11 - Aeronationalism

Summary

‘Fancy with airy flights my Noddle crouds,

I'm like the Nation, wholly in the Clouds’

Edward Topham, Epilogue to Deception, 1784

IN NOVEMBER 1784 three plays were reviewed by The Universal Magazine. One, Frederick Pilon's Aerostation, explicitly jokey about balloons, had a cast of characters with European interests. A second, John O'Keeffe's Fontainbleau, included a comic character called Colonel Epaulette, a French fan of England who came on stage humming ‘Britannia rules the waves’. The third, a farce by Thomas Linley called The Spanish Rivals, included a Cumberland boy speaking in broad dialect who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Gibraltar and thereafter kept in Spain. In each of these plays people crossed national borders and still kept local identities. Comedy staged inter-nationalism while recognising national characters and conflicts. Comedy also questioned simplistic ideas of British national character:

A well-educated British gentleman, it may truly be said, is of no country whatever. He unites in himself the characteristics of all different nations: he talks and dresses French, and sings Italian: he rivals the Spaniard in indolence, and the German in drinking: his house is Grecian, his offices Gothic, and his furniture Chinese. He preserves the same partiality in his religion, and finding no solid reasons for preferring Confucius to Brama, or Mahometanism to Christianity, he has for all their doctrines an equal indulgence.

The self-styled Lounger who penned this portrait is thinking humorously about patriotism. Just as balloons were both serious and comic, national character was solid enough to survive ironies – or, looking the other way round, national character was solidified by irony. (The British are still inclined to be defined through their sense of humour.) Satirical prints showed that people were perfectly used to reading a language of exaggeration in which truth could be found. Truth might even be easier to recognise when it was dressed in exaggeration. But for all the playfulness about national character, in 1783 and the years immediately following there was a seriousness in discussions about the state of the nation that reflected deep uncertainties and worry about Britain's prospects.