There are two Nordic words that have no direct English equivalent. Literally translated, the Norwegian and Swedish expression likhet means equality and sameness, the two concepts being indivisible, implying a uniformity in both standards and appearances, or of them ‘being the same worth’ (Gullenstad, 2002). The nearest English equivalents to the Swedish word lagom are phrases such as ‘just enough’, ‘just right’ or ‘everything in moderation’, but these do not adequately recognize the moral force this expression has come to have in Sweden. In that country, lagom conveys strong disapproval of anything that suggests overindulgence, with a simultaneously strong approval of moderation and self-effacement. In such ways, lagom and likhet have become immensely strong characteristics of Nordic society, signifying as they do an emphasis on egalitarianism and inclusion, as well as the high levels of informal social control that enforce these values, in order to bring about conformity and uniformity, rather than exclusion and division.
That there are no direct English equivalents to these two words also tells us a great deal about the Anglophone societies. There are no direct equivalents because, instead of equality and sameness, there is much more emphasis on individuality and difference; instead of moderation, there is much more emphasis on aggrandizement and self-advancement. In these respects, if the Nordic countries are ‘just right’ societies, then the Anglophone are ‘getting on’ societies. Rather than the Nordic values that give importance to egalitarianism, cohesion and the status quo, upward mobility has more value in the Anglophone, particularly because, in these societies, one’s standing is very much dependent on one’s place in their (more hierarchical) class structures. This is inferred in various English phrases that have no Nordic equivalents: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’; ‘knowing one’s place’; ‘looking up to one’s betters’. The origins of these different value systems doubtless lie wayback in history, and it may well be that, in the aftermath of social and economic changes in Western society as a whole since the 1970s, they are no longer as visible as was once the case. Nonetheless, from the early nineteenth century, they were given a particular momentum and force through the nexus provided by four particular features of the modern organization of these societies: class structure, degree of homogeneity, the value and function of education, and the role given to the central state in everyday governance. As this occurred, these different value systems fed back into and shaped and reshaped the way in which it became possible to see and understand the world.
In the mid-nineteenth century, most land in the Nordic countries was divided into self-sufficient smallholdings that belonged to the bönder – independent farmers.1 This meant that there was no powerful landowning class that lived off the profits of land rented out to agricultural labourers. Norway was the exemplar of this form of social organization. Here, on the death of a landholder, property was shared among all descendants, rather than inherited by the first born, thereby preventing the build-up of large estates. As Crichton (1842: 349) explained, ‘the land has been parcelled out into small estates of 40 or 60 acres, affording a competent subsistence, with a moderate share of the elegancies of civilized life; but in no degree supplying the means of luxury, or the accumulation of wealth. The number of proprietors, in proportion to the rest of the population, is perhaps greater than in any other country in Europe. Equally remote from poverty and affluence, and addicted neither to extravagance nor enterprise, they are content to enjoy the simple comforts of their paternal domain. ‘It was also a matter of necessity to build strong interdependencies in the small rural communities, given the challenges posed by geography, climate and the sparse population – hence, the dugnad tradition in this country (similarly, talkoot in Finland). Literally, this means ‘voluntary community work’ but, in practice, it related to a broad range of mutually reciprocated neighbourly activities and support. The Norwegian bønder were also politically significant and influential – the 1814 Constitution gave the vote to 45 per cent of the male population, ensuring that these farmers had a potential majority in parliament – indeed, the Farmers’ Party maintained a strong political presence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although this country retained its monarchy, the nobility was abolished in 1821, with the result being, as the newspaper Aftonbladet (1 August 1839: 3) explained, ‘there is no court with all its hangers on [in Norway], no arrogant and impoverished nobility with much life at others’ expense’.
However, Sweden was then a more stratified society. Here, the nobility maintained their titles and high social status. Laing (1837: 77) thus referred to the ‘splendid court’ in Stockholm, and noted that ‘the Swede has a remarkable fondness for dress; and dresses well, converses well, dances well, has ease and elegance about him … this is the influence of a court in a small city’. In reality, though, the Swedish aristocracy had been stripped of most of its land at the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, it was redistributed in such a way that the political power of the bönder was strengthened in this society, as well. As a consequence, the Swedish nobles did not constitute a ruling elite, detached from the rest of society on large estates. Laing (ibid.: 180, our italics) thus qualified his comments on the court by stating that ‘I had formed an erroneous idea of the Swedish nobility. I had imagined they were a rich and splendid class … but they are, with few exceptions, extremely poor, living from civil or military employment with small pay. There are few signs of luxury or opulence in Sweden.’ Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century ‘in the greater part of the country, large properties formed an insignificant minority compared to small freehold farms and holdings … the life and work of the owners of these and their children were so like those of the agricultural labourers that no marked class distinction was available’ (Blomstedt and Book, 1930: 221, our italics). Although universal suffrage was not introduced to Sweden until 1920, the bönder still had significant power in the existing structure of government: a four estates diet (two from 1865). Their admission to the riksdag (parliament) as a separate estate (alongside the burghers, nobility and clergy) was, in itself, a recognition of their economic and strategic importance (Roberts, 1967: 249). And, as with Norway, the Agrarian or Farmer’s Party had an important presence when full democracy was introduced.
In Finland, stability and cohesion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was under threat from two sources. First, land distribution was regulated by a tenancy system, with only about 100,000 privately owned farms (Alestalo and Kuhnle, 1987: 21). Changes from arable to dairy farming, enclosures and growing mechanization during the nineteenth century benefitted yeoman farmers and wealthier tenants at the expense of poorer tenants and landless labourers, who regularly faced dispossession, eviction and poverty. Second, Tsarist attempts to ‘Russianize’ Finland, overriding legislation to the contrary from the fledgling Finnish parliament, led to further instability. The Finnish civil war of 1918 was the product of these destabilizing forces. The subsequent victory of the White Guards over the Red Guards was followed by particularly bloody reprisals. But, at the same time, the idea of a ‘free, independent peasantry’ (Kekkonen, 1999) gave a strong idoleogical charge to the direction of government policy: it became a symbol of the triumph of the Whites over the Red, Russian-influenced, menace. This was given a material basis with the introduction in 1918 of a more recognizably Nordic form of land distribution. The state was now empowered to buy large estates for subdivision into small farms, and to rent them out as leasehold lands. Legislation in 1922 then allowed uncultivated land to be purchased with state-supported capital. Emerging out of the restructuring of class relations that these measures made possible, the Agrarian Party also became a pivotal player in subsequent coalition governments during the course of the twentieth century.
Overall, then, and despite the differences in the processes associated with it, we find the development of a class structure where the bønder and their values were a dominant feature of the social and the political structure of these societies (Stenius, 1997: 165). Indeed, in Norway, this class was idealized. Speaking the local Landsmal dialect, as opposed to what was the official Swedish language of this country before independence in 1905, and practising their modest way of life, the bønder became the emblem of that country’s struggle for national identity and independence. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (quoted by Barton, 2003: 104), one of Norway’s most renowned nineteenth century literary figures, thus described his work as taking the form of ‘a plea on behalf of the peasant … we had come to understand that the language of the sagas lived on in our peasants and their way of life was close to that of the sagas. The life of our nation was to be built on our history; and now the peasants were to provide the foundations.’ As such, the egalitarianism, uniformity, solidarity and stability that was characteristic of that way of life had become a national characteristic by the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘the highest and lowest strata of society are on the whole no farther removed from one another than that there is constant reciprocal action between them, and transition from the one to the other’ (Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, 1900: 202). In addition, industrialization, when it arrived in Norway and Sweden in the late nineteenth century (it did not really arrive in Finland until the 1950s), did not lead to urbanization, nor did it disrupt rural life and community. Instead, it was on a relatively small scale, in keeping with the population sizes of these countries (5,000,000 in Sweden in 1900 and 2,240,000 in Norway). The traditions and values of the countryside, and the historical foundations these had provided in the evolution of Norway as an independent nation, were thus able to be maintained, even amongst city dwellers, as they sought what were originally very humble holiday homes in the country (see, for example, Shirer, 1955: 71; Eckstein, 1966: 124). As Figure 2.1 illustrates, these cottages allowed for the celebration of the rural heritage of these countries while simultaneously reaffirming the values of egalitarianism and moderation.
| Figure 2.1 | The Nordic ideal: a small cottage or hytte in Norway. Note the emphasis on personal space and proximity to nature. Photograph: Dagbladet/Norsk Folkemuseum |
Of course, it is important not to overstate the degree of harmony and cohesion in these societies. Nonetheless, potential conflicts and disunity were likely to be channelled into the existing ways of understanding the world, through the activities of interconnecting and inter-class social movements. These were variously formed by religious revivalists, industrial workers, farmers and temperance supporters during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often in protest at existing social arrangements. Their emphasis remained, though, on egalitarianism, moderation, thrift and sobriety – already existing values that then became further inscribed in these societies, in ways that modified and incorporated dissent rather than repress it. Mead (1968: 167), for example, wrote that the Finnish temperance movement, at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘embodied central ideals of Finnish nationalism – it promoted organizations within the sphere of the state, educated people and pursued demand for legislative reforms – it was also rooted in the peasants’ own values.’
