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In The Return of the Native Hardy introduces the inhabitants of Egdon Heath alongside a multi-layered exploration of Bonfire Night. Hardy’s reference to the ‘jumbled’ traditions of bonfire-making is not a prelude to any attempt to untangle the various meanings latent in the custom. On the contrary: it suits him better to bring into play the varied strands—Christian and pagan, rebellious and celebratory, communal and individual, local and universal, historical and instinctive—at different times in the novel, without privileging or excluding any one of them. This chapter will begin by establishing some of the etymological traditions associated with the word ‘bonfire’, before looking at portrayals of the seasonal bonfire in antiquarian and historical literature as they developed into the Christian and post-Reformation manifestations that Hardy would come to know personally in the nineteenth century.

The well-known historian, political author and patriot Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote these words in the preface to the second edition of his work On the Celebrations of the Battle of Leipzig, which appeared in the summer of 1815. He expressed his sentiments on the first evening of the ‘National Festival of the Germans’, which was celebrated in hundreds of towns and villages across Germany on 18 and 19 October 1814 to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. For Arndt, the experience of the widely visible fires linking the various regions of Germany must indeed have been remarkably moving. After all, the initiative for these ‘joyful bonfires’ (Freudenfeuer), as well as for the national festival as a whole, had come largely from him and a small circle of like-minded friends in Hesse. These included Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as the father of the gymnastics movement, who like Arndt worked at this time for the Central Administrative Department of the Allied Powers in Frankfurt am Main, and the Rodelheim Counsellor of Justice Karl Hoffmann. These German-national patriots had met in early May 1814 and made plans for the future. Among the topics of the meeting was the introduction of a ‘Festival of the Battle of Leipzig’, which Arndt had suggested shortly before in his pamphlet Another Word on the French and Us. He intended it to foster the ‘preservation and invigoration of German nature and German thought’, the ‘awakening of German strength and discipline’ and the ‘revival of new and old memories’ of German history.2

When William Butler Yeats thought of Keats, he imagined a Cockney schoolboy, ‘nose pressed to a sweet-shop window’.2 In his poem, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (1917), Keats is the ‘coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper’, shut out due to his class and non-university education from ‘all the luxury of the world’, who peers longingly in at the shop window.3 Yeats’s Keats stops short, however, of smashing the glass. The situation in London was very different during a furious week in August 2011, when unrest spread through the capital and into the Midlands. The critic and restaurateur A. A. Gill dismissed the riots — some commentators prefer ‘uprising’ — as a ‘rant without reason’, a thoughtless ‘bonfire of consumer vanities’.4 In similar vein, Justin McGuirk labelled the disorder a ‘venting of consumer spleen’, which, he insisted, lacked ‘any articulated aims or ideology’.5 In a Channel 4 News interview, Paul Bagguley, researcher in the sociology of protest, remarked that ‘there used to be food riots in Britain’ — the summer’s disturbances, he added, were ‘like a consumer version of that’.6 Bagguley’s allusion to historical food riots, which we discussed in Chapters 1, 3 and 4, was perhaps more pertinent than he realized. It is worth pausing to remind ourselves that the first premises to be looted at the outbreak of the riots on 8 August was not a sportswear store, nor an electrical retailer, but the Clarence Convenience store in Hackney.

For many readers, their first and most enduring impression of The Return of the Native (1878) remains the highly sensuous and atmospheric evocation of Egdon Heath at the start. Grouped into ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ in his General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912, Hardy’s sixth novel draws much of its colouring and inspiration from that initial framework: in film terms, a salient establishing shot. In terms of its actual scale, the account of Egdon occupies, with one exception, the least space of any chapter (134 lines vs. average of 276), a fact testifying to the degree of its intensity and powerful recall in the imagination of the reader.2 By sharp contrast with the three venues and immediate entry of the heroine at the start of the foregoing HE, the first chapter of RN features no human beings, only Egdon Heath as dominating personality of the natural world.3 As its title intimates (‘A Face on which Time makes but Little Impression’), the chapter appears to be atemporal, reaching back to prehistory and myth from the locus of a twilight Saturday in November. Two chapters later, it is identified as the Fifth, Guy Fawkes’ Night, a date which naturalizes the important bonfire motif of Book First.

When my mother died, a year or so back, it fell to my brother and me to clear her house. . . . She had a dual existence, tough and job-oriented during the day . . . while at home . . . she was closer to Miss Havisham . . . My mother lived in her memories. Day-to-day events were considered in relation to past experience . . . When the house was burgled and she lost some treasures . . . she mourned not so much for the objects, but for that part of her own past world which had gone . . . She needed memory to define herself . . . When we made a bonfire in the back garden and burned the cheque stubs, we committed her to the flames almost as certainly as, at the cemetery, we had lowered her coffin into the ground.

