A. J. Cook, D. H. Lawrence, and Revolutionary England: Discourses and Performances of Region and Nation in 1926
The mid-1920s marked the height in popularity of the literary travelogue as a mode of articulating post-First World War English identity. A nostalgia for rural living and the idea that socially coherent traditions could be ‘rediscovered’ in the byways of the English countryside prompted writers such as Henry Morton, author of In Search of England (1927), the most celebrated example of the genre, to leave London and extol places that were still ‘guarding the traditions of the race’ (Morton 1927: x). The origins of Morton’s book were in a series of dispatches to the Daily Express that began in April 1926 with a characteristic evocation of an ‘unknown dream village’ representing ‘the essence of England, the unit of our social development, the germ of all that we have become, something almost too English to be true’ (Morton 1926b: 15). That journey of visionary recovery was halted after only two further bulletins, however, a hiatus announced in the reduced edition of 4 May which carried the headline ‘MOMENTOUS GENERAL STRIKE BEGINS’. The conjunction of national celebration and national schism provides the focus for this chapter, which sets Morton’s work alongside the contemporary fiction and journalism of D. H. Lawrence and the oratory of Arthur Cook, General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) as they responded to the continuation of the industrial conflict of May in the coalfields of the East Midlands during the summer and autumn of 1926.KeywordsEnglish LiteraturePolitical GeographyGeneral StrikeEmergency PowerPolitical ContestThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.