In the Anglophone countries, however, there were not only more extensive and deeper class differences and divisions but, at the same time, much greater importance was given to individual prosperity and material success, at the expense of egalitarianism and solidarity. And, for the most part, these were also societies that, during the course of the nineteenth century, came to be organized largely around urban values, practices and work routines, rather than those of rural life. In England, industrialization profoundly disrupted rural traditions, In 1801, one in three of the population worked in agriculture; by 1881, this had been reduced to one in eight. The result was a much weaker bond between most of the population and the countryside, those still working on the land and the gemeinschaft traditions, obligations and reciprocities of pre-industrial society. As Thompson (1988: 93) observed, ‘if the English rustic had the desire to “better himself” he had better leave the land’. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, agricultural workers were the worst paid and worst fed of all manual labourers (Burnett, 1966; Perkin, 1969). Mid-nineteenth-century English literature is thus preoccupied with themes of rural penury and misery, in contrast to the bucolic idealism of Bjørnson’s Norway. For example, in his novel Alton Locke, Charles Kingsley (1850: 96) describes a rural village as ‘a knot of thatched hovels all sinking and leaning every way but the right, the windows patched with paper, the doorways stopped with filth’. Moreover, the class-based nature of land ownership led to vulnerabilities and uncertainties that the more egalitarian Nordic systems of distribution avoided. In George Eliot’s (1859/1980: 125, our italics) Adam Bede, the grandson of the local squire suddenly announces to a tenant farmer whose family have leased land from this gentry family for generations, that ‘“I think yours is the prettiest farm on the estate … and do you know, if I were going to marry and settle, I should be tempted to turn you out, and do up this fine old house and turn farmer myself.” “O, sir,” said [the farmer] rather alarmed, “you wouldn’t like it. As for farming, its putting money into your pocket wi’ your right hand and fetching it out wi’ your left.”’
Certainly, farming and agricultural interests had a strong political influence in the histories of Australia and New Zealand, but there was nothing of the tranquillity and moderation associated with Nordic rural life in such areas in these societies. Indeed, as Australia became the most urbanized society in the world, during the course of the nineteenth century,2 what lay beyond the cities came to be associated with danger and menace: escaped convicts, bushrangers, hostile Aborigines, lethal wildlife. In these respects, the rural way of life was to be feared rather than romanticized. Similarly, New Zealand: the bush became a place of isolation, a place for misfits and runaways as described in John Mulgan’s (1939) novel, Man Alone, rather than the setting for some idyllic community life. In effect, then, egalitarian gemeinschafi traditions still flourished in the Nordic countries for much of the nineteenth century, but had little purchase in the Anglophone, where the importance of the individual doing well for themselves, rising above their status, moving ahead rather than standing still, came to be paramount.
This was reflected in the distribution of political and economic power in the Anglophone countries. Much of this shifted away from the landowners of the pre-modern era towards newly rich industrialists and other parvenus. But this did not then mean that the values of the previously dominant landowning class were abandoned or overturned. Their grand properties and lives of leisure remained the ideal to which the newly wealthy could aspire. Hence, the desire of the lawyer and businessman Soames Forsyte, the central figure in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922: 71, our italics), to have his own country house notwithstanding that he already owned a substantial property in Knightsbridge in the centre of London. On surveying a prospective sight for a country house, ‘something swelled in his breast. To live here in sight of all this, to be able to point it out to his friends, to talk of it, to possess it.’ Indeed, there was a marked growth in country house building between 1835 and 1889: some 500 were built or remodelled, roughly half of them for newly rich families (Thompson, 1988: 155).
Reviewing these trends, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1857: 76–7) observed that ‘palaces, halls, villas, walled parks all over England rival the splendour of royal estates … the hopes of the commoners take the same direction with the interest of the patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys land and does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise.’ In such ways, one’s status in England was determined by the extent of one’s wealth, extravagance and the ownership of property (see Figure 2.2), rather than any modest consumption and an ability to fit in well with the local community. Indeed, the whole point of buying an English country estate was to demonstrate one’s difference from, and superiority to, the rest of the community – ‘look at me, look what I have become’ – rather than to be at one with it, as reflected in the ownership of sommarstugor (summer cottages) in the Nordic countries.
Clearly, though, not everyone could own a stately home. For the vast majority of the emerging bourgeoisie, dreams of the country estate had to be scaled down, taking the form of suburban villas or multi-storied ‘townhouses’. In his Notes on England, Hippolyte Taine (1874: 275) observed that ‘the city man strives to have his country seat and county surroundings at the outskirts; he feels the necessity of being by himself – of feeling that he is alone, monarch of his family and his servants, of having around him a piece of park or a garden as a relaxation from the artificial life of town and business. Hence have been constructed vast silent streets in which there are no shops, and in which each house, surrounded by a patch of green, is detached and is occupied by a single family.’ This also meant that great importance came to be attached to home ownership, as an emblem of one’s wealth and social standing. As Emerson (1857: 80) put the matter, ‘the English … wish neither to command or obey, but to be kings in their own houses’. Similarly, Smith (1915: 1) later wrote that ‘no other nation has accepted the home as the foundation of national life to the same degree as England; no other nation esteems the influences of home higher than the English’. In such ways, self-advancement, with wealth and property its key signifiers, rather than the importance given to remaining at the same level as everyone else (as in the Nordic countries), became the driving force of English social life. Binney (1853: 20, our italics), for example, argued that the essentials for a happy life were ‘health, cheerfulness, competence, and along with this, the feeling and consciousness of getting on – of success and advancement’. As Collier (1909: 158) then explained, ‘in England, the prizes are fewer, they are more difficult to win, and they are splendidly rewarded. A really great man in England is rewarded as in no other land, while the failures suffer in proportion.’ Beatrice Webb (1926: 13, our italics), the renowned Fabian socialist and social reformer, confirmed in her memoirs that, as a young adult, ‘it was the bounden duty of every citizen to better his social status; to ignore those beneath him, and to aim steadily at the top rung of the social ladder’.
But it was also important that wealth should free the new English elites, rich from successful investments and the products of industrialization, from having to work, as in the manner of the pre-modern landowners. They would then be able to assume membership of what Collier (1909: 38) referred to as the ‘unoccupied classes’ or what Ford (1907: 173) termed the ‘leisure class’. Such people displayed a confidence and assurance that came from the certain knowledge of the superior social standing that their wealth had given them. The very way they carried themselves, the way they spoke, set them apart (Huizinga, 1958) and provided the etymological basis for expressions, based on these class distinctions, that had ‘no equivalent in any language I know. Like “our betters” and “the likes of us” for instance … to be happy in England one must be “looked up to” and “well thought of” – more untranslatable phrases!’ (Keun, 1935: 160). Furthermore, ‘think, too, of the columns, the pages, filled in the newspapers by the doings of the great: where they go, how they look, what they say. Never, in any European country, would the press dare to keep up such a chatter about futile personalities or give so much publicity to such insipid and meaningless figures’ (ibid.: 168). Here, then, was a society in which those who stood out in one way or another could find fame, rather than be put in their place for elevating themselves above the rest of the community – and the more they could demonstrate that they lived above the rest of society, the more, it seemed, they gained respect. In the Nordic countries, however, there seems to have been little of such extravagances and fripperies. Travers (1911: 210) wrote that ‘so small a remnant of the real “idle classes” now remains in Finland, that there is something quite gallant and pathetic about the efforts of this little band to go on playing when all the rest are at work … during the last 20 years one well born family after another has quietly sunk its prefix (av) and its intentions are [now] in commerce or public service, while the daughters have learnt to earn their own living as a matter of course’. Here, it was expected that all would work, rather than allow a privileged ‘leisure class’ to idle away its time with indulgences and extravagances while the rest toiled.
But, if this contrast between class-divided England and the more egalitarian Nordic countries seems clear cut, what of Australia and New Zealand, now known for their egalitarianism, rather than their idle rich? In New Zealand: A Short History, James Buller (1880: 142) opined that ‘the social disabilities, exclusive caste, the overstrained competition and the stereotyped conventionalism of the Old World have not yet taken root’ here. Similarly, Harrop (1935: 270), half a century later, claimed that ‘there is an absence of class distinction in its extreme forms in New Zealand’. Furthermore, ‘New Zealand boasts not a single millionaire nor any who are starving’ (Cowie, 1937: 187). However, while class differences in Australia and New Zealand were not so glaring as those in England, the practices and manners of the English upper classes were deliberately replicated in these countries, from their early years of settlement (Russell, 2002): country estates, followed by intermarriage with other estate owning families; the employment of servants; hunting, shooting and fishing; attending balls, coming-out dances for debutantes and dinner parties for the well-to-do; the establishment of fee-paying ‘public’ (that is, private) schools for the children of these new elites (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4); the use of calling cards and elaborate ‘introduction’ etiquettes.3
If anything, these habits and practices became more stylized amongst upwardly mobile colonists. This was because the very isolation and detachment of these new colonies in the South Pacific was likely to reinforce, indeed petrify, British attributes at the point of departure from them, rather than loosen ties to what became known as ‘the Old Country’ or ‘the Motherland’. Settlers took their identity from Britain because, at that time, neither Australia nor New Zealand could provide the sense of continuity, familiarity and security to constitute a national identity. They could only make sense of the circumstances around them by reference back to Britain and its values (Hartz, 1964). The realities of endless stretches of native bush were thus reimagined and transformed into more familiar, reassuring landscapes: ‘our eyes are refreshed with green, real English green; hedgerows, and plenty of water and cottages and small houses of every description, surrounded by clumps and soars of poplars, hawthorn and other English trees; Christchurch nestles all hidden in English trees, whilst round and about run magnificent roads, shut in on either side by hedgerows, gorse, thorne and broom’ (Baden Powell, 1872: 12). Their colonial mentalities oppressed and shut out unfamiliar sights and scenery and the cultures of what were thought to be the biologically inferior and socially ‘primitive’ indigenous peoples of these countries. Indeed, those who came to better themselves in these two distant colonies tied themselves to the ideal of Imperial Britain and the respectability and standing this gave them. A New South Wales surgeon thus claimed, in 1820, that ‘the pride and dignified hauteur of some of our ultra aristocracy far eclipse the nobility of England’ (quoted by Maynard, 1994: 44). And the ideal of the Canterbury Association in the 1840s was the establishment of a colonial settlement in New Zealand’s South Island that would reproduce ‘an English county with the Cathedral city [Christchurch], its famous University, its Bishop, its endowed clergy, its ancient aristocracy and its yeoman farmers, its few necessary tradesmen, its sturdy and loyal labourers’ (Purchas, 1903: 32).
