Britain’s rich cultural heritage and traditions are the main reasons why it has millions of overseas visitors each year. The attractions include the many theaters, museums, art galleries, and historical buildings to be found in all parts of the United Kingdom, as well as the numerous annual arts festivals and the pageantry associated with the British royal family. The expansion of tourism, combined with the collapse of many traditional economic activities, has helped encourage the growth since the 1980s of the so-called heritage industry, seen in the explosion of “living” museums illustrating Britain’s rural and industrial past.
London has the greatest concentration of theaters, orchestras, and galleries, and is also the main home of the print and broadcast media, and of the fashion, recording, motion picture, and publishing industries—as such, it often seems to dominate modern British culture. However, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the regions of England all have vigorous cultural traditions that have contributed to and still enrich all aspects of British life. The traditions and abilities of the various ethnic minorities are also reflected in modern British culture, notably in music and literature, and are celebrated in events like the annual Notting Hill Carnival in west London.
The traditional music, song, and dance of Scotland, much of it derived from the country’s Gaelic heritage, thrives in the ceilidh, the (bag)pipe band, and the Highland games. In the contemporary arts, Scotland has noted museums, galleries, and orchestras, and national ballet and opera companies. It also hosts the world’s premier arts festival, the annual Edinburgh International Festival; Britain’s second-largest arts festival, the Mayfest, is held in Glasgow. The choral and bardic traditions of Wales are seen most notably in the country’s male-voice choirs and in the eisteddfod. These annual festivals celebrating Welsh music, poetry, and customs are held throughout Wales, culminating in the Royal National Eisteddfod, which has developed into an international festival of the arts. Cardiff is home to the Welsh National Opera, one of Britain’s leading symphony orchestras, and several museums. In Northern Ireland, the ancient Celtic traditions of the whole island coexist with those of the descendants of the English and Scottish settlers. Opera Northern Ireland, the Ulster Symphony Orchestra, and the national Ulster Museum are based in Belfast.
In England, ancient folk traditions are maintained in all parts of the country. Many are unique to particular areas; some, like the morris dance, are more widespread. All English cities and many towns have art galleries and museums. Many contain notable collections.
British society is overwhelmingly urban, but it has retained distinct links with its rural past. These links are reflected in the popularity of gardening, and in the working-class tradition of growing vegetables on allotments. Sport is important in Britain, and the British originated or developed the modern forms and rules of a number of sports—notably soccer (known as football in Britain), rugby, cricket, tennis, polo, horse racing, field hockey, and croquet. Angling (fishing) is the most popular British sport or pastime, attracting more active participants than soccer.
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| Literature |
By the end of the 20th century, English had become a true world language, and English literature is taught today in secondary schools and universities everywhere. Famous English poets, playwrights, and novelists are quoted, translated, and loved throughout the world. Welsh, Scottish, and Irish writers who write in English rather than in their native Celtic tongues are customarily included as contributors to English literature. For the development of literature in the British Isles, see Cornish Literature, English Literature, Gaelic Literature, Irish Literature, Scottish Literature, and Welsh Literature.
The earliest celebrated example of English literature is the bloody Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, written sometime between the 8th century and the late 10th century. After the Norman conquest in 1066, French was the language of the ruling elite, but native Britons still spoke English. The greatest English writer of the Middle Ages was Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th century. This work displayed not only the vigor and vitality of the English language, but also shaped the future of the language for centuries to come.
A great flowering of English writing took place in the late 16th century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The themes of Englishness, love, violence, and the turmoil of human emotions were explored from a nonreligious standpoint. Poetry was considered the most polished form of literary expression. The Faerie Queene (Books I-III, 1590; Books IV-VI, 1596), an epic poem in six books by Edmund Spenser, is one of the masterpieces of the century. The sonnet, a poetry style that uses a formal rhyme scheme, was used by Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, who excelled at this form.
A shift to spiritual themes began in the early 17th century, as seen in the writings of John Donne, who is famous not only for his religious sermons but also for his love poetry. Donne’s complex and dramatic style made him one of the founders of metaphysical poetry. Amid the religious and civil turmoil of the English Revolution in the mid-17th century, Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Donne, wrote plays and poetry in a formal style that rejected the floweriness of 16th-century writing. This more classical style inspired a group of writers who became known as Cavalier Poets. The prose of John Milton also shared this classical style. His works, mostly pamphlets, supported the Puritan side of the revolution by stressing civil and religious liberty. Milton’s later works, the poems Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671), were written in blank verse. This unrhymed poetry focused on such religious themes as the fall of Adam and human redemption. John Bunyan wrote the popular work The Pilgrim's Progress (published in two parts, 1678 and 1684), which depicts Christian salvation as a journey.
