What have the Belgians to do with British Nineteenth-Century Culture?

Anyone who has offered work with ‘Belgian’ in the title to an Anglophone publisher or editor will know how tricky that can be. A book on the history of German psychiatry, or French masculinities, or British Romanticism, seems perfectly logical; replace the national indicators with ‘Belgian’ in these titles, and editors start frowning: is there an international audience for such studies? Who are these Belgians anyway? Some of them speak French, others Dutch (or is it Flemish, and is there a difference?), and (since the First World War) a very small minority even German. So what is it with this hybrid and confusing little country, and why would one bother about its history and culture? Let us assume there is French, German and British thought, but can we accept there is something like Belgian philosophy? And is raising this question so troublesome because it also questions how easily we talk about ‘national’ schools and traditions as long as they are French, German or English? Literary scholar Marysa Demoor convincingly shows in A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918 how manifold, crucial and productive the encounters between the British and Belgian nineteenth-century worlds have been, and how revisiting these meetings can stimulate historical as well as contemporary debates on British national identity.

‘The Belgians are far better than the French’, Charles K. Scott Moncrieff, aged 25, wrote to his mother in November 1914, while he was serving with the Kings Own Scottish Borderers and was stationed in the vicinity of Ypres. Hardly a Francophobe, Scott Moncrieff would a few years later gain a reputation as the English translator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. In the letter to his mother, he explained: ‘The Flemish really are like us. . . . they are simple, capable, friendly folk. I love them’. Scott Moncrieff was no doubt influenced by a longer romantic tradition, which Demoor convincingly links to ‘The Allure of the Middle Ages’ (in Chapter Five). The Scottish young intellectual desired to see with his own eyes the historical Flemish towns he knew from reading. Inevitably present in his mind as well was the then topical image of a violent Hun violating Gallant Little Belgium. But there was more at play than just aesthetic attraction and war propaganda. In his poem ‘Domum’, published in 1915 in The Wykehamist, the magazine of his former school, Winchester College, he wrote:

Fighting on Belgian soil, Scott Moncrieff is reminded of the many British soldiers who died on that same territory during the Napoleonic wars, and he hears their voices from their graves. Demoor pertinently remarks in her introduction: ‘Ironically, . . . it so happened that in the nineteenth century when all European countries were constructing their own identities, often based on military victories, much of the British identity was constructed on battlefields elsewhere – and no country absorbed as much British blood per square mile as Belgium’ (pp. 6-7). She points to a recurrent theme in English literature: British blood and bones turn foreign fields into native land, most famously, of course, in Rupert Brooke’s lines ‘some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’. In Scott Moncrieff’s verses, a similar sentiment transpires. The Flemish ‘lowlands by the English sea’ have, through their absorption of British blood, almost become part of the mother country and its inhabitants are entitled to British friendship and protection.

Scott Moncrieff is not one of the authors discussed in Demoor’s monograph. It is impossible to include each and every example of British-Belgian encounter. My citing of this example is therefore not meant as a criticism; quite the contrary, it reinforces the author’s claims about the significance and prevalence of these mutual engagements. Demoor’s erudite, yet highly readable, book brings together for the first time different components of these entanglements, roughly from 1815 (the Napoleonic wars and Waterloo) to 1918 (the Great War and Flanders Fields). Let me in this brief review highlight three different axes along which these encounters ran.

First, there are the royal dynastic connections. Belgium’s first king Leopold I was the husband of Britain’s heiress to the throne, Princess Charlotte, who had died in 1817 at the age of 21. Victoria was his niece, and she married his cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburgh. Whoever has read the correspondence between the young queen Victoria and king Leopold I realizes that these royal connections were far from faits divers, but had a real impact on nineteenth-century British and European politics. Royalty ‘brought the two countries together’, but the African ambitions of Leopold II and his exploitative rule over the Congo produced ‘the absolute low point of the relationship between Belgium and the United Kingdom and the contacts between their two royal families’ (p. 166).

A second important component would be the battlefields (the ‘mudscapes’ of the title) and war graves. British tourists today still flock to Ypres and Flanders Fields, as they did during the nineteenth century to Waterloo. While British identity is often said to be ‘insular’, some of its most defining lieux de mémoire are situated on the continent, and most importantly in Belgium. These fields are both foreign and domestic, distant and close, outlandish and familiar. Visiting these places and encountering its ‘native’, Belgian population, which was so close and yet so strange, constituted a significant aspect of British identity formation during the nineteenth century. The book elaborately discusses the literary ruminations on Waterloo by well-known authors such as Wordsworth, Southey, Scott and Byron (in Chapter Three), and the representation of the Belgian battlefields by the war poets of the Great War (in Chapter Eight).

Thirdly, there are numerous examples of novelists, poets, art critics and artists for whom the contact with Belgium, its history and inhabitants, had a decisive impact on their own work. Sometimes, these English creative minds had ended up in Belgium more or less coincidentally, as in the case of the young Anthony Trollope, whose parents had to escape from their creditors and who sought refuge in the town of Bruges (Chapter Four), or the equally young Charlotte and Emily Brontë, who enrolled at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, mainly to learn French, and opted for Brussels because Lille was more expensive (Chapter Six). Such twists of fate could have, as Demoor demonstrates, a lasting impact: growing up in the context of bilingual and predominantly Catholic Belgium was a transforming experience. Other British authors and artists came to visit Belgium (and sometimes, like James Weale, to live there) with a clear intention, and anything but by chance. They were often looking very specifically for the remnants of Medieval Flanders, the country of Van Eyck and the Flemish primitives. That was the case for the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Gabriel Rossetti, but William Morris, too, was deeply influenced by Flemish art and literature (discussed in Chapter Five). In a chapter on ‘Surrealist Entanglements’ (Chapter Seven), the author draws a genealogy ‘from the grotesque fantasy figures in Brueghel and Bosch’ to ‘the manner in which Flemish grotesque fantasy found its way into the [nineteenth-century] British cultural field and in literature’ (p. 183), exemplified by the work of Lewis Carroll (and the illustrators John Tenniel and Henry Holiday) and J. R. R. Tolkien. James Ensor, son of a British father and a Belgian mother, is described by Demoor as ‘the apotheosis to this shared fascination’ (p. 194).

Ensor was one of the artists affiliated to Les XX, often seen as a pivotal group within the Belgian avant garde. Demoor does a wonderful job (in Chapter Nine) in disentangling the connections between these Belgian artistic circles and British connoisseurs, critics, collectors and artists. One of the key figures in this transnational artistic web was the symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff, but it is equally fascinating to read how present Belgium was in the work and world of Henry James, although not always in a flattering way.

This Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium is multifaceted and to a certain extent kaleidoscopic. The author does make use of theoretical concepts (such as histoire croisée, Othering, and even the subaltern), but it is probably not for its contribution to theory that this monograph is noteworthy. It is a pleasure, however, to stroll with the author through a century of British-Belgo entanglements, and to discover with her the central presence of Belgium in the British imagination. While the book also explores how Britain mattered for Belgian authors and artists, the emphasis is clearly on British culture. Marysa Demoor is a scholar of English literature, after all, and she seems much more invested in the field of British studies than in Belgian cultural history. One final remark: this original book deserved a more appealing layout and a better quality of illustrations.