| Figure 2.4 | Armidale School, New South Wales, Australia. Established in 1896, it was also modelled on English public school designs. Photograph: National Archives, Australia (1949) |
However, while the ‘bush’ or the ‘outback’ had been ripe for land grabbing by squatters, or for dubious purchases from the indigenous inhabitants, the power of the elite class largely came to an end in Australia with the 1850s gold rush, even though their pretensions lived on until at least the 1920s. As Sherer (1853: 10), explained, ‘all the aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated. Plebianism of the rankest and … the lowest kind at present dwells in Australia, and as riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position, it is vain to have any pretensions whatever … It is not what you were but what you are that is the criterion.’ New Zealand, with a view to attracting more immigrants, enacted compulsory purchase legislation at the end of the nineteenth century, allowing smaller land purchases to be made from the great estates that had been established in the early years of settlement. But if, by this point, the egalitarian reputations of these societies had been set in place, immigration to them still presented the opportunity for advancement ‘to gain what contemporaries called a “competency” or an “independency”, equivalent to the ownership of productive capital, usually landed property’ (Fairburn, 1989:46). In these respects, the egalitarianism in these former British colonies took on a different quality from egalitarianism in the Nordic countries. It provided more equal opportunities for ‘getting on’ than had been the case in England, with those working hardest being able to reap the most rewards in terms of the accumulation of fortune, wealth and status. In contrast, in the likhet dominated Nordic countries, egalitarianism meant everyone receiving very similar rewards. I. R. Cooper (1857: 9, our italics) thus wrote, of New Zealand, that ‘those who arrive in the colony without capital will, if they enjoy good health, are sober and economical in their personal expenses, and are able and willing to work at any one trade, as farm servants, boatmen, shepherds, or house servants, soon realise a significant capital to invest in land, cattle or sheep, and thus to render themselves and their children independent’. As if in proof, home ownership in New Zealand, usually with four to six rooms and one-quarter acre of land attached, increased from 36 to 49 per cent between 1916 and 1926. In Australia, by 1947, home ownership had reached 53.4 per cent of householders, with five rooms per house the norm. What we thus see in these colonial societies, even as they became more markedly egalitarian and less elitist, is a replication of the English values that elevated one’s status and, in particular, the importance given to property and wealth, In the Nordic countries, however, it was thought that one’s occupation should not be allowed to create social distance between oneself and others, and that one’s standing should be dependent on contribution to community well-being, rather than level of wealth and prosperity. In these societies, ‘one does not talk about work as a way of making a fortune, or that through work one retains the idea of oneself as a creative being … to see that everybody works is the main principle of Nordic societal organization and the force that holds these associations together’ (Stenius, 1997: 164, our italics).
Furthermore, the greater egalitarianism in Nordic class relations was reinforced by the frugality and moderation that the mainly agricultural and under-developed economies of these countries made necessary. As they then became more diversified and industrialized from the late nineteenth century, improvements in living standards were shared across the whole population, rather than concentrated in particularly privileged segments of it. By 1900, about one third of all Swedish families had become members of the consumers’ cooperative movement; the king himself was a member. By the 1960s, Kooperativa Förbundet had become Scandinavia’s largest single enterprise, incorporating businesses such as supermarkets, department stores and restaurants. However, these stores had to be managed on a cash basis, with reserve capital. This meant that ‘people were less tempted to buy beyond their means than if instalment buying were a regular practice’ (Fleisher, 1956: 320). Again, then, the consumers’ cooperatives provided ways of improving living standards, while continuing to emphasize the importance of moderation by controlling spending and making the improvements available to all. The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, featuring displays of Swedish design and crafts and attracting 4,000,000 visitors, demonstrated that comfort, style, hygiene and cleanliness could be made generally available through mass production, rather than remain the exclusive privilege of the wealthy in exclusive, bespoke manufacturies. As The Times’ correspondent noted (18 June, 1930: 15), ‘a very valuable [section of the exhibition] is that of serial, standardized furniture, in which the aims are practicalness, durability and cheapness. It is not easy to be patient with people who look down on such attempts. The great majority of us have to depend upon mass produced furniture, and it is highly important that it should be – as generally here – artistically designed in terms of its production.’ In other respects, wage differentials seemed quite small when compared to England (Grimley, 1937; Cole and Smith, 1938). But, at the same time, ‘one of the first things that strikes a visitor to Sweden is that in the towns there seems to be no very poor people. There are no beggars, no-one to sell matches, sing or play gramophone records in the streets. There are no children in rags to correspond to the slums of our great [English] cities’ (Cole and Smith, 1938: 204). Frugality and moderation, rather than expanse and extravagance, were also striking characteristics of housing provision. In contrast to the emphasis on multi-roomed and gardened property ownership in the Anglophone countries, ‘Swedes in the cities live in flats. You will find few families in Sweden occupying a whole house’ (Thomas, 1892: 135); ‘flats and houses of one room and a kitchen are more common than any other type [in Sweden]. Middle and working class people alike regard all their rooms, often including even the kitchen, as bed-sitting rooms with divan beds and writing desks, and the standard of a separate bedroom for every person and a common living room is rare’ (Cole and Smith, 1938: 254); ‘differences in the material level of living among the social classes is probably less in Sweden than in any non-Scandinavian European society … about three quarters of non-farming Swedish families live in apartments, and while there is certainly variation in size and appointments … there is not much variation in quality … [and] little class difference in taste in furniture style … and little variation in rents’, but ‘a great deal of mixing of classes’ (De Mare, 1952: 219).
These similarities, uniformities and short social distances in the Nordic countries stood in marked contrast to the levels of class separation, division and inequalities in England, in particular, of the Anglophone societies. Here, the shift from rural to urban life had meant that the vagaries and social instability of the industrial revolution were burdens that the poor carried almost exclusively, and became familiar themes in the literature of the period. In Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell (1848/1996: 24) wrote that ‘large houses are still occupied [in Manchester], while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food.’ And as regards the fictional Coketown, in Dickens’ (1854/1992: 27) Hard Times, where ‘the comforts and elegancies of life were made and found their way all over the world’, it was ‘a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.’ In contrast to the suburban villas and townhouses of the middle and upper classes, the appalling housing of the poor had been the subject of numerous inquiries and commentaries from the mid-nineteenth century (see, for example, Chadwick, 1843; Second Report of the Royal Sanitary Commission, 1871; Rowntree, 1902). But, after nearly a century of such investigations, Capek (1925: 74) still observed that ‘the horrible thing about East London is not what can be seen and smelt, but its unbounded and unredeemable extent. Elsewhere poverty and ugliness exist merely as a rubbish heap between two houses … but here are miles and miles of grimy houses, hopeless streets … a superfluity of children, gin palaces and Christian shelters.’ At the same time, the very organization of public and private space was deliberately designed to keep the classes apart. Taine (1874: 16) thus wrote that England is ‘an aristocratic country. At the gate of St James Park is the following notice: “the park-keepers have orders to prevent all beggars from entering the gardens, and all persons in ragged or dirty clothes, or who are not outwardly decent and well-behaved.’” On the European continent, British travellers would be annoyed because there were no separate waiting rooms at railway stations for the different classes, which is what they were accustomed to at home (Huizinga, 1958).
Separation was also embedded in the very architecture of the townhouses and villas – the country estates in miniature: ‘it is the foremost of all maxims, that however small the establishment, the servants’ department shall be separated from the main house, so that what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other. The outdoor work of the domestics must not be visible from the house or grounds, or the windows of their offices overlooked. The idea which underlies all this is simple: the family constitute one community, the servants another … each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other and be alone’ (Kerr, 1865: 567). One of the consequences of these highly regulated and enforced separations was that each class knew very little of the existence of the other, as Faucher (1844) and Mayhew (1851) observed in the mid-nineteenth century. And yet, in Norway, it appears that servants were more likely to be treated as de facto family members, rather than kept at a distance as socially inferior employees. The 1868 Housemaid’s Manual (quoted by Aubert, 1956: 152) thus stated that ‘the master and mistress must, if they want to obey the word of the Lord, look out for their servant’s welfare, care for them in case of sickness and other accidents, warn them when they see them on off-paths, and on the whole show an affectionate disposition toward them and set a good example, and not load them with more work than their strength permits them to carry’. Indeed, Beckett (1936: 168–9) later wrote that ‘Norway is a relatively poor country, and this, added to the absence of aristocracy, tends to a democratic atmosphere. Many a well-born girl, for instance, will take domestic service to relieve the burden on her family; but the family employing her always receive her en famille.’
Differences in class relations also produced very different forms of manners and etiquette. Clarke (1823: 662), for example, complained that ‘the people of Trondheim – more polished than any other town in Norway – place themselves without etiquette at table: everyone sits as he chooses.’ There was no respect, then, for hierarchy and status in deciding table placements, much to the distaste of this English visitor. Bowden (1867: 39) was similarly dismayed by the lack of refinement amongst the Norwegian upper classes: ‘it is not considered a breach of good manners to put one’s knife into one’s mouth and you may afterwards help yourself to salt with it.’ Thereafter, Rothery (1939: 147, our italics) still found that ‘while there is in Oslo a certain amount of formal and diplomatic entertaining, where scrupulous attention is paid to the proper seating of guests, to the etiquette of pouring the wines and serving the food, such occasions are restricted to a very limited circle’. English visitors also complained of the lack of deference they received. Laing (1837: 181), for example, suggested that one of the characteristics of the Norwegian lower classes was ‘extreme insolence to their superiors. The conduct and deportment of servants is no bad criterion by which to judge the character of the lower orders. More tact is required in Norway in the conduct of superiors towards their dependents … The slightest offence towards a menial will occasion the instant oblivion of the kindnesses of years – respect and obligation will alike be forgotten; and the servant will immediately leave his master.’ More than a century later, Warbey, et al. (1950: 137) similarly found that ‘the unabashed freedom of manner of so many Norwegians … is usually very charming but it can sometimes be a little disconcerting in waiters and railway porters. They are not brought up to fear the authority of their “betters”.’ The point, of course, is that in this country, without ingrained class distinctions but with relatively short social distances, codified ways of enforcing differences between respective social stratas and ostentatious displays of deference were redundant.