This classical writing style continued from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the middle of the 18th century, a century often called the Age of Enlightenment. It was during this time that the modern novel emerged as a popular form of expression. The modern novel encompassed stories about people and their relation to society, whether they lived within society’s confines or not. Journalist Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) and a number of other popular adventure novels. Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift authored Gulliver's Travels (1726), a charming and biting social commentary. Bawdy and wild aspects of 18th-century life are reflected in the novel Tom Jones (1749), by writer and lawyer Henry Fielding. It was also during the 18th century that writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson compiled his Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Toward the end of the 18th century, a reaction against reason, rationalism, and the physical world developed. This movement (romanticism) pervaded many aspects of society. The romantic movement in literature idealized nature and was characterized by a highly imaginative and subjective approach. Emotions and exotic places, both present and past, became central to countless lengthy novels and torrents of poetry. Poet William Wordsworth found his inspiration in nature, while Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake were inspired by mysticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats wrote romantic poetry. Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, whose most famous work is Ivanhoe (1819), wrote more than 20 historical novels, many of them set in the Middle Ages.
Women also made their mark as writers during the romantic period. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is noted for the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), which took the romantic interest in emotions to the point of terror. Jane Austen wrote clever, elegant novels such as Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Her down-to-earth main characters were reactions against the emotionalism of romantic writers.
During the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the Victorian era produced an amazing number of popular novelists and poets. This time period saw the rise of an increasingly urbanized, middle-class, and educated society that included a much larger reading audience. Many authors wrote about characters and situations well-known or easily comprehensible to their audience and became universally popular and in touch with their vast readership to a degree not matched in the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous author of this time was Charles Dickens, who portrayed the hardships of the working class while criticizing middle-class life. Writers prominent during the heart of the Victorian period include George Eliot, who, despite being a critic of Christianity, was known for her intense, moral novels; William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote humorous portrayals of middle- and upper-class life; the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—whose novels tended to be autobiographical; Anthony Trollope, a keen observer of politics and upper Victorian society; and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote children’s books, adventure stories, and poetry. The most popular of the many Victorian poets was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Other famous poets include Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, and Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
As the late Victorian era gave way to early modern times at the turn of the 20th century, the focus shifted away from stories of everyday Victorian life. The novels of Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad possess a certain pessimism and uncertainty about life. In the early 20th century the dark, psychological novels of D. H. Lawrence were censored for their explicit language; his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was banned as pornographic. The poetry of T. S. Eliot, especially The Waste Land (1922), expresses disillusionment with modern civilization, as do the popular novels of Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World (1932). Exotic and foreign places are the settings of works by Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster. Forster’s novels became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as films, including A Room with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924). Irish writer James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf were instrumental in forging the new stream-of-consciousness writing style. The rich and memorable poetry of Dylan Thomas made him the greatest Welsh poet of the 20th century.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse wrote novels satirizing British upper-class life. In the mid-20th century the works of George Orwell, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), focused on his fears about society. William Golding also expressed fears about the breakdown of society in his novel Lord of the Flies (1954). Works of fantasy were written during this period in response to the horrors of World War II. J. R. R. Tolkien is famous for his fantasy novels, particularly The Hobbit (1937) and its sequel, the trilogy Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). British writers whose work won attention in the late 20th century included novelists Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Ian McEwan; poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney; and dramatists Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Michael Frayn.
EU for Britain
"The European Union is essential to the success of Britain and a Britain fully engaged in Europe is essential to the success of the European Union."
- Prime Minister Gordon Brown
The way that EU funding makes a positive difference to small businesses all around the UK. We tasked a camera crew to travel the country and talk to some of those that have received funds to build successful enterprises.
However, there was disparity for political economy of Britain. Some elites and opinion formers said that Britain’s economic pre-eminence was in decline. This dilemma has shown through the government that: (1) the appropriate and relative roles of the state and the market as generators of prosperity and (2) the framework within which the governance of economic life should happen.
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