Chapter 4 explores Adam Nicolson’s attempts to ‘revive’ tradition at his ‘ancestral’ estate, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. Here Sissinghurst becomes the beacon for his political philosophy of landscape, agriculture, and something approaching ‘England’ via his mythology of ‘Arcadia’. It is argued that Nicolson’s vision for Sissinghurst ought to be understood as a response to the central sociological problem aristocrats face: sinking status. Given that if one starts at the top, the only way is down, sinking status must develop strategies for upward nobility. The strategy of upward nobility that Nicolson has chosen is to turn his ancestors into sources of social and political power for the future. It is shown that Nicolson’s telling of Sissinghurst’s story as a story of decline and fall is seized upon as an opportunity to revive and bring back a way of life that can mitigate the problems and ills of the present. Here we see how Nicolson combines Sissinghurst’s twentieth-century renown and its representation in modernist literature with a political philosophy of agriculturalism that evokes the early organic movement, which took the small manor farm and attendant hierarchy of lord, yeoman and peasant as the basis for social harmony and economic prosperity.

Chapter 8 examines the fortunes of the twenty-first century in relation to two interlocking but competing sensibilities in English culture, Raymond Williams’ Country and the City. The city is London, and the country is the spiral of the Home Counties surrounding London: Middle England. Here we find two competing sensibilities in relation to the fortunes of the twenty-first century, one which recalls the aesthetics of the father of modern conservatism Edmund Burke. On the one hand, the fortunes of the twenty-first century appear as sublime, while, on the other, those who make such a judgement long for a more agreeable vision of fortunes and its accompanying aesthetic of beauty – a beauty sought for or revealed in either architecture or landscape of an England of old. As the fortunes of the twenty-first century cannot be easily divided by Old and New Money, a move away from a moral hierarchy of wealth has been replaced with an aesthetics of feeling and desire. Examining the writings of a disparate mix of upper-class gentlemen, critical sociologists and environmentalists we shall see how the fears of excessive, plutocratic capital accumulation is tied with an alternative aesthetic of beauty which is socially elaborated as an old imperial-colonial Englishness. The chapter demonstrates that within the traditionalism and empiricism idioms of the house of England, we can find a tradition of English socialism and radicalism which does not seek to revolt, to destroy, to overturn or break down but hopes for a piecemeal, gentle, prolonged reformation.

While the idiom of the house has been drawn up in a multitude of different areas of English social, political and cultural life in the present, it has not provided any satisfactory answers or directions for our future. As such it is suggested that the idiom of the house ought to be viewed as what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called a Thing: an empty void into which we have projected our inaccessible desires to guarantee the preservation of a view of English society which is no longer possible, morally permissible, or even desirable. Instead, we could view ourselves not as heirs to a tradition but, rather, as contingent remainders: those people who signal more the crisis and imperfections of a society where kinship and inheritance play so central a role. We could give up the ghost of the house and think of ourselves as freer to be together in new and collaborative ways.

Chapter 6 consists of an ethnography of a provincial English town’s independent bookshop. Here, discussions about the role of reading, literature and the high-street reveal deep, underlying concerns on the meaning of ‘culture’ in English society and its relation to the ‘moral health’ of the nation. Awakening the debates on the meaning of ‘culture’ in the art-society tradition of the twentieth century, ranging from F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, through C. P. Snow and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the chapter shows how the meaning of culture becomes a debate about the ethical permissibility of a traditional Englishness. We find that through interviews with the upper-class gentlemen who frequent this bookshop, and in their artistic work as writers and critics, folklorists and as readers, an aesthetic of Old Englishness emerges, an aesthetic which is used by these individuals to form a critique of the shortcomings of the present. Through constructing an aesthetic of English society in arts and letters, these individuals then pit an avaricious, and ephemeral, modernity against the certainties found in Old England.

Chapter 7 consists of an examination of the writings of upper-class society journalist and commentator Peter York and his classic 1980s series Sloane Rangers. It argues that Sloane Rangers ought to be treated as continuing a tradition of English class categorisation where social status and economic interest are exaggerated by appeals to tradition in the idiom of kinship. Sloane Rangers arose in the 1980s as a response to English deindustrialisation and the rise of an advanced neo-liberal consumer economy: in contrast to new money and widening affluence, Sloane Rangers were offered as a long standing, inherited social position, part of what York called ‘the eternal stream of English life’. Through a critical examination of York’s writings, the chapter shows that the Sloane Ranger was invented to meet a challenge: to preserve forms of social behaviour, attitudes, practices and cultural worldviews which are seen as either dying out or from a time prior to the present. As such, the status symbols of the Sloane Ranger become another way in which the present needs of capitalism draw upon old ideologies and character traits. By extending the analysis of the Sloane Ranger through to its present reincarnations in brands such as Jack Wills, we see how this sense of social practices and status symbols being repetitions from a time prior to the present is one of the ways in which economic privilege and social exclusivity go hand in hand in England.

How can we explain the cultural fault lines which currently plague a post-Brexit Britain? The Introduction makes the claim that the culprit is the peculiarity of the English imagination, whose eternal and timeless utopia is Arcadia: a perfect England which existed once and has since been lost. It is demonstrated that this vision of a perfect England is a post-war invention as Britain underwent imperial and colonial decline. We can understand Brexit as a crisis of Englishness which tries to re-imagine a vision of British society as one of pastoral harmony organised around the manor house, and imperial power channelled through networks of overseas trade. The book argues that this vision of English society can be located in the upper-class house, and through the idioms of houses we can trace notions of belonging and social unity through the upper-class personages of which these houses are associated. The book’s overarching claim is that the idiom of the house, from the country house to the public school system, monarchy to lesser gentry, has been seized upon repeatedly in a variety of social, political and cultural beliefs and practices. In so doing, the English have turned their upper class into a ‘past’, a living form of ‘tradition’ beyond the empirical here-and-now. Fall and rise traces the various ways in which a vision of national hope and loss can be traced and read in the writings and practices of the English upper-class gentleman.

Chapter 2 confronts the problem that sociologists of class in Britain face: how to explain the persistence of a traditional upper class in an advanced modern society where class ought to prevail over status. It is argued that England’s agrarian capitalism gave rise to a form of societal membership and language of class that was never fully able to dispense with kinship terms of descent, inheritance and ancestry. The chapter explores this in three domains. First, by examining Sir Thomas Smith’s 1583 De Republica Anglorum, it demonstrates that the vision of British society as a multitude of households and families provided the means to dispense with a centralised vision of state sovereignty as found in the continental European tradition. Second, it suggests that the origins of the house-based society arise, first, in the vision of society as a ‘multitude of individual households’ and second, in the peculiar economic arrangement of the lease-copyhold which governed the economic relations and kinship structures of the early modern agrarian economy. Because economic interests were conceptually indistinguishable from kinship terms, the organic transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England preserved pre-modern status terminology within naked ‘class’ (economic) interests. Third, it argues that from Sir Gregory King’s Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (1696) onwards, class categories continue a conflation of economic interests with status, and kinship terms of inheritance with financial power.