In England, however, there was a much more elaborate and highly ritualized system of etiquette signs and symbols in existence that determined modes of address, level of acquaintance and social standing. In their instruction manual The Complete Servant, Adams and Adams (1825: 20) advised those entering domestic service that ‘the grand foundation of your good character must be industry, fidelity to your employers, and an inviolable attachment to truth, both in words and deeds … carefully avoid all reproachful, indecent, or even familiar terms in speaking of your master, mistress or superiors … the virtue of silence is highly commendable, and will contribute greatly to your ease and prosperity’. Visiting required careful protocols to be followed in the nineteenth century: ‘morning calls included the leaving of cards; if left by the lady herself, and not handed in by a footman, the bottom right hand corner was turned up. A married woman left cards on behalf of the husband as well as herself. Some cards had printed on the back, in each corner, a word to indicate the nature or purpose of the call: Felicitations, Adieu, Affaires’ (Lochhead, 1964: 37). As regards deportment, ‘persons do not shake hands when introduced, but simply bow … persons meeting at the houses of friends when making afternoon calls need not be introduced to each other, and certainly should not be, unless it is known that such introductions should be mutually agreeable. Nor should persons who have accidentally met in this manner, without being introduced, bow, or in any way express recognition, should they afterwards meet’ (Anon., 1871: 42). In contrast, Laing (1837: 109, our italics) remarked of Norway that ‘I like the politeness of people towards each other in this country; the putting off of hats or caps when they meet either strangers or friends. The custom is universal … even the school-boys bow to each other in the streets; such a custom is not to be laughed at, it has a humanising effect. He who had made a bow and received a similar salute is not so likely to launch out into a burst of abuse or violence, even against one who has offended him, as if the previous day had not intervened.’ In a society without significant class distinctions, and where everybody had much the same status as everyone else and accorded each other respect on this basis, it was possible to dispense with all the English rituals and protocols for policing social distance and difference.
There were also major differences in relation to race and religion, which reinforced the sense of sameness and uniformity in the Nordic countries and the differences and divisions in the Anglophone.
There had been next to no immigration to the Nordic region by the early twentieth century. As Austin (1970: 16) explained, in relation to Sweden, ‘Lying so far to the north and having such a severe winter climate, and her soil relatively poor, this country experienced almost no immigration and, over the centuries, very little invasion.’ Accordingly, each citizen was likely to seem much the same as any other, not only on account of their economic circumstances but also because of their physical appearance. Outsider groups consisted only of a small number of indigenous Sami people in the far north, a few small Jewish communities and Gypsies – largely invisible for all political purposes. At the same time, the flow of emigration from these countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely because of the intrinsic poverty (Sweden lost 1,000,000 citizens, mainly to the United States, in this way, Finland and Norway 750,000 each), was likely to have acted as a safety valve, ensuring that social tensions were reduced in the struggle over scarce resources, while further reinforcing homogeneity. But, if such levels of racial homogeneity were important features in the development of the Nordic culture of equality and cohesion, did not Australia and New Zealand have similar levels of racial homogeneity amongst their settler populations? Not only was all non-British immigration carefully restricted until at least 1945 (see pp. 4–5), but, at the same time, the majority of British immigrants came from specific areas of that country (see Belich, 1996; Jupp, 2004). And, while the two colonies had very significantly larger indigenous populations than the Nordic countries, new illnesses from contact with Europeans decimated them, to the point where, towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was thought that each indigenous race would simply become extinct. For example, there had been an estimated 300,000 Aborigines in Australia in 1788; a century later there were an estimated 80,000. In addition, Aborigines were firmly shut out of Australian society and were formally regarded as non-citizens until 1967, when a referendum approved of their inclusion in the Australian census for the first time.4 Meanwhile, in New Zealand, after land wars in the 1860s finally put an end to any sustained resistance to British colonization, the policy was to assimilate the much greater numbers of Maori into settler society, although during this period many Maori, anyway, remained in their traditional communities, largely invisible in the ‘Britain of the South Pacific’ that was being built around them. In these ways, then, the settlers were able to maintain their well-defined homogeneity – yet it did not lead to the same levels of cohesion and solidarity that it helped to bring about in the Nordic countries. There were three main reasons for this.
First, in both Australia and New Zealand, there was a high level of transience amongst the settler population. While there was common ancestry, there was nothing like the long-established Nordic communities that would allow interlocking roots and lengthy interdependencies to develop. Indeed, both colonies were marked by dramatic population growth and high levels of population turnover. For example, as regards New South Wales, where the population had grown from 127,000 in 1840 to 1,360,000 by 1900, net migration alone had contributed to 11.1 per cent of this between 1861–1871, and 18 per cent between 1871–1881 and 1881–1891 (New South Wales Official Yearbook, 1974: 63). New Zealand experienced similar population growth, from 150,000 in 1860 (two thirds then being Maori) to 815,000 by 1901 (but with the Maori population shrinking to 40,000) and 2,000,000 by 1951. In 1909, for example, ‘38,650 persons arrived in New Zealand, while 33,931 departed’ (New Zealand Yearbook, 1910: 270) – something like an eight per cent turnover of the total population of the country in just one year. Indeed, its extreme bursts of immigration and emigration led to highly unstable communities and insubstantial interdependencies within them.
Furthermore, those who did stay tended to move around these new societies, seeking fresh opportunities to better themselves: there was little of the stability and permanence of the Nordic communities. Harris (1847: 67) wrote of Australia that ‘it may be as well to notice here a particular characteristic of the free labouring population: it is in a state of constant migration. The man who has a contract job or is a hired servant here this year, probably spends the next at the other end of the country.’ This pattern continued for the next half century at least. Sir Timothy Coghlan (1888: 309), in The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, stated that ‘the largest increase of population … occurred in 1885, when owing to the depression prevailing in some of the neighbouring colonies, large numbers of adult males flocked to New South Wales … the result of this influx was felt during the following years in the congestion of the local labour market.’ Hancock (1930: 270) then reported that ‘society in Australia is not yet fixed and formalized. Men do not find it difficult to change their house, or town or class.’
Second, New Zealand, especially, became a very atomized society for much of this period. In part, this was because of the solitary nature of much of the available work – shepherding, gold digging and gum digging, for example, In these respects, while social distances between respective classes in this country certainly became much shorter than in England, horizontal chains of interdependencies were likely to be quite thin and easily fragmented, rather than homogenous and solidaristic. This also led to high levels of fear, suspicion and intolerance of strangers and outsiders, thought keen to take whatever they could from this isolated, fledgling, society, but putting in little themselves before leaving for greener pastures. Vagrants, especially, were demonized (Fairburn, 1989) because of the way in which they challenged the importance of hard work as a means to ‘getting on’. Summarizing these attitudes, Lipson ( 1948: 492) wrote that ‘New Zealanders tend to conform to type. The same convictions, prejudices and stock symbols predominate throughout the country. There is not enough internal diversity to produce a clash of opinion … the equalitarianism that provides for all within the group can be hostile for those who reject the group standards or who are outside the membership. Free thinkers on religious matters, a handful of oriental residents, refugees from European fascism, advocates of heterodox social theories – all who do not conform are subject to a suspicion and in critical times to a persecution that appears the less justified because these minorities are so utterly impotent.’
Third, Australia’s ‘mateship’ tradition encouraged a multiplicity of shallow and fleeting interdependencies. Mateship (Ward, 1958) was initially a characteristic of relationships – often chance ones, and usually of short duration – that developed in the outback between bushrangers, convicts and labourers. Their circumstances meant that they were temporarily dependent on each other and thus reciprocated favours, gave gestures of goodwill, and so on. They then brought these values to the city and the mateship concept became a feature of Australian society at large.5 As Harris (1847: 326) pointed out, ‘it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his mate in everything’. Mateship was organized around egalitarianism, loyalty and friendship with those in one’s immediate (working) environment – but with a simultaneous suspicion and disrespect for more removed authority figures. However, by its very nature, Australian mateship was unlikely to bring about the more deeply ingrained solidarity, cohesion and trust that became cultural characteristics of the Nordic countries.
The virtually 100 per cent religious uniformity6 in the Nordic countries, the product of automatic membership of the Lutheran Church for all their citizens, at birth, in itself strengthened the intense homogeneity of this region. However, Lutheranism also reinforced its prevalent egalitarian values and level of social cohesion. In its teachings, there is less importance on the Church itself and more on the individual’s relationship with God. Salvation could not be granted by priests, as in the Catholic Church but, instead, came about through an individual’s own faith and belief in the gospel. To prove they had faith, their knowledge of the Bible would be examined in classes that led up to the ceremony of confirmation. This was a vitally important test to pass, since it was proof not just of an individual’s knowledge of God and his works, but, as well, their own trustworthiness, reliability and ‘normality’ before the rest of the community. We are given an insight to the importance attached to this ceremony by Bjørnson (1882: 65) who, in his novel, A Happy Lad, describes a confirmation class waiting for the results of their exam: ‘anxiety filled their throats and eyes; they could not see distinctly, neither could they swallow; and this they felt a continual desire to do. One sat reckoning over how much he knew; and although but a few hours before he had discovered that he knew everything, now he found out just as confidently that he knew nothing, not even how to read in a book. Another summed up the list of his sins, from the time he was large enough to remember till now, and he decided that it would not at all be remarkable if the Lord decreed that he should be rejected.’
