What Condition of England?:
Re-Imagining the ‘Two Nations’ in David Lodge’s Nice Work
Keywords:
condition-of-England novel, Englishness, higher education, David Lodge, metafiction, metanarrative, neo-Victorianism, Nice Work, Thatcherism, 'two nations'Abstract
Although the demise of the national novel has been announced repeatedly, the condition-of-England novel continues to thrive. While the traditional Victorian form with its focus on the ‘factory question’ was very specific in what it defined as the state of the nation, in the twentieth-century English novel this became more difficult to identify, at least in such pithy terms. David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) relocates this debate to educational discourses in the 1980s, identifying the opposition of town vs. gown as a substitute for Disraeli’s ‘two nations’. Additionally, Lodge takes this debate to a meta-level: as I will argue, he illustrates how it is precisely this concern with a sense of dividedness that answers the state-of-the-nation question on a larger scale, with higher education providing a pertinent context. Thus, I suggest that the ‘two nations’ have not only turned into a topos of (neo)Victorianism but also into a metanarrative of Englishness more generally.
