Albion: Origins of the English Imagination [Hardcover]

Peter Ackroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2003

Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: The Biography with a book that once again plumbs the history of England and uncovers the continuities that link past and present. A dazzling, highly original exploration of English culture from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, ALBION demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality imbues every form of cultural expression—not just literature, but also painting, music, architecture, philosophy, and science.

In an intricate, expertly crafted mixture of narrative and theme, Ackroyd travels through time and across cultural categories as he seeks out the roots and the essence of the English imagination. With an irrepressible curiosity and contagious enthusiasm, he moves from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, Hogarth to Hockney, Purcell to Vaughan Williams, Inigo Jones to Edward Lutyens. His lively biographical sketches and incisive exegeses of the work of figures both well known and less familiar deepen our understanding and appreciation of our inherited culture. Like London: The Biography, ALBION contains unexpected treasures, including a thought-provoking look at immigration and assimilation and a delightful digression into the English obsession with gardening. Black-and-white photographs and drawings, and two lavish four-color inserts add visual appeal throughout.

Ackroyd’s talent for distilling information and presenting it with novelistic flair shines on every page of ALBION. It is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant and exuberant.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Even a writer as popular, prolific and inventive as Ackroyd can concoct a bore. Nevertheless, Albion is likely to succeed on his considerable reputation and the success of his bestselling London: The Biography. Here Ackroyd seeks to define and describe what he sees as distinctive qualities of the English imagination as they have developed since the country's beginnings. Quoting the 17th-century Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, he claims a cultural continuity-"we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again." But the Englishman, as Daniel Defoe remarked, and Ackroyd concedes, remained infinitely adaptable, having already assimilated waves of invasion and conquest-and become "Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman-English." Explaining that "mungrell" mingling in 53 thematic chapters, Ackroyd appropriates nearly every quality in literature and the arts for England (largely ignoring Ireland and downplaying Scotland). He cites love of gardens, worship of trees, cultivation of dream-visionaries, affection for eccentricity, affinity for morbid sensationalism, attraction to understatement, pleasure in alliteration, fondness for cross-dressing, passion for antiquarianism, ease with an empirical temper, relish for detective and ghost stories, penchant for portrait miniatures, creative adaptation of folksong. It is a sentimental stretch. Where London was animated by a brilliant exploitation of anecdote, Albion lacks its verve. Rather, it is armed with a goodly-and defensive-helping of "It has often been said," "it might even be said," "It is no surprise, either, that," and often bogs down in bland thesis and empty persuasion. Yet vastly learned and frequently engaging, it may prove good bedtime reading-a veritable night school. B&w and color illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Following the triumph of London: A Biography (2001), Ackroyd confidently and entertainingly delves into a far more elusive aspect of the English experience, the origins of England's distinctive, widely influential imagination. Albion is an ancient name for the island as well as for the primeval giant who made it his home, a clue to the two primary characteristics Ackroyd discusses in this marvelous synthesis: the deeply rooted connection between the English and their land and a reverence for the past. Ackroyd begins by discussing how trees became sacred symbols of life and continuity, and, as he does with each ensuing subject, whether it's the sea, stones, rain, gardens, music, painting, or ghosts, he presents a cascade of evocative examples, keenly interpreting various artists, composers, and dozens of writers, including Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Austen, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The English imagination is stoked by visions and leavened with wit, Ackroyd avers, forming not a linear progression but, rather, a shining circle that leads back to the "original sources of inspiration," be they Celtic, classical, or Christian. A master extrapolator and wonderfully epigrammatic stylist fluent in many disciplines, Ackroyd has created a key to English creativity past, present, and future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese (October 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385497725
• ISBN-13: 978-0385497725
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,146,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An erudite scrapbook, August 22, 2004

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Albion: Origins of the English Imagination (Hardcover)

Though I'm almost worryingly Anglophile, I did not find this an all too easy read. The book's structure is unclear - it seems to start out chronologically, but halfway through continues thematically. It is also rather fragmented, though this has the advantage of offering something for everyone; it's like picking through trinkets at some bric-a-brac store. Ackroyd's massive erudition is never in doubt, but it is a pity he seems more concerned with showing it off rather than curtailing it within the confines of a coherent argument. At times the author lapses into mere namedropping that struck me as rather random. Nor is his argument always consistent. E.g., he notes that English gardening is suffused with territorial and warlike thinking and terminology; yet, two pages on he states that English gardens are characterised by meandering lines that bespeak of a "distaste for regimentation."

Be aware also that Ackroyd's interpretation of "imagination" veers very much towards literature; architecture, landscape gardening, painting and music are treated cursorily at best - there is a final chapter on music, but it covers only a few pages and deals almost exclusively with Vaughan Williams.

In general I'm not at all convinced that Ackroyd succeeds in making a case for the specificity of English imagination. He cites many examples for which equivalents could, it seems to me, with equal ease be found in French or German art. Just a glance at a Caspar David Friedrich painting will be enough to show you that there is nothing peculiarly English about a melancholy obsession with the transience of things. Parts of this book are thought-provoking, parts are entertaining, and all of it is definitely well-written. But in the final reckoning it does no more than vaguely delineate the outlines of a hypothesis; it certainly does not prove it. The essence of the undeniably peculiar Englishness that suffuses works by Gainsborough, Turner, Britten, Elgar, Shakespeare, Dickens, "Capability" Brown and Vanbrugh alike (to name just a very few) simply eludes these pages. What you are left with is an erudite scrapbook.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Enlgish (read Anglo-Saxon) Imagination, November 28, 2003

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Albion: Origins of the English Imagination (Hardcover)

Peter Ackroyd is never at a loss for words and he uses a great many of them to trace the origins and progression of the English imagination from its very early Anglo-Saxon beginnings until the twentienth century in his new massive tome, Albion. Along the way, he covers music, art, religion, philosophy, history, and biography, as well as, of course, literature, and merges them together in quite insightful ways. The book is strongest in the early Anglo-Saxon and medieval sections that set up the author's thesis and it can grow a tad bit repetitious in theme in the later chapters as he pounds home his ideas. Overall though, the reader should be fascinated by the vast number of examples from primary (and some interesting secondary) sources that pepper the book. The author's knowledge is vast and his selection of sources is unimpeccable. A frequently interesting read.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What makes an Englishman?, April 20, 2011

By 

Joseph N. Anderson (UT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Albion: Origins of the English Imagination (Hardcover)

Albion traces ideas, images and patterns across the centuries to consider what it means to be English. Any Anglophile will enjoy the many and varied cultural references linked within Ackroyd's dense but fascinating text. Beginning and ending with Englishmen I admire (historian the Venerable Bede (d. 735) and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (d. 1958)), these two disparate personalities were brought together in one memorable statement: "The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself." To me, reading this book was like examining the contents of an ancient attic trunk, ruminating on the people, places, and things that made you who you are. When you come to the end of your literary pilgrimage, you're better for having experienced it.