By the same token, Lutheranism endowed a very particular value to work in these societies. Working diligently was seen as a way of serving God, but one should not try to change from the occupation into which one had been born: to do so would contravene God’s laws, since it was God only who assigned each person to their place in the social order (Lipset, 1990). In addition, because God was the only true judge of man, all occupations were of equal spiritual value and dignity: what distinguished one person from another was not their occupation per se, but the way in which their labour was performed. As Luther (1520/1915:175) had written, ‘the first, the noblest, the sublimest of all works is faith in Jesus Christ. It is from this that all other works proceed: they are but the vassals of faith, and receive their efficacy from it alone. If a man feels in his heart the assurance that what he has done is acceptable to God, the work is good, if it were merely the lifting up of a straw; but if he have not this assurance, his work is not good, even should he raise the dead.’ Here, then, were a set of beliefs that were locked around these entire socieites, whereby judgmental attitudes to others were proscribed (this was the task of God, not man); where dedication to work brought social stability and cohesion, rather than any ambition for material self-enhancement; and where all were expected to work, since the performance of good works was a signifier of God’s grace. The English ‘leisure classes’ could thus have no place in such societies.
The Lutheran Church was also at the centre of village life because of the administrative functions it peformed. As well as providing education and assisting the poor, it presided over all important events and recorded the biographical details of its parishioners: deaths, births (who the parents were, what was their civil status, were the children placed elsewhere, if so, where and with whom) and marriages. The importance it had thus assumed in the administration of everyday life is captured in another of Bjørnson’s (1857: 309) novels, Synnøve Solbakken, where it is given an almost mystical status: ‘in the peasants’ mind, the church stands upon a high place and by itself, dedicated to peace, with the solemnity of graves round about, the activity of the service within. It is the only building in the valley upon which he has applied elegance, and its spire therefore reaches a little higher than it seems to reach. Its bells greet from afar his going thither on a clear Sunday morning, and he always lifts his hat to them … There is an understanding between him and them which no-one knows.’ In the Anglophone societies, however, religious beliefs were much more heterogeneous,7 with histories of conflict between Catholics and Protestants in each.8 These were ultimately resolved by the churches existing independently of the state. In the Nordic countries, the church and state were indivisible. Furthermore, religious beliefs in England were also related to class differences, as Huizinga (1958: 345) pointed out: ‘a clergyman of the Church of England, it appeared, was normally a “gentleman”, whereas his colleague, who preached in the “chapel” instead of the “church” was not’. And, whereas, in the Nordic countries, pastors were likely to be the children of pastors or from poor families, in England, during the nineteenth century, being appointed to the Anglican clergy became something of a sinecure for second or third sons of the landowning class. Lochhead (1964: 8) wrote that ‘throughout the Victorian age [the parson] is more often than not, the cadet of a county family, presented to the family living; a product of public school and university, not of any seminary or theological college’. Thus, in George Eliot’s (1859/1980: 113) Adam Bede, the Reverend Adolphus Irwine, a ‘pluralist’ who dines and hunts with the squire and his family, ‘was not in these days what is called an “earnest man”; he was fonder of church history than of divinity, and had much more insight into men’s characters than their opinions; he was neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying; nor very copious in alms-giving, and his theology was lax … [his] recollections of young enthusiasm and ambition were all associated with poetry and ethics that lay aloof from the Bible’. Here, then, rather than helping to bring unity and solidarity, religion was another illustration of the divisions and differences in the Anglophone societies.
Lutheranism not only helped to bring about the high levels of social cohesion in the Nordic countries; it also put a high value on education. Swedish legislation of 1764 stipulated that no marriage could be celebrated unless both parties had taken communion: but no-one could be admitted to the ‘communion table’ if they could not read and had not been instructed in religious study. As one visitor later acknowledged, ‘every Swede must read with the priest before he or she can be admitted to the Lord’s table; and every year the priest has to hold a meeting in various parts of his parish, and hear his parishioners read, and examine them in their religion. The peasants here appear to be much more under the eye of their clergymen than in England’ (‘An Old Bushman’, 1865: 81). In such ways, Lutheranism had made literacy accessible to, and essential for, all. However, until the early nineteenth century, the intellectual life of Norway had been dominated by Denmark. Laing (1837: 249) thus found that ‘a bookseller’s shop is a curiosity in Norway … Danish books are almost the only books to be had’ (Danish at that time, of course, being the official language of Norway). Similarly, Clarke (1823: 510), visiting the Finnish city of Turku, found that ‘Books of any kind are seldom seen: there are no booksellers; nor is it possible to meet with a single copy of the work of the few celebrated authors Sweden [sic] has boasted in any of the private houses.’ This, though, was because there were virtually no Finnish books available: Swedish was then Finland’s official language. Thereafter, however, language and literature became expressions of the struggles for national identity in Finland and Norway (see Figure 2.5), generating a literary renaissance. Between 1543 and 1808, only 174 books had been published in Finnish. Between 1809 and 1853, there were another 452; in the next decade, 481 (League of Nations, 1939). The Finnish Literary Society was established in 1845 and the Finnish Artists’ Union in 1846, providing classes, prizes, exhibitions and scholarships for young painters to study abroad, In Norway, the importance of the role and place of artists and intellectuals as emblems and icons of national identity was evident in the way in which the death of historian P. A. Munch, at the age of 53, in 1863 was regarded as a ‘national disaster’. When nobel prize winner Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson died, aged 73, in Paris in 1910, ‘the Norwegian government had his body brought home on board a Norwegian man-of-war. The ship was greeted with a royal salute from the castle as it steamed into Oslo harbour. The mourning which united the whole nation was the best proof how much this poet had meant in the life of the people’ (Castberg, 1954: 33).
In Sweden, the establishment of a highly literate society (80 per cent of the population in the eighteenth century) had anyway transformed education into a desirable goal in its own right, rather than simply a means to know God. This country was, thus, particularly susceptible to rationalist thought and Enlightenment values, producing such notable eighteenth-century scholars as Anders Celsius in mathematics and Carl von Linné botany. Here, too, the national importance of intellectuals and artists was recognized, with foundation scholarships for life made available for them from 1863 through the Swedish Academy. From 1901, the annual awards of Nobel prizes became the most visible sign of the importance placed on intellectual achievement in this country. By the mid-twentieth century, Shirer (1955: 204) noted that ‘the writer, the artist, the professor are highly regarded in Sweden. The term “egghead” is unknown.’9 And Martin (1952: 136) observed that, in Norway, ‘respect for academic learning is a very real phenomenon. Professors form an aristocracy … in a society which has no aristocracy of blood. It probably had its origins in the village where parson, schoolmaster, doctor and lawyer set the tone.’
Recognition of the broader role of education in modern society had meant that Bible study began to be replaced in schools by subjects such as technology, science, history and languages around the mid-nineteenth century. As this occurred, the state, rather than the church, became the main provider of educational services. Swedish legislation of 1842 stipulated that every parish had to have a school with at least one teacher. Thereafter, the number of teachers increased from 2,785 to 4,241 between 1847 and 1859, while the number of children receiving no education dropped from 22,606 to 7,372. By the 1930s, continuing high levels of investment meant that, ‘compared to the United Kingdom, the first and greatest difference [in education] is in the size of classes, a matter on which Sweden is undoubtedly far ahead of this country. While we are struggling vainly for a limitation of the numbers in elementary classes to 40, and having to endure a large number of classes containing 45–50 children, it is salutary for us to observe that in Sweden the average, in elementary schools, is a little over 30 and that a class of 40 is regarded as a survival from the Dark Ages’ (Simon, 1939: 255). In Norway, from 1860, there were provisions for rural school districts, with each to have at least one upper school for advanced education. Provision was also made for qualified teachers and trained inspectors. As regards Finland, elementary education began to be provided by the state from the 1850s, and the first two training colleges for teachers were set up in 1863. Travers (1911: 185, our italics) later noted that ‘most elementary school teachers have spent three years in college at the state’s expense ; and most secondary teachers have been through the university. It would be difficult to find the equivalent of our [English] uncertified elementary teachers in Finland, or our underpaid broken down schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. You see, both the [Finnish] people and their administrators are convinced of the benefits of education.’ Similarly, Shirer (1955: 397), in the post-war period: ‘the position of the public school teacher [in Finland] is rather enviable. Salaries are relatively high and if a teacher is the father of a family he receives extra pay.’
Furthermore, as the school curriculum developed, it reflected a strong anti-elitist strain: ‘a characteristic feature of the secondary school in Norway is the relatively small importance which is attached to the classical languages … as early as 1869, side by side with the classical line, a modern “line” had been introduced which took the pupil through to a matriculation exam which did not include Latin’ (Castberg, 1954: 31). Indeed, the comprehensive state education system largely precluded any private provision. Even ‘children of the [Norwegian] royal family attend ordinary schools instead of being taught privately’ (ibid.: 27–8). In such ways, education was an extremely important attribute in its own right – it became a means of achieving social advancement, recognition and respect in otherwise relatively egalitarian societies to which all were given access. At the same time, its almost exclusive provision by the state further ensured cohesion and solidarity: nobody would stand outside and above these services in elitist, privately funded, institutions.
