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Dear Mr Kendall

     It would take a long essay to explain why, in her estimable piece ‘Names Was Made to be Spoke’, Sheenagh Pugh is almost certainly wrong to think that the “long tradition of celebration and commemoration, of a determination to mark and keep what was, while one still can, not because it was necessarily wonderful in itself, but because it happened, it was there... is possibly more of a Celtic than an English obsession.” But it ought at least to be noted that such celebration and commemoration must surely come from a keen sense of the past as another country, of change as loss. In which case I’d say that what seems to me an entirely new consciousness of such loss is, not surprisingly, to be found in England in the latter half of the 18th century. It’s then that time begins to feel different (for which see E.P. Thompson’s unsurpassable essay on ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’), then that people begin to register how different England is beginning to look, then that Wordsworth writes ‘Michael’. (“Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale,/ There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name” – real garden, imaginary toad). And not many years after that Clare is writing about Langley Bush and speaking in the voice of Swordy Well and, too, his part of the midlands. And on a lesser scale Barnes is doing the same in Dorset. And then, infinitely greater, comes Hardy. And, prompted in part at least by an apprehension of catastrophic change associated with 4 August, 1914, there are Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney.

     As for the novelists... But this is intended to be a brief letter.

Yours sincerely,
John Lucas