Notes From A Small Island

As an American, Bryson has little patience for the monarchy that rules Great Britain, at least symbolically, and the aristocracy that dominates its complex class system. Unless these elite groups produce some new and extreme brand of eccentric behavior, Bryson views them as an insignificant distraction. As he puts it, “I thought they were insupportably boring” until, that is, they start to exhibit what the British believe is shocking behavior (55-56). He then begins to find them interesting, worthy of an American-level scandal. The British, in contrast, are appalled, and Bryson calls them to task: “If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way” (56). Bryson’s tenure in Great Britain does not, in some respects, make him any less an American in spirit.

He additionally notes that the complex system of titles and inheritances is almost impossible for any outsider to grasp. This, apparently, is what attracts the British to it: “Almost every realm of British life you could care to name, from the rules of cricket to the running of Parliament, is predicated on a system guaranteed to confound foreigners” (161). While Bryson does not belabor the point, it must be noted that the small island about which he writes is not only circumscribed by geography but also isolated by an insular culture. He includes the aristocracy in this “realm of British life,” and he proceeds to try to explain its rules (for his American audience, ostensibly). He also asserts, tongue firmly in cheek, that too many members of the aristocracy are directly descended “from that frolicsome and merry monarch Charles II” (163). He even goes so far as to invent a rather rude song about the monarch, his mistresses, and his progeny. Despite his overarching love of tradition and history, Bryson regards the “system of hereditary privilege” as an anachronism that has no place in modern life except as a form of entertainment.

While the author does not dwell on either the magnificence of the British empire or its dubious history of conquest and colonization, he does acknowledge its role in the history of his small island. England would not exist as it does had it not been for the centuries-long expansion and domination of the empire, first via mercantilism (the British East India Company) and then under the auspices of the crown. Bryson obliquely acknowledges this motif when he travels to Great Windsor Park, near the palace, where he discovers “things that the Queen had brought back from trips abroad and couldn’t think of anywhere else to put—obelisks and totem poles and other curious expressions of gratitude from distant outposts of the Commonwealth” (53). This catalog of items certainly serves to commodify and diminish foreign cultures; they are but trinkets of “gratitude” to the Queen.

It is also notable that Britain contains a wealth of “fake Roman ruins” (55), many of them commissioned during the 19th century, at the height of British imperial power: These serve as a link to another great imperial dynasty, a connection to the power of the past, the mighty Roman Empire. Bryson visits the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, which “contains only eight thousand items but they come from all over—from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome” (306). The museum’s catalog is one of the spoils of empire, or at least of imperial privilege, as Sir William Burrell put together his collection in the early part of the 20th century.

Bryson explicitly connects the decline of certain British cities and ways of life directly to the end of empire. For example, the city of Bradford once boasted “one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now” (173). In the wake of decolonization and war, the city undergoes a period of modernization from the 1950s through the 1970s that sweeps all the old historical buildings away. Now, ironically, “the local authorities are desperately trying to promote their meager stock of old buildings as tourist attractions” (174-75). Liverpool, “a place with more past than future” (211), represents an even starker representation of the decline precipitated by the end of empire: The docks are now empty in the once “great port,” “when the world was full of a productive busyness and majesty of enterprise” (213). In observing the debris of a vanished empire, Bryson notes that British ascendancy is on the wane, as Britain has long since been displaced as global hegemon by Bryson’s other home country, the United States.