However, education was valued in a different way and performed a different function in the Anglophone countries. State education itself was not provided in England until 1870. Thereafter, the school leaving age was steadily raised from 10 to 12 and, post-1945, to 15. Even so, by the early twentieth century, such investment was set at a minimal level (Thompson, 1988). By 1900, 20 per cent of the working class remained illiterate and 55 per cent of schoolteachers had had no formal training (Roberts, 1971). In Australia, a Select Committee of 1860 suggested that half the children aged four to 14 were receiving no education at all. By the end of the nineteenth century, state education consisted of little more than the ‘“3Rs” [reading, writing and arithmetic], singing and military drill’ (Nadal, 1957). At the same time, educational services were dominated by issues of class in all three of these societies, with huge distinctions between the standard of education available for the wealthy, which they would pay for themselves in the public schools, and that for the poor, for whom provision was likely to be from charitable organizations or a very begrudging state. Taine (1874: 122) found that, at Harrow, one of the most elite English schools, the students had to ‘attend classes, lessons, dinner, to enter at an appointed hour in the evening, nothing more; the remainder of the day is their own; it can be spent in their own fashion’. In effect, it was something of a finishing school for those whose class status swiftly elevated them to the upper echelons of government and power, or who would simply join this country’s ‘leisure class’. He goes on to quote from Thomas Hughes’ (1857) novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, in which Brown explains what he hoped to achieve during his time at another such institution, Rugby School: ‘“I want to be Al at cricket and football and all other games … I want to carry away just as much Latin and Greek as will take me through Oxford respectably … I want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one’” (ibid.: 127). In other words, such students were being cultivated to be ‘natural’ leaders of men, particularly through their prowess on the sports field, which also meant downplaying the importance of academic scholarship and excellence: this could be left to the ‘eggheads’ of these societies. Nonetheless, in most of the English public schools, a curriculum made up almost entirely of Latin and Greek scholarship perpetuated class distinction in the school curriculum, allowing upper class school students to remain apart from the rest of society and the more vulgar concerns of commerce, industry, engineering and so on.
Meanwhile, those at the bottom received their rudimentary tuition in literacy and numeracy amidst performing ‘drill’ that would render them suitable to taking orders and keeping in line. In contrast to the healthy, lively, countenances of Tom Brown and his fellow members of the ‘First XI’ or ‘First XV’,10 destitute children and orphans attending ‘ragged schools’ had ‘faces [that] are dull, and not very pleasing, they have a special uniform, blue and grey … they were made to line up single file, close up and march before me … their faces are disquieting, and resemble those of young prisoners … Every one is taught to read, to write, to sing to go through drill’ (Taine, 1874: 207). In Coketown school, the factory workers’ children were informed that ‘you are to be regulated and governed by fact … You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery … You never meet with quadrupeds [monkeys] going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact’ (Dickens, 1854/1992: 12). For such students, their education was not a means to social advancement but a form of training that instilled in them a poverty of ambition from which, in conjunction with their material poverty, acceptance of their place at the bottom of the English class hierarchy became all the more straightforward – ‘know your place’.
‘An Old Bushman’ (1865: 119) contrasted these English provisions with those in Sweden, and concluded that ‘I like the system of educating youth in Sweden much better … in nearly every town there is a public school open to all classes, and peasants are admitted on an equality with gentlemen’s sons … the salaries are paid by the government which is far more liberal than any other I know, in promoting everything for the good of the country … the degrading system of corporal punishment is quite unknown in Swedish schools.’ In the Anglophone countries, however, education became another instrument for dividing rather than unifying their populations. Thus, in England, the aim of the Taunton (Schools Inquiry) Commission (1864) was to provide a means of segregation so that ‘the lower classes would not be educated above their station nor embarrass the higher [classes] with low company’ (quoted by Perkin, 1969: 301, our italics). Similarly, the views expressed in the New Zealand Education Act 1877: ‘children whose vocation is honest work waste in higher schools time which might be better devoted to the learning of a trade’ (quoted by Belich, 2001: 130). Meanwhile, the New Zealand gentry had succeeded in ‘establishing a small network of secondary schools for their own children. Some were entirely private; most were endowed with land from the public estate, but charged substantial fees for day pupils, even more for boarders … as in England … they featured fags,11 prefects, corporal punishments and Arnoldian principals’12 (idem, our italics).
A further reason for the limited and fragmented nature of state education in Australia and New Zealand was that the demands of settlement – land clearance, farming, husbandry, pacification of the indigenous populations – were given a much higher priority. This also meant that highly educated people, or those with artistic tendencies, were unwanted immigrants. As Sidney and Sidney (1848: 192) emphasized in their Australian Handbook, ‘discontented dispositions [had] better stay at home, and so had all the stars of society, wits, diners out, the leading lights of literary circles and of provincial debating societies’. On the other hand, ‘as to the class of men who should emigrate, the first is the labourer, with no capital but stout arms and a stout heart. Action is the first great requisite of a colonist: to be able to do anything, to have a talent for making shift.’ Similarly, Berry (1879: 59), in his New Zealand as a Field for Emigration: ‘my fear is, lest lazy or incapable people should imagine that they have heard of a country where the great law about the sweat of the brow is repealed; and where they can succeed without the divinely-established conditions of success. For such to go out will be a calamity … in a bustling, prosperous active community, the listless and the lazy speedily go to the wall.’ This propensity to put a higher value on physical prowess rather than mental ability remained so in Australia and New Zealand during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Aughterson (1953: 51) thus referred to ‘the intellectual shallowness of Australian society’. As Home (1965: 17) put the matter in The Lucky Country, ‘cleverness can be considered un-Australian’. Instead, ‘Australians like people to be ordinary’ (ibid. : 24). Blainey (1966:30), too, observed that ‘the pursuit of education was seen as snobbery and a way of social advancement that broke up the camaraderies and mateship of workingmen.’ Following their visit to New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, Beatrice and Sidney Webb (1959: 25) described it as a ‘nondescript place with no intellectual circles’; sport was ‘the principal subject of conversation’ and young people ‘objected to intellectual pursuits’. In these countries, there was no need for highly trained, well-educated, ‘specialists’ (Fairburn, 1989). Indeed, Northcott (1918: 219) observed that ‘employers are negligent in regard to the future supply of efficient skilled labour. They protest that the apprentice is now economically unprofitable, that he is too difficult to control, and too careless of diligence and efficiency.’
The different values and function of education in the two clusters are also seen in relation to higher education. By the early twentieth century, England had seven universities, the same number as Sweden, which had about one seventh of its population. Entry to the Nordic universities was determined by academic ability. Tweedie (1897: 69) wrote of Christiania [Oslo] University that ‘it is very liberally open to women’. In these respects, a Nordic university education was never the exclusive prize of already very privileged elites, as it was in the Anglophone countries. Furthermore, there does not seem to have been any elaborate distinctions in the clothing of university students that would then separate them from the rest of the community. At the prestigious Uppsala University in Sweden, ‘neither the professors nor the students have any distinctions of dress … a student in the streets is not a whit better clad than any working coachmaker or carpenter in England’ (Clarke, 1823:180). And, in Finland, ‘only a tiny German cap is worn to distinguish its wearer as a university man’ (De Windt, 1901: 117). In contrast, the flamboyant gowns then worn both by Oxford and Cambridge students and their professors affirmed their difference and elite status in England. Indeed, ‘this high finishing place of education is for the aristocracy, for the rich, for the minority’ (Taine, 1874: 138). But, even then, ‘certain poor or low born undergraduates become the toadies [servants] of their noble comrades, who later on will be able to present them with a living … in certain colleges the noble undergraduates have a separate table, a particular dress, divers minor privileges’ (idem).
Overall, the pursuit of knowledge became commonplace in the Nordic countries through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries: ‘education is very thorough and the result is that Norwegians of all classes are usually well informed’ (Tweedie, 1897: 69). Indeed, ‘there are libraries on ships, in seamen’s homes and in churches … the servant girl has a shelf of books in her room and the fisher lad finds a place for a few books in his boat … Scientists at the University of Oslo and at the Bergen Museum broadcast their lectures and public school curricula are now being extended to include instructive radio programmes’ (Evang, 1957: 113). In Sweden, the folkhögskolan (an elementary school that provided training for adults) was a further offshoot of the social movement tradition and, again, affirmed the importance of educational skills to which all should continue to have access: ‘every autumn, as the evenings swiftly draw in, some 1,000,000 adult Swedes – one eighth of the entire population – turn out in the cold to flock to adult classes, another aspect of the educational explosion which has deep roots in the Swedish past’ (Austin, 1970:121). At the same time, training and specialization also became important Nordic characteristics, available to all workers: ‘Norwegians tend to define in highly specialized terms a remarkable variety of social roles and to recruit men to such roles on the basis of formally acquired qualifications, particularly special schooling. Special functional training is, of course, typical of modern societies, for functionally specific relations play a large role in all of them. But the Norwegians go much farther in this distinction than others: they even insist on specialist schooling for such people as postal or cafeteria workers’ (Jenkins, 1968: 223). In such ways, educational achievement and enterprise was something to encourage, something to strive for, a way of winning respect in these otherwise egalitarian societies. One consequence of this was that it became an unquestioned assumption that policymaking should be expert dominated: ‘there is enormous respect among Swedes for science, technology and expert opinion. No society in the world utilizes experts and knowledge in the whole process of writing legislation as much as does Sweden’ (Tomasson, 1970: 226).
