At the same time I learned that my chances were not high of being a first-rate scholar of English literature with a potential Oxbridge academic future, remote as that had always been. It’s not that I wished for this, or that it was something I was planning or wanted. Not because I wasn’t clever enough or hadn’t read enough – which may or may not have been true – but because such a vocation seemed to depend on an innate, unreflective belongingness, knowing the social grammar of the place; an ability to feel instinctively the pulse of the culture behind a text, to inhabit what, years later, Raymond Williams called in his characteristically oxymoronic phrase its ‘structure of feeling’. Most of my English peers seemed to share something of this deep structure of affiliation, irrespective of their different class and regional backgrounds. I had read – and loved – Jane Austen too. But I couldn’t seem to get hold of what intricate resonances ‘Bath’ or ‘the parsonage’ stirred in the English imaginary. I found it difficult to call on, let alone to claim, an insider’s attentiveness to the subtle nuances of feeling and attitude which played across the text. My fellow students seemed to have unconsciously internalized what I would have self-consciously to learn.

By my unfamiliarity with the lived experience which informed the text, I don’t mean, literally, being unfamiliar with its location, geography or history. Rather, it meant that I was excluded from sharing a habitus – a way of life, forms of customary behaviour, a structure of common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions, affective identifications and presuppositions about the society, and how things work, below the conscious or purely cognitive level. These things were embedded as much in the minutiae of daily life, in facial expression or in body language, in what was left unsaid, as they were in what was spoken. They were evidence of the tacit knowledges which underpin cultural practices, the shared codes of meaning which those who belong unconsciously bring to bear to make sense of the world. This is what enables a culture’s members to ‘know’ and at the same time ‘not to know’ the unwritten cultural rules as to what can and can’t be said, what is and isn’t reasonable or appropriate to say or do, when and where things can and can’t be done. ‘Being English’ had everything to do with this deep structure of national cultural identity, an ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase; based not only on a set of institutions, but on a ‘lived imaginary relation to its real conditions of existence’, as Althusser has it: a fantasy of the nation, as well a gift of the gods, a state of grace.