There were overwhelming demonstrations of the new community spirit, mass oaths under floodlit cupolas, bonfires on the mountains, [...] choral singing in the churches in honour of the Nazi seizure of power. [...] Something genuinely new seemed beginning. Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger (1999)1 This Age must be called, not the decline of the West, but the resurrection of the peoples of this West of ours! Only that which was old, decayed and evil perishes; and let it die! But new life will spring up. Faith can be found if the will is there.

The popular image of ‘global finance’ in the new century is of a hightech, IT-centred world where bankers sit in front of rows and rows of flickering computer screens. Deals are done on computers; money is made or lost in abstract, electronically mediated markets where the only characters to be found are numerical. In popular culture, the explosion of financial service industries in cities like London and New York during the 1980s spawned films such as Wall Street (1987) or The Bonfire of the Vanities (1988) which portrayed a new world of late twentieth-century finance where millions were being made or lost in speculative trading (see also Hassard & Holliday 1998). In the 1990s, these images were reinforced through popular perceptions of Black Monday (Buiter etal 1998), the collapse of Barings Bank (Tickell 1996), collapsing markets in East Asia and Japan (Goldstein 1998; Agenor 1999) and most recently the demise of the US energy giant Enron on the basis of deeply flawed business financing.1

Ifirst went to Northern Ireland to study Halloween, but I was struck (as I think most Americans are) by the preponderance of visual display. Brilliant multicolored murals adorn the walls and gable ends of houses; curbstones are in some neighborhoods painted red, white, and blue; in others, green, white, and gold. Starting in the spring, it seemed as if there was a parade almost every other day, and indeed, there well may have been; a Belfast city official told me there were 3,500 parades a year in Northern Ireland, which is about the size of Connecticut. The calendrical holidays in which I was interested, such as Halloween, had major public components such as bonfires and fireworks—and, again, parades. Likewise, the rites of passage of the life cycle have strongly visual public customs associated with them. Sometime before her wedding, for instance, a bride-to-be might be taken out to a party, gotten helplessly drunk, decorated with shaving cream, tin cans, and ribbons, and left tied to a tree or pole in some public area (Ballard 1998). Likewise, funerals customarily involve public processions of the coffin through the streets. Flags—British flags, Irish flags, Ulster flags—are ubiquitous. In addition to all this are the patrols of British soldiers, on foot and in armored vehicles through the streets, a visual and tangible presence of another sort.

On 19 June 1989 the trial of the popular comedian Ken Dodd on a series of tax-evasion charges commenced. The headlines the following day read ‘Premier’s Letters of Tribute to “Diddling” Doddy’ (Sun); ‘Diddy Dodger Doddy’s Diddling’ (Mirror); ‘King of the Diddle Men’ (Star); ‘Diddled Men of Knotty Ash’ (Today); and ‘Diddling Dodd and 20 Bank Accounts’ (Express). All these were on the front page. The ‘quality’ papers all carried the story, but as a major item on the inside page. This confirms one point — examined later — that conventional notions of media neglect of ‘white-collar crime’ and fraud (Box, 1983) are now passe, even if they were ever wholly true. (The jury later acquitted Dodd of all charges.) High-class fraudsters, as popularised by the film Wall Street and Tom Wolfe’s best-seller Bonfire of the Vanities, are big news and have become part of the popular culture of crime. Their criminality (and, a fortiori, the criminality of alleged health and safety offences that result in deaths at sea) may not be as unambiguous, in terms of social typifications of evil, as that of the Mafia. But fraud is increasingly treated as ‘real crime’, in ways described elsewhere (Levi, 1987).

Speculating about the future of strategy is more hazardous than ever. At a time of a ‘bonfire of certainties’, to borrow a British MP’s phrase, many of our well-established strategic concepts have to be thought through again. For the first time a substantial build-down of the asymmetries which have dominated the European security environment since World War II has become a real possibility. What are the implications of a situation of rough parity throughout Europe, either at somewhat below current NATO levels or at considerably lower capabilities? What does it mean for our strategy, for the deployment of our forces, for the role of US forces in Europe and for the mix of conventional and nuclear weapons? This Paper will concentrate on the military aspects of the new situation, although it is fully realized that the political relationships are equally in a state of flux. While the postwar period has been characterized by continuous American pressures upon the European allies to do more for the common defence, the threat perception on both sides of the Atlantic started to diminish sharply at the very moment that the burden-sharing debate was about to acquire nasty proportions. For the meantime, the Bush proposals at the NATO Summit have taken the pressure off the European governments to shoulder a larger share of the burden. Arms control may well achieve the long sought-after transatlantic adjustments, provided that domestic pressures on this side of the Atlantic do not result in proportionate European reductions.