In the Anglophone countries, however, the pursuit of knowledge was much more likely to be regarded as an esoteric, somewhat eccentric, activity practised by dilettantes, and divorced from the concerns and issues of ‘the real world’. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were still hardly any free public libraries in England. Collier (1909: 344) complained that ‘only in a comparatively few families in the English town is there any continued reading of even such ephemeral literature as [newspapers and magazines]’. Indeed, anti-intellectualism became a strong feature of public discourse. The famed zoologist Thomas Huxley (1880: 137) complained that ‘“practical” men … were of the opinion that science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice have nothing to do with one another; and that the scientific habit of mind is an impediment, rather than an aid in the conduct of ordinary affairs’. Kingsley (1877: 119), himself both a novelist and philanthropist, had emphasized the importance of practical skills – the same skills that had brought many of the industrial entrepreneurs their wealth – rather than those that were merely cerebral: ‘they say knowledge is power, and so it is. But the only knowledge which you get is by observation. Many a man is very learned in books, and has read for years and years, and yet he is useless. He knows about all sorts of things, but he can’t do them. When you set him to work he makes a mess of it. He is what is called a pedant: because he has not used his eyes and ears. He has lived in books.’ Rather than being celebrated, those with literary or artistic talents were more likely to be treated with suspicion and disdain. Taine (1874: 258–9) thus complained about the cartoons in the satirical magazine Punch: ‘we all know how in French sketches the artist is raised above the citizen; here, oddly enough, the reverse occurs … musicians are represented as salaried monkeys, who come to make a noise in the drawing room. Painters are bearded artisans, unkempt, shabbily dressed, hardly one degree raised above photographers. These are workmen who cannot speak English and who merely form food for ridicule.’ In England: Her People, Polity and Pursuits, the historian Thomas Escott (1885:334) argued that such temperaments were indicative of effeminacy and corruption: ‘the keen scented, eminently decorous British public perceives a certain aroma of social and moral laxity in the atmosphere of the [artist’s] studio, a kind of blended perfume of periodical impecuniosity and much tobacco smoke … [T]he popular view of the painter … is that the calling which he elects to follow lacks defmitiveness of status, and that it is not calculated to promote those serious, methodical habits which form an integral part of the foundations of English society.’
This attitude towards intellectuals was also related to British class structure: the exclusiveness of the universities, for example, that removed such thinkers from the mainstream of society. Thereafter, many remained as ‘gentleman scholars’, if not employed by the universities, amongst whom, in the late nineteenth century alone, were John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, George Bernard Shaw and Robert Browning. Their physical remoteness also emphasized their ‘difference’ from the rest of society, and frequently made them figures of fun or derision: ‘appearances were to be exposed and these men were splendidly eccentric in Victorian society in not keeping them up. They groaned at the thought of formal receptions and preferred to wear rough clothes ‘(Annan, 1955 : 249). Even George Orwell (1941: 160) referred disparagingly to ‘the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck’. Thus, while intellectuals were expected to have a direct influence on policy development in the Nordic countries, their dislocation from such involvement came to be seen as a defining characteristic of the Anglophone. Arguing against the recruitment of state-employed experts in England, A. V. Dicey (1919: lxxvi), Oxford professor and leading constitutional lawyer, preferred rule by the ‘gifted amateur’ : ‘respect for experts ought always to be tempered by constant remembrance that possessors of special knowledge have also their special weaknesses. Rarely indeed does reform come from even the best among professional men.’ Similarly, Inge (1926: 102): ‘our most influential thinkers and discoverers have rarely been professionals. We are a nation of amateurs in peace and war … our great men have had wider interests and more knowledge of the world than can be often found in a university professor.’ Indeed, the famous British historian, G. M. Trevelyan (1942: 165) claimed that the history of England was littered with examples of the archetypal ‘amateur’, such as William Caxton, the inventor of modern printing: ‘an early and a noble example of a well known modern type that has done so much for the world, the individualistic Englishman following out his own hobbies with business capacity and trained zeal’. Here, then, thinkers were best left alone rather than recruited to the services of the state.
The impact of the Lutheran Church, the responsibility of which was to facilitate faith rather than give charity, had necessitated that the state administer to the sick and needy. Lutherans rejected the spiritual idealization of poverty and the efficiaciousness of charity that was characteristic of Catholicism: ‘voluntary poverty was a form of social parasitism to be punished, not a symbol of spiritual sacrifice to be rewarded’ (Witte, 2002: 20). This then put the onus on the state to undertake ‘caring work’ in the void that the Reformation left. Indeed, an already formidable state bureaucracy in Sweden undertook the first collection of census data in the world, in 1749. Laing (1837: 273, our italics) later noted, with some bemusement, that ‘in Sweden there is a department of government for drawing up statistical tables, called the Table Department. Tables on every point respecting the population, property, crops, capital, in short embracing every matter of statistical interest either to government or the political economist, are made out in each parish by the clergyman and the parish writer – a distinct functionary apart from the parish clerk or sexton; and a Table Commission at Stockholm is constantly employed in generalising these local returns and reducing them to tables … In any other country, if a public functionary were to ask you how much you sow, how much you reap, what is your capital, what your profits, the inquirer and his commission would be turned out of doors for his impertinence. Here, people are trained to obedience.’ In effect, what could seem to be the extraordinary extent of state governance to a visitor from England, such as Laing, already seemed, for Swedish citizens, to have become an unremarkable feature of their society. At the same time, the employment of many of the landless nobility in key civil service positions (Laing, 1837) helped to give state organizations additional authority and prestige. A century later, civil servants had become a very highly respected group of workers in Swedish society (Tomasson, 1970).
In addition, state organizations had to play a major role in infrastructural development in these geographically large but sparsely populated countries: ‘in times of crisis the state raised loans, which it passed on to industry and commerce. The state was also active in the creation of an institutional apparatus for the provision of credit. Local authorities played an important role in the establishment of local savings banks … the state played the main role in the development of the communications network which promoted growth and market integration. The purchase of Sweden’s first steamship in 1826 was a state initiative’ (Hovde, 1943: 110). In effect, then, there was nothing unusual or undesirable about an enlarged role for the state in these societies: on the contrary, it had become a necessary feature of economic development and social organization. Grimley (1937: 29, our italics) thus observed that ‘the question of ownership of public utilities has never been much of an issue [in Norway]. To the great majority of [its] people, it is unthinkable that these should be privately owned and run for the profit of a few … railways were not built for profit. They were built both as an economic and social enterprise, just like you build a highway.’ Post-war reconstruction then necessitated further extensions of state power: ‘it was generally conceded that the task of rebuilding Norway’s economy after occupation would require collective action under firm state leadership and all political parties were therefore able to agree upon a common programme of economic reconstruction and social reform’ (Warbey, et al., 1950: 11).
But the state provided more than infrastructural development. It was able to shape, police, guide and regulate public morality and culture, to bring about what it judged to be the well-being of each individual. Thus, in Norway, ‘90 per cent of cinemas or movies of Norway are municipally owned … there are no privately owned motion picture theatres in Oslo, and there as well as elsewhere in the country, the movie is made into an education factor to a large extent. There is also a state censor of films. You cannot buy time on the state owned radio … the radio is an educational factor, and the different speakers discuss objectively all kinds of subjects which tend to enlarge the knowledge of the listener and widen his horizon of human interest’ (Grimley, 1937: 29). Alcohol restrictions and prohibition exemplify the deep penetration of the state into everyday life in these societies during this period. Following the campaigning activities of their temperance movements, prohibition was introduced in both Norway (from 1916 to 1927) and Finland (from 1919 to 1932). In Sweden, alcohol purchases were regulated from 1914 to 1955 by the ‘motbok [passbook] system’. That is, ‘a passbook is given only to persons who have reached majority age, who possess sufficient income to afford the purchase of alcoholic beverages, and who are known for their temperate mode of life’ (Kinberg, 1930: 209). Entry was made of each purchase in the book and, if it was thought that alcohol was being consumed too quickly, the purchaser could be turned away from the state monopoly alcohol outlets (Systembolaget). Since the end of prohibition and the motbok this remains the only permissable outlet for alcohol sales in Sweden; similarly, the Vinmonopolet in Norway and Alko shops in Finland.
Such exercises of state power, designed to engineer individual well-being that fitted community expectations and standards, could be both humane and generous on the one hand, yet clumsily insensitive, not to say harshly authoritarian, on the other. Thus, while the state facilitated the extensive development of municipal housing that was made available to all, irrespective of income, those moving into such facilities were subject to high levels of scrutiny and inspection by its bureaucracies: ‘it is a house rule that each new tenant must have his possessions disinfected before he moves in so that there will be no danger of vermin’ (Childs, 1936: 53). The state introduced sex education to Swedish schools in the 1930s, with a view to ensuring that informed choices could be made regarding family planning and development, rather than allowing this to be ruled by ignorance and myth. However, because it was thought that the mentally retarded were not capable of practicing birth control and would bring large numbers of children into disadvantaged circumstances, the state also assumed the power to prevent them from having any. Swedish legislation in 1935 thus authorized compulsory sterilization for ‘legally incompetent’ individuals. This was justified by Karl Höjer, Director ofthe Swedish Poor Reliefand Child Welfare Association (1938:371), on the basis that ‘the community having by now assumed main responsibility for care of the feeble minded … it is only natural that efforts should be made to prevent an increase in their number’. There were 63,000 such operations up to 1975, the vast majority on women (Broberg and Roll-Hanssen, 1996). In Norway, there were 41,000 between 1934 and 1977. In Finland, there were 1,078 between 1935 and 1955, under legislation allowing this for ‘idiots, imbeciles and the insane’. Further legislation in 1950, allowing this to be carried out on eugenic, social or general medical grounds, led to 56,000 more.
