Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Professor Gerald Middleton has spent his career studying the past while making an impressive mess of the present. Now sixty, professionally respectable and privately convinced that much of his life has been wasted, he decides to investigate an archaeological mystery he has spent decades carefully avoiding. Historians are generally enthusiastic about confronting uncomfortable truths once everyone directly involved is safely dead.

The mystery concerns the celebrated Melpham excavation, where a grotesque pagan fertility idol was discovered in the tomb of the early Christian Bishop Eorpwald. The find transformed scholarly understanding of Anglo-Saxon religion and supplied generations of academics with something substantial to disagree about. Unfortunately, Gerald has reason to believe that the idol was planted as a hoax by his old friend Gilbert Stokesay, whose drunken confession has remained buried almost as successfully as the object itself.

For years Gerald has done nothing. Exposing the fraud would damage reputations, overturn scholarship and reveal his own cowardice in remaining silent. More personally, the excavation is entangled with his relationship with Gilbert’s fiancée, Dollie, with whom Gerald began an affair before Gilbert was killed in the First World War. The past is therefore not a tidy field of academic evidence but a badly organised storage room containing guilt, adultery and an exceptionally embarrassing pagan figure.

Gerald’s family provides no refuge. His estranged Scandinavian wife Inge has constructed an elaborate private reality in which awkward facts are refused admission. Their adult children have accumulated unhappy marriages, resentments, affairs and grievances against their parents. Gerald attempts to repair some of the damage, only to discover that relatives do not respond to historical reassessment quite as calmly as manuscripts.

Around them, Angus Wilson assembles a wonderfully sharp collection of scholars, social climbers, fading performers, businessmen, lovers, dependants and professional manipulators. Everyone is concealing something, misinterpreting somebody else or maintaining a moral position that becomes flexible under personal pressure. English respectability survives chiefly because so many people have agreed not to examine it closely.

First published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is both an archaeological mystery and a broad satirical portrait of postwar England. Wilson examines academic vanity, family cruelty, sexual hypocrisy and the comfortable arrangements by which institutions protect themselves from truth. The hoax at Melpham matters, but so does the larger question of how people construct an acceptable history of their own behaviour and then cite it as an authoritative source.

The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where the Anglo-Saxon Messenger adopts peculiar bodily attitudes when happy. Wilson’s characters assume attitudes of a different sort: moral, intellectual, social and frequently unsustainable. Very few are happy, but nearly everyone has developed a position.

The novel has the crowded energy of Dickens and the social malice of someone who has spent enough time around respectable institutions to understand how they actually operate. Its comedy is dark, its plotting elaborate and its sympathies surprisingly humane. Gerald’s attempt to uncover the truth becomes a late effort to recover some moral purpose—not heroically early, perhaps, but before the final bibliography is compiled.

This 1992 Penguin Books edition is in Good condition. It shows the reasonable signs of previous reading but remains sound, complete and free of planted archaeological artefacts. Any phallic pagan idol discovered inside should be reported before the listing is revised.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where all historical claims are subject to verification and family scandals may be stored securely behind the bookcase.

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