The 1980s mark another decade of senseless killing in Ahmedabad — the city where Mohandas K. Gandhi launched some of his most celebrated campaigns of nonviolent resistance. The feelings of terror and grief that grip this city are not fundamentally different from those that prevailed nearly forty years ago in the months leading up to Gandhi’s assassination. Today, as then, Hindus and Muslims wage war across the narrow lanes and rooftops that divide their communities. Lingering caste hatred is reignited by battles over job quotas and educational reforms designed to help the Untouchables — the people Gandhi lovingly called Harijans. Nightfall brings deadly confrontations between feuding families and gangs armed with rocks, clubs and knives. Meanwhile, children taunt riot police with bonfires and makeshift barricades on Gandhi Road.

At Christmas after the Armistice Churchill and his family, and also his brother Jack and F. E. Smith and their families, all went to stay with the Duke of Marlborough. There were delayed twenty-first-birthday celebrations for the Duke’s son and heir: illuminations were put up, a firework display took place, and a whole ox was roasted. There was also ‘a gigantic bonfire on top of which was placed an effigy of the Kaiser’.1 On the morning of December 29th Churchill was back in London and had an interview with the Prime Minister, who was planning the reconstruction of his government after his success in the general election. Before Christmas Churchill had understood that he was probably to become Secretary of State for War; but now Lloyd George offered him either that post or the Admiralty, with the Air Ministry thrown in as a bonus whichever he chose. Churchill retired to Blenheim to consider the matter, but sent his reply later on the same day: he favoured the Admiralty, as he knew it so well already and as ‘any claim I may be granted in public goodwill rests on the fact that “the Fleet was ready” ’.2

All over Europe the peasants have been accustomed from time immemorial to kindle bonfires on certain days of the year, and to dance round or leap over them. Customs of this kind can be traced back on historical evidence to the Middle Ages, and their analogy to similar customs observed in antiquity goes with strong internal evidence to prove that their origin must be sought in a period long prior to the spread of Christianity. Indeed the earliest proof of their observance in Northern Europe is furnished by the attempts made by Christian synods in the eighth century to put them down as heathenish rites. Not uncommonly effigies are burned in these fires, or a pretence is made of burning a living person in them; and there are grounds for believing that anciently human beings were actually burned on these occasions. A brief view of the customs in question will bring out the traces of human sacrifice, and will serve at the same time to throw light on their meaning.

The foregoing survey of the popular fire-festivals of Europe suggests some general observations. In the first place we can hardly help being struck by the resemblance which the ceremonies bear to each other, at whatever time of the year and in whatever part of Europe they are celebrated. The custom of kindling great bonfires, leaping over them, and driving cattle through or round them would seem to have been practically universal throughout Europe, and the same may be said of the processions or races with blazing torches round fields, orchards, pastures, or cattle-stalls. Less widespread are the customs of hurling lighted discs into the air and trundling a burning wheel down hill. The ceremonial of the Yule log is distinguished from that of the other fire-festivals by the privacy and domesticity which characterise it; but this distinction may well be due simply to the rough weather of midwinter, which is apt not only to render a public assembly in the open air disagreeable, but also at any moment to defeat the object of the assembly by extinguishing the all-important fire under a downpour of rain or a fall of snow. Apart from these local or seasonal differences, the general resemblance between the fire-festivals at all times of the year and in all places is tolerably close.

‘A Sad Play within the Tune of a Polka’ is the wistful sub-title of O’Casey’s next full-length play — known, generally, by its more familiar title of The Bishop’s Bonfire. Again, the terrain is rural Ireland, where rhetoric is the fire-water of the natives and rank Jesuitry the specific balsam bestowed on a long-suffering population adjusting — though with the occasional glint of a drollish mind — to De Valera’s sinister yet subtle, spiritual blackguardocracy. ‘It’s an outspoken play’, O’Casey told a correspondent in 1955 — shortly before the world premiere in Dublin — ‘with a good deal of humour and some sad moments’. In the introductory parts, the play is mostly bubbling talk, in O’Casey’s fluent style, though an allegro con brio in the finish darkens the plot, bringing the drama to an unexpected and extraordinary conclusion — couched in firm melodrama in truest Boucicaultian manner.

In the published version of The Bishop’s Bonfire, the frontispiece is a reproduction of an oil portrait of Sean O’Casey by his son, Breon.1 Even in black-and-white it is an excellent picture. The face is thin and stern, like that of a bishop disapproving of his flock. But Breon knows his father too well to be satisfied with surface appearances. Look a little closer and the face turns out to be full of kindness as well as strength. The sterness does not represent anger. It represents disappointment. The bishop wished that his flock were happier.