The extent and exercise of both formal and informal social controls helped to bring about high levels of conformity and acquiescence to community standards, rather than give encouragement to individual aspirations. Let us go back to Bjørnson’s (1882: 65, our italics) confirmation class, waiting for their results, to witness this. One young man had been placed tenth in the class rather than first, even though the exam results had merited the latter. However, the schoolteacher explains to him that ‘this, Øyvind, has been a well-merited recompense. You have not studied from love of your religion, or of your parents; you have studied from vanity.’ Success in this region was not to be an excuse for celebration or pride, where the individual was then elevated beyond the standards or expectations of their community. By the same token, the need to avoid emotional outbursts, the need to avoid ostentation, the need to be seen as similar rather than different, brought with it caution and reserve – lagom – in everyday interaction. Clarke (1823: 238) thus noted that ‘the Swedes are naturally mild and obliging [,] being rarely provoked to anger, or passionate when disputing with each other’. More emotional outbursts than this were likely to lead to unplanned or ill considered conduct that would shatter the consensus that formed the basis of everyday relationships in these small societies. Undoubtedly, such values could be repressive and stifling. In the late nineteenth century, Henrik Ibsen (quoted by Connery, 1966: 184) complained that ‘Norwegians can only agree on one sole point: to drag down what is lofty’. A succession of commentators then variously reported that: ‘Sweden is a country where only the mediocre is successful … generally speaking, we do not like eccentric or original people, unless they amuse us’ (Sundbärg, 1911a: 28); ‘the eccentric character in Sweden is rare’ (De Mare, 1952: 253); ‘nonconformists often have difficulty fitting into Swedish life’ (Fleisher, 1967: 342); ‘to be different in Sweden is to be burdened with a sense of guilt and to be the worst of failures’ (Huntford, 1971: 32). And, despite the cultivation of the creative arts in these societies, luminaries such as Ibsen, August Strindberg and Jean Sibelius spent much of their working lives outside their own countries of Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Yet, out of these pressures to conform, out of the acquiescence to state authority, these societies also seemed able to generate high levels of trust, norm compliance and self-regulation (those same values that have become manifested in their prison systems, particularly the open prisons, in the early twenty-first century). Much emphasis was thus placed on conflict avoidance, and the performance of civic duties and responsibilities that demonstrated the importance of interdependencies, and the need to extend reciprocities towards other members of these societies, rather than out of any deference to or illustration of difference from them. Laing (1837: 159), for example, noticed, in Sweden, that ‘the good manners of the people to each other are very striking, and extend lower among the ranks of society in the community than in other countries. There seem none so uncultivated or rude, as not to know and observe among themselves the forms of politeness. The brutality and rough way of talking to and living with each other, characteristic of our lower classes, is not found here … there is evidently an uncommon equality of manners among all ranks.’ In much the same way, regular references to high levels of hygiene and cleanliness were indicative of the extent of these responsibilities and the readiness to conform to them: ‘one thing will strike the stranger on entering a countryhouse here, and that is the scrupulous cleanliness in which the rooms are kept’ (‘An Old Bushman’, 1865: 122). In the 1920s, Gothenburg public gardens were described as ‘a dream of delight and colour in summer, while they are so beautifully kept and well ordered that though frequently invaded by festive crowds there appears to be an almost entire lack of that careless abandon that so often impels the British holiday maker to litter even the most pleasant garden with paper bags and food’ (Heathcote, 1927: 86). For Simon (1939:255), ‘the Swedes are so orderly and clean that nowhere does one find a dirty or untidy apartment and the flue ventilated lavatories even in the hotels were never objectionable’. Thereafter, the renowned criminologist Torsten Sellin (1948: 14) confirmed that ‘[Swedish] cities have no slums … the visitor is struck by the orderliness and cleanliness of the cities and their recreational facilities for children and adults alike’.
In England, however, the emphasis was much more on self-help rather than state help. A long line of scholars that can be traced from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and which included Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and A. V. Dicey, were all of the view that the state should only be allowed minimal intrusion in the lives of its subjects.13 This would then mean that each citizen would have to take responsibility for the subsequent direction that his or her life took, rather than expect any assistance to this end from the state. Indeed, these ideas were famously popularized in the best-selling writing of Samuel Smiles in the mid- to late-nineteenth century: ‘the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and exhibited in the lives of many, constitutes the true course of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates’ (Smiles, 1859: 1, our italics). State power was thus understood, here, as something debilitating rather than enabling. For example, in National Life and Character, C. H. Pearson (1893: 138) claimed that the growth of state power would lead to the decline of ‘English adventurousness’, the spirit on which the Empire itself had been founded. It thus represented ‘an absolute departure from the time honoured English principle of leaving every man to do the best for himself and fare as he may’. As such, the different place and tolerance of state bureaucracies became one of the distinguishing characteristics between England and continental Europe over the course of this period. Dickens (1857), in Little Dorrit, for example, satirizes the civil service when he writes of ‘the Circumlocution Office’, ‘the most important department under government’. To become involved with it, though, was like stepping into quicksand: ‘numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare, who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it.’ Rather than the state bureaucracies having, as it were, a natural and largely uncontested role in the governance of everyday life, as in the Nordic countries during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, it was as if they were at best nothing more than an unnecessary appendage, complicating and obfuscating matters that individuals could – and should – be allowed to accomplish more efficiently and effectively on their own. British travellers in Europe in the late nineteenth century thus took exception to the powers they found invested in continental state officials. One complained that ‘surely it is not necessary for government to poke its nose into all private concerns, to have magistrates and police and common councils and commercial councils … to control the affairs of the citizens and to protect what is in no need of protection’ (quoted by Morgan, 2001: 164). These antipathies to the state and its organizations of government had become cemented into British society by the mid-twentieth century. J. B. Priestley (1934: 389), for example, in English Journey, wrote in praise of ‘Little England’ and against ‘red-faced, staring loud-voiced Big Englanders who want to boss everybody about’. Much more preferable to investing state officials with seemingly authoritarian powers, M. Ernest Barker (1947: 554) in The Character of England, claimed, was ‘the habit of “muddling through” … It means that all sorts of men – each in his own way, and each on his own account – are tackling the problems of the moment with every appearance of confusion … and yet achieving results which the planner and synthesizer might miss.’
Was this hostility to state power a characteristic of the Anglophone cluster as a whole? In Australia and New Zealand, as in the Nordic countries, the state had to play a more central role in infrastructural development. As Siegfried (1914: 54) explained, ‘in the early days of a colony there is usually little co-operation between the immigrants; the government is usually the only bond which unites them, and some time is necessary before natural groupings are formed. The government is thus brought by the force of circumstances to perform functions, which in the old countries would lie within the province of private initiative.’ However, proposals for any more extensive state intervention in the conduct of everyday life were regarded with scepticism and suspicion (Webb, 1940: 146). Instead, as in England, social advancement through hard work was the expectation: ‘a man must perforce be the sole architect of his own fortunes. Industry and energy, enterprise and perseverance pave the pathway to success’ (Hay, 1882: 34); and ‘it is the hard-worker with small capital who will win in the long run in New Zealand, and to him I commend the colony’ (Ashby, 1889:48). Indeed, across all these Anglophone societies, the self-made man making vast fortunes set the example for others to follow, rather than the poor farmers of the Nordic countries. Hence, the central character in Kingsley’s (1849: 96, our italics) novel, Yeast, is described as having ‘carved out his own way through life … neither with sword nor pen, but with steam and cotton … From a mill owner he grew to coal owner, ship owner, banker, railway director, money lender to kings and princes; and last of all, as the summit of his ambition, to land-owner.’ Each individual, in effect, was thought to be master of their own fate: ‘how a man uses money – makes it, saves it and spends it – is perhaps one of the best tests of practical wisdom … some of the finest qualities of human nature are intimately related to the right use of money ; such as generosity, honesty, justice and self-sacrifice, as well as the virtues of economy and providence’ (Smiles, 1859:290).
At the same time, though, the importance of self-advancement meant that there was less emphasis on the development of interdependencies and reciprocities than in the Nordic countries. Collier (1909: 32) wrote of ‘the grounded horror of interfering in other people’s affairs – they avoid the smallest suspicion of even curiosity about one another’s affairs or private concerns’. As Maillaud (1945: 27) observed, ‘English individualism is undoubtedly the strongest in Europe … “not to get involved” is a watchword which one hears time and time gain, whether it is applied to an invitation to lunch or to a sentimental attachment.’ Indeed, it was thought that offers of assistance, whether these came from individuals or the state, led only to dependency rather than empowerment. In the late nineteenth century, Jevons (1878:9) thus claimed that ‘there are many good-hearted people who think it is virtuous to give alms to poor people who ask for them, without considering the effect produced upon the people. They see the pleasure of the beggar on getting the alms, but they do not see the after effects, namely that beggars become more numerous than before. Much of the poverty and crime which now exist have been caused by mistaken charity in past times, which has caused a large part of the population to grow up careless, and improvident and idle. Political economy proves that, instead of giving casual ill-considered alms, we should educate people, teach them to work and earn their own livings, and save up something to live upon in old age.’ It was to lead to a mindset where there was much less by way of recognition of civic duties and responsibilities than in the Nordic countries. In England Speaks, Gibbs (1935: 40), at the height of the depression and mass unemployment, was ‘convinced that there are numbers of cases in which the incentive to work is lacking because idleness is subsidised by state relief … it will be a tragic thing if the younger crowd are brought up to believe that the state will provide for them, at least on a minimum scale, whether they feel like work or whether they don’t’.
By the mid-twentieth century, then, two very different ways of seeing, constructing, understanding and thinking about the world had been set in place. In contrast to the importance given to individual success, and the need to establish barriers of exclusion against the unwanted and the unproductive in the Anglophone countries, we have moderation, reserve, uniformity and inclusion in the Nordic. In contrast to the way in which education was something that the wealthy purchased, but which took the form of disciplinary training for the poor, in the Anglophone countries, in the Nordic it was more readily available to all. Here, intellectual advancement won respect and recognition, while intellectuals in the Anglophone countries were generally regarded as eccentric outsiders – Wood (1958: 162) wrote of a ‘suspicion of the expert and an undervaluing of research [in New Zealand]’. In contrast to the way in which advances in state power were to be guarded against in the Anglophone countries, on the basis that this enfeebled the nation’s health, this was regarded as an essential means of enriching community well-being in the Nordic countries.