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Book Review: The Northumbrians By Dan Jackson
Originally published in LSE Review of Books
Date : 26/12/2019
Author Information
Uploaded by : Tom
Uploaded on : 26/12/2019
Subject : History
The
notion that North East England has been overlooked, patronised, forgotten and
misunderstood runs through Dan Jackson's The Northumbrians, a welcome
examination of the last two thousand years of history in this seemingly peripheral
corner of England. What may be seen today as a distant and uneventful region
for Jackson deserves not only considerable scholarly interest and attention but
popular engagement. This is a book for both historians and the general public
and one which succeeds in merging a life-long fascination and enthusiasm for
the people and history of the North East with a scholarly scepticism and reluctance
to engage in the exercise of navel-gazing. Jackson
has chosen the Northumbrians as his catch-all term for the people of the two
historic counties of Northumberland and Durham. This avoids bogging us down in
the imprecise demarcation of Geordies and Mackems, the two feuding tribes of
Tyne and Wear whose modern rivalry has obscured how much they share in common
(vii). It also ensures that the rural and middle class inhabitants of
Northumberland and Durham are included - groups traditionally neglected by the
urban working-class associations commonly made with Geordie - as well as connecting
the experience of the present with the deep-rooted and almost unchanging
cultural mores that have persisted over centuries (vii). This
preoccupation with Northumbria has had a long allure in the North East. Jackson
stands as a twenty-first century heir to the New Northumbrians of the
nineteenth century, a loose movement who saw themselves as alternative,
cultured and historic people distinct from the national norm. An interest in a
meaningful past and a sense of an ever-changing present fed this concern for
the region and for the Northumbria of Bede, St. Cuthbert and the castles, hills
and crumbling Roman remains far from the smog and soot of industrial Tyneside
and Wearside. With a perspective unavailable to the original New
Northumbrians , Jackson is able to trace the bonds which connect the nineteenth
century with the medieval and modern periods. This is a book which looks for
continuities rather than change, channelling Fernand Braudel's longue dur e,
and seeks to show how the hard-working, heavy drinking, sociable, macho and
sentimental North East grew out of hundreds of years of contested border
warfare and dangerous, but stimulating, industry. Few
histories of North East England take the grand sweep of time selected by The
Northumbrians and few have the range of sources, including poetry, song, art,
film and television, analysed succinctly here. The book is arranged thematically
rather than chronologically - a decision much to its benefit - and yet this
composition still allows for a neat Bede to Brexit structure. Included are
chapters on the North East's medieval past& the martial, fighting tradition
prevalent throughout the centuries& the work of the great inventors,
scientists, engineers and tinkerers who formed the Northumbrian
Enlightenment & the landscape and architecture (with a walking tour through the
Northumbrian Riviera ) of the region& its endemic sociability, hedonism and
boisterous drinking culture& and, finally, the current political scene, where
the old assumptions about a Labour-voting region are scrutinised. There
are elements of geography overlooked by other historians who have commonly seen
the hyper-masculine, hard-working stereotype of the contemporary North East as
stemming from the realities of working in the mines and industrial spaces of
the region. Jackson certainly believes that work in dangerous industry has
sustained a sense of toughness and a Stakhanovite pride in hard-work but a
heavily contested Anglo-Scottish border came first and made sure that violence
was the dominant factor in Northumbrian lives in a way that was absent
elsewhere in the rest of England (26). The region's martial tradition, its
formidable fighting record in the two world wars, emerges out of its
blood-soaked past just as living in a warzone made it prudent to huddle
together for warmth and safety (28) and arguably accounted for its modern sentimentality,
solidarity and communalism. The
macho-posturing of North East men may be seen today as one of the uglier
aspects of the region's historical hangovers, but learning, literacy and
curiosity have also been part of its story through the ages. The greatness of
Northumbria in the Dark Ages was based less on its political power than on the
distinctive Christian culture that flowered there in art and learning and
religious piety (9). This emphasis on literacy, exemplified in the medieval
period by the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Codex Amiatinus and the work of
the Venerable Bede, filters through into the second golden age of Northumbrian
history: the great era of the Northumbrian Enlightenment and the extraordinary
inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution. This
is a story usually told through the lives of gentleman inventors and tinkerers
George and Robert Stephenson, Lord Armstrong, Joseph Swan, Charles Parsons
but a focus on the achievements of many notable women Mary Astell, Jane
Gomeldon, Josephine Butler, Grace Darling - and the rigidly patriarchal society
they inhabited freshens Jackson's account. The rivers Tyne and Wear were then a
veritable Silicon Valley of Georgian England (63). Nineteenth-century
Tyneside was a sort of Dallas or Dubai or even Florence of the Industrial
Revolution, both entrepreneurial and highly literate (78)& a centre of
innovation, printing and study which welcomed many great figures including
Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Jean Paul Marat, E a de Queir s, Oscar Wilde,
Yevgeni Zamyatin, George Bernard Shaw and Ludwig Wittgenstein among others. This
interest in knowledge and ingenuity is further illuminated in the twentieth
century when a working-class intellectualism found expression in the pit
villages and towns of Northumberland and Durham. Jackson admires his pitman
painter grandfather and other autodidacts such as Thomas Burt, Jack Lawson, Sid
Chaplin, John Gray and Norman Cornish and discusses their work with insight and
intelligence. The achievements of the working-class intellectual and leader of
Newcastle City Council (1959-1965) T. Dan Smith, however, are brushed-over with
Jackson propagating many of the simplistic villain narratives that have found
currency recently. Nevertheless, his concern for the accomplishments of many little-known
Northumbrians livens the narration and will influence future work on the
region's cultural history. There
is a sense of a lost world in these pages, of a once great time now forgotten,
even though so much of the past still arguably hangs over the current scene. That
the North East was once so innovative, resourceful and enlightened, as well as
dangerous, poverty-stricken and exhausted, may surprise some. For those yet to
reckon with the compelling past of this peripheral corner of England, Dan
Jackson's The Northumbrians, a work of deep research and life-long
fascination, is an excellent place to start.
This resource was uploaded by: Tom