Through the eyes of immigrants we gain a view of ourselves which is critical but not inimical. It is the view of the outsider who is also the insider; like crime, sex, and music, the question of immigration in Britain seems to reinvent itself every generation, while the underlying reality remains much the same.
Refugees dominate the headlines, and for the wrong reasons, if one assumes that the right reason might be the newsworthiness of their sufferings. Yet they form only one end of the immigration continuum, and always have.
In the past, as now, less dramatic arrivals have also flowed here in a constant stream: not only “economic migrants” (a slippery term), but also those who come for fun, for adventure, to practise English, for a job, or for an ideal of the freewheeling life. Some arrive from prosperous countries, while others arrive from poor ones. Their motives can range from desperation to raving Anglomania, and most are more mixed. Many people simply end up here by accident.
Quite a few bear a remarkable similarity to those Brits who rush off to Tuscany or France with television crews trailing them for shows with titles such as No Going Back. Reality shows about British emigration proliferate like yawns at a board meeting, each imitating the other. Yet nobody seems to want to try an immigration show based on the same formula. Why not?
A few hundred years ago camera crews were thin on the ground, but immigrants did write about their experiences. Take, for example, a young Dane called Jørgen Jørgensen, who came to London in 1794 as a 14-year-old apprentice sailor. He stayed on and off for 30 years, and adapted his name to Jorgen Jorgenson, or sometimes John Johnson. A compulsive writer, he recorded his impressions in an autobiography, in letters to friends, in formal reports, and in a novel about a balloon flight to a parallel world where “Capricornia” is a thinly disguised Britain.
The dream that first drew Jorgenson here would attract few travellers today. He had grown up reading Captain Cook’s voyages, and fell for the romance of the sea. Like Cook, he signed up as a teenager on a British coal ship. Unlike Cook, he did it in defiance of his father’s protests that the English were arrogant hypocrites, “the most haughty and proud people in the world” — not good employers.
The boy would not be diverted: he was in the grip of a fantasy barely distinguishable from a companion one about being borne “in an immense ship along the smooth waters”. Britain and the sea were almost synonymous in those days. Almost a century later a similar feeling would inspire Józef Korzeniowski, the young Pole who became the English novelist Joseph Conrad. For Jorgenson, England was “an imaginary vision, the creature of my own brain”. It represented travel, riches, and above all freedom.
At first, he found what he was looking for. London was a vast commercial machine, and the surrounding countryside resembled something from his own science-fiction novel: another visitor described pigs inflated like balloons, cattle so plump as to be wrinkle-free, and human beings with limbs “as bulbous as a pumpkin”. Yet, amid all this bloated plenitude, Britons breathed the light air of liberty. Unlike in many countries, no restrictions were placed on travellers’ movements, foreign or native, and there was little censorship: newspapers spoke their minds and print shops were full of political caricatures. To Jorgenson, it seemed to be a land without fear.
Later, the magic faded. Jorgenson learnt excellent English, but became irritated when his accent was mocked: “I am not responsible because the English have taken it into their heads to pronounce some of the letters of the alphabet in a manner different from all other European nations.” He got on the wrong side of laws he thought ridiculous, and disliked the etiquette called for in dealing with officials — a problem immigrants today might underestimate at their peril. When his sojourn ended, it was not through choice but because he was convicted of a petty theft and exiled as a convict to Tasmania. There he went off British politics completely, especially in matters of empire. Britain was “laying about to the right and the left”, he wrote, “ransacking the whole world” to patch up a shoddy colonial racket that was doomed to end anyway.
The irony was that, by this time, he no longer judged these matters as an outsider. He had himself become more English than Danish: the bold, moralistic tone of 19th-century England rang forth in everything he wrote. He had even forgotten how to feel in Danish: in a letter to a long-lost brother he apologised because he could discuss only business matters in their own language; about emotions, he had to write in English.
Jorgenson pursued an ideal, found it, and lost it again: dream, honeymoon and disillusionment. But by then he was so assimilated that there really was no going back. The only time he did return home, his compatriots called him “English Jørgensen”, but to the English themselves he remained a foreigner. He was neither English nor Danish, or perhaps he was both.
Jorgenson’s stereoscopic vision as an “English Dane” gave him an insight into both cultures that few others could have. It made him interesting to his contemporaries as well as to us. Even the Government took an interest.
Just after the Napoleonic wars, the Foreign Office employed Jorgenson as a spy, to rove France and Germany and report on everything from smuggling to general attitudes. He had already been useful: in dispatches from Spain during the French occupation in 1812 he had given warning that British soldiers stationed there were losing local support because of their demeanour: what his own father would have called haughtiness, and what Jorgenson himself interpreted as reserve. While the French billetted themselves in people’s houses and plundered everything in sight, they did it with a certain “adroitness”. The British remained separate and proper in their own encampments, and treated the Spaniards formally, except when drunk, upon which they became yobbish. To Mediterraneans, neither end of this conduct was acceptable. The soldiers made “bad companions to loquacious Beings”, and so, “with much real good-nature and humanity”, created a worse impression than the French invaders. No native-born Englishman would have been likely to see the problem so clearly. Nor could anyone not in some degree Anglicised have understood its causes so well.
Countries, like individuals, benefit from seeing themselves through others’ eyes. When our Government talks of the nation’s “fairness and hospitality” being overstretched, it is important to remember that immigration of all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons, has itself had its generous side. Despite occasional panics, Britons have been well aware of this throughout history, and so have their rulers.
The English Dane by Sarah Bakewell is published by Chatto & Windus, £18.99; offer, £15.19
