to commemorate the release of her
four millionth record in 1933 was renamed a "Lancashire do."