Albion, The Origins of the English Imagination, by Peter Ackroyd, New York and London: Doubleday, 2003. xxiv + 484 pp.

Those who savor everything English as precisely their cup of tea will find Peter Ackroyd’s Albion truly suited to their taste. Daring and delightful in concept, an exploration of the roots of his country’s creativity, it is a daunting enterprise. Consider the time span, more than two millennia, from the myths of antiquity to the events of only yesterday. Regard the cast of characters, literally hundreds, as one critic observed, “everyone from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.” Not only is this a work of impressive scholarship, but it is as well a serious demonstration of the importance of the past and of tradition, of those essential values that distinguish an enduring society.

Americans are likely to find this volume particularly fascinating since our own country at its beginnings was a rebel offshoot of the British Empire and we continue to share a common language, a literary heritage, and other strong cultural influences. Even such a significant Briton as Winston Churchill, who stubbornly led the English resistance in the war against the fascists, was half American, which perhaps explains why he does not appear in this text. But Ackroyd misses little else.

He comes masterfully qualified to this mammoth task: acclaimed biographer (of Thomas More, Dickens, Blake, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot), award-winning novelist, poet and cultural critic. He is also the author of London: The Biography (2000), a best-seller. He employs his novelistic talents to impart a narrative flow to his survey: his biographical skills to recount the lives that enlighten this panorama; finally, he employs his knowledge and skill to make this account as readable as it is rewarding.

At the outset, Ackroyd rejects the notion of the British as arising from a single stock, citing instead the admixture of Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, the Roman invaders, Danish sea-raiders and settlers, and the Norman incursion. He supports the position put forth by Ford Madox Ford in his The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (1912), emphasizing “the imperative of place” as more significant than “any linguistic or racial concerns.” Ackroyd agrees with Ford’s belief, “That it is not a matter of race but one, quite simply, of place—of place and of spirit, the spirit being born of the environment.”

To cover the vast time-frame of his study, the author still has to array his material in some order. Ackroyd has organized his observations into some fifty chapters within nineteen sections on themes as general as “Old English” on early history; as specific as “An English Bible” on the King James translation; as varied as “Green England” on the British mania for gardening; and as amusing as “Melodrama” on their taste for blood, gore, and ghosts.

Two collections of color illustrations, portraits, paintings, and historic relics, offer a glimpse of English cultural history. Black and white illustrations, equally instructive, open individual chapters. As a further help in grasping the wide scope of his study, Ackroyd offers a six-page “chronology of characters,” 180 of them, from the author Caemon (active from 670 to 80) to the artist David Hockney (1937-).

Such features, useful as they are in linking the centuries, hardly suggest the full flavor of Ackroyd’s retelling. Take, for example, his account of the life of the seventeenth-century holy man, the Venerable Bede, priest, scholar, and writer, who spent his years in the Benedictine monastery and scriptorium at Jarrow, an Anglo-Saxon house of prayer and learning. Renowned for his piety, his erudition, and his history of the early church, in his sixty-third year, aware he has come upon his final hours, he is shown sitting in his cell, as Ackroyd says, capping his quiet life with a peaceful death, praying and singing to his last breath.

In contrast, there is the telling of the short and tragic life of Thomas Chatterton, the most celebrated, most successful literary faker of the eighteenth century. Born in Bristol in 1752 in a house opposite the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, he came into the world after the death of his father, an antiquarian, who left him a miscellany of old manuscripts, notes, and various scraps of memorabilia. The boy grew up obsessed with the past, invented a fifteenth-century monk, one “Thomas Rowley,” of St. Mary Redcliffe, the writer of much poetry, discovered by Chatterton, he insisted, in an ancient chest within the church. Astonishingly, Chatterton forged 687 pages of poetry and prose before he was found dead at eighteen, an apparent suicide, in his London attic room. He became the sentimental sensation of the time, despite the eventual discovery of his incredible fraudulence.

