The Special Relationship: Elisa Tamarkin’s ‘Anglophilia’

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In “Anglophilia” (University of Chicago Press, 384 pages, $35), Elisa Tamarkin has hit on a first-rate idea: Americans in the 19th century were noted (by non-Americans) for their national vanity, chauvinism, and Anglophobia. And yet, as Ms. Tamarkin establishes, they were marked equally by what she calls Anglophilia: a sentimental respect, amounting almost to love, for England, and a fascination with its history, culture, politics, manners, and way of life. Anglophilia, in short, was as much a part of the national character as Anglophobia. The observation is not new (Henry James is full of it) but Ms. Tamarkin, so far as I know, is the first to write a scholarly study of the subject — a book which, properly put together, might change for good many perceptions of the American people.

And she lays out her subject intelligently, beginning with the fascinated welcome given to Queen Victoria’s son and heir, the future Edward VII, when he visited North America in the summer and fall of 1860. She follows this discussion with chapters on nostalgia for the Colonial past, on the abolitionists and Britain, and on “the Anglophile Academy” — chiefly Harvard College. In design, “Anglophilia” is everything that it ought to be, and Ms. Tamarkin has worked extremely hard to fill out her design with telling detail. She shows herself to be a learned and intelligent scholar.

But she is an appalling writer, in fact hardly a writer at all. “Anglophilia” reads as if it had been cobbled together from a string of conference papers. The author gives herself away by repeatedly using phrases such as “I want to suggest … ,” “I want to argue … ,” and “I would like to say …” (Who’s stopping you?) and by frantic name-dropping: “Adorno, for one …”; “We need not turn to Clifford Geertz …”; “Following Walter Benjamin …”; “to follow Srinivas Aravamudan.”

The atmosphere is unmistakable: the stuffy seminar room, the overanxious presenter, the tiny coterie that forms the audience. No one has taken the trouble to show Ms. Tamarkin how to turn working papers into a book. She is so comfortable in her coterie, and is so fatigued from her research, that she cannot be bothered, or has not the energy, to write freshly.

And this is a serious matter. Very occasionally a memorable observation escapes from her word-processing. Thus, she shows how the generous treatment meted out by General Gates to General Burgoyne after the surrender at Saratoga made Americans think better of themselves: By conforming to gentlemanly English standards, Americans showed that they were gentlemen, too, even if revolutionaries. It is depressing to think how many more such insights are lost in this waste of verbiage. It is even more depressing to reflect that until academics, would-be historians, mend their ways, American citizens will be denied access to their own history and the best discoveries of modern historians by the very people who should be helping them. By what right do academics presume to write only for each other while drawing salaries from public institutions?

In every generation, Americans (and the people of all other nations, too, of course) need to think about themselves and their destiny as seriously and intelligently as possible. The chief duty of American historians is to assist them. They will never fulfill this duty while they treat the history of the national character as no more than a topic for professorial pirouettes.

Mr. Brogan is a professor of American history at the University of Essex, and the author of “Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biography,” among other books.


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