![]() It is, Forster continues, the public-school system that is at ‘the heart of the middle classes’ an institution, he argues, found only in England: ‘How perfectly it expresses their character…. Whereas Russia is symbolised by the peasant, and Japan by the samurai, ‘the national figure of England is Mr Bull with his top hat, his comfortable clothes, his substantial stomach, and his substantial balance at the bank’. ‘I had better let the cat out of the bag at once’ (a favourite Forsterian expression), he writes at the essay’s opening, ‘and record my opinion that the character of the English is essentially middle-class’. In ‘Notes on the English Character’, first published in the American journal Atlantic Monthly in 1926 and reprinted as the opening essay in the 1936 collection Abinger Harvest, E.M Forster outlined, both humorously and poignantly, his perceptions of the defining features of Englishness. ![]()
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