Nostalgia

It is easy to allow a romantic nostalgia to cloud judgement over what was not an easy life, but the Victorians certainly did cultivate and possess a sense of destiny and self-confidence that gave the British Empire colour, character, unity, and purpose. The empire peaked during the lifetime of Hetty Jane Owen and yet was well on its way to disappearing almost entirely when she died. Her country has struggled ever since to make sense of its role in the world, and how to define and itself accordingly. New waves of migration began, unsurprisingly from the former colonies of the empire, and the East End and other parts of Britain began to change character accordingly. How this new multicultural society with all its pluralities could be given a sense of cohesion was an issue that later generations would return to.

The later British thus entered a new period of not very articulate soul-searching, hearkening back to the past and bemoaning their loss of identity, and the apparent unwillingness of the new populations to adapt to their ‘way of life’. New citizenship measures and tests began to be discussed and implemented, as if such measures had not been tried, tested and failed in the centuries before, as if the concept of ‘identity’ could be somehow defined and fixed in time and in a history long gone, and alien in any case to its new populations.

A history and heritage goes up in flames. Docklands during the Blitz. From The Daily Mail.

It is not possible to suggest whether Hetty Jane felt herself to be more English, Anglo-Welsh or British, or indeed whether she troubled herself with such weighty questions at all. Nor is it possible to speculate about what she made of the troubled world she left behind. This much however can be said: In 1914, the British military were still engaged in discussions about the use of cavalry in the war to come. Hetty Jane, just about to marry Charles Albert Eldridge at that time, was to pass away on a planet where nuclear bombs had now been used for the first time to terrifying effect.

And such changes can only drive nostalgia for what in many ways must have been better days. Nostalgia however is not necessarily the best recipe for the prosperity and welfare of future generations.