In “A Short History of Shakespeare” Ackroyd is at his best since, as he declares, “To write about Shakespeare is to write about everything,” comparing him “to the air we breathe,” announcing “he is now within the fabric of our language,” and noting, “Such is the power and persuasiveness of his work that each day, somewhere in the world, a book is published upon his work or upon his influence.” He was, of course, an actor before he became a playwright and continued to appear upon the stage after his success as a dramatist. What little we know of him, Ackroyd suggests, is what he wished us to know, skilled as he was in portraying character, probably even his own. While he revealed a desire to be known as a gentleman, with pride in his coat of arms, and as a successful businessman, with properties in both Stratford and London, he was not known as overly mindful of his growing fame. He was thus, Ackroyd concludes, “the image of modesty and self-effacement, thereby embodying the highest virtues to which English writers can aspire.”

But there is no denying the power and impact of his playwriting, “his mingling of high and low, king and fool, prince and gravedigger, commander and soldier, scholar and buffoon,” “moving fluently from farce to pathos, comedy to tragedy, while all the time ever shifting from theatrical pageant to intense soliloquy.” Ackroyd points out, “More than any other dramatist, he is the poet of dreams and visions.” “In the island of ghosts and spirits…ghosts wander through his tragedies and histories and his last plays are surrounded by visionary enchantments.” “The qualities of the English imagination,” Ackroyd concludes, “are everywhere apparent in Shakespearean drama.”

Quite a different matter is reviewed in “An English Bible” with a chapter entitled “In the Beginning” concerning the composition of the King James translation into English of the Bible. It traces the history of various earlier translations, the first in 1535 by Coverdale, followed by one known as “Matthew’s Bible,” the work of Coverdale and Tyndal, which was to become known as the “Great Bible.” This was followed by the Geneva translation during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It went through sixty editions, testifying to the increasing demand by the English for the Bible in their own language.

This growing popularity did not escape the notice of King James I, who was also suspicious that certain constructions seemed to deny the divine right of kings to rule. He therefore called a conference at Hampton Court to consider a politically correct translation. The scholars proposed that a company of translators be established “to begin work upon a wholly new translation that would avoid the excesses of Puritanism, Presbyterianism and Roman Catholicism.” Their ambition was, working with all available texts, “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.”

They were to succeed beyond the most hopeful expectations, as Matthew Arnold was to assert, “producing an English book and one only…where perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness.” It was the perfect blending of English spirituality and English imagination, Ackroyd declares, which was to have a profound influence upon the English language, as was once noted: “its phraseology has become part and parcel of our common language—bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh.”

Ackroyd has much to say about Charles Dickens, whose life reads like a Victorian novel. A bright, energetic boy, eager to learn, he was taken out of school and put to work in a blacking factory when his father was imprisoned for bankruptcy. His brief, bitter experience as a child laborer Dickens was never to forget nor to forgive. But he proved quick and adept as a court reporter and the fictional sketches he wrote, collected and published as Pickwick Papers (1837), were a great success. He would go on to triumph after triumph as a novelist, as an owner and editor of successful magazines, and a career as a public reader of the most emotional episodes from his writings. To his worldwide fame was added the scandal of an unhappy marriage and his affair with a beauteous actress.

Dickens seemed to draw his boundless energy and inspiration, Ackroyd suggests, from the hustling, bustling metropolis that was the London of his time. As Dickens himself wrote of the city, “Draw but a little circle above the clustering housetops and you shall have within its space everything, with its opposite and contradiction close by.” Here “life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid themselves down together; and here also were wealth and beggary; vice and virtue, guilt and innocence…all treading on each other and crowding together.” He felt “the restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and turns before it can get to sleep.” Finally, “every voice is merged… into a distinct, ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass vibrating.” To which Ackroyd adds, “Spectacle and melodrama are intrinsic aspects of the London vision and thus, by extension, of the English imagination itself.”

He closes this work by returning to the theme stated at the outset: “In England the reverence for the past and the affinity with the natural landscape join together in a mutual embrace, to which we owe much to the ground on which we dwell. It is the landscape and the dreamscape. It encourages a sense of longing and belonging. It is Albion.”

Having read Albion once for the scope and sensitivity of its unfolding of English creativity over the centuries, the reader is likely to be driven back to the book to plumb its auxiliary aspects: the chronology of characters that opens the book, the treasury of illustrations, the fulsome notes and exhaustive bibliography—all continually useful references for those who wish to dig deeper into the subject. Finally, putting the book aside, the thought is inescapable, as one reviewer has perceptively noted, that here Ackroyd has himself in his own writing illustrated most thoroughly the quality of the English imagination. Surely there is no more worthy praise than that for this unusual, accomplished book.