British Characters in American Fiction

In blog-housekeeping I ran across an old reference to an e-friend’s blog, complaining that when there are British characters in American fiction, they’re either rich snobs or sinister spies.

I tried to think of some exceptions. The ones that came to mind date back into the 1940s or at least the early 1950s. Young adult novels of that period sometimes touched on the ways the different English-speaking countries were recovering from The War. So did romances; the international romance used to be a popular theme, though the characters in romances tend to be too one-dimensional to count.

There is, of course, the whole genre of American stories about Americans’ visits to Britain. I don’t know how well or how badly British people think the British characters in this group are done, but they are at least diverse. Often the background is a large household with relatives of all ages and conditions, or a school with an assortment of schoolmates, and all of them are nice characters. Sometimes, of course, for variation’s sake, the character uncovers their deep nastiness. In a YA thriller of my teen years called It’s Murder at St Basket’s, a teacher is an evil racist who’s killed a foreign student and intends to kill his brother. Of course a classroom full of diverse and sympathetic British boys are the friends who help the protagonist solve the mystery.

But I suspect US authors do tend to avoid writing UK characters for two reasons:

(1) “I’ve never seen one. What would they say? Oh well I have seen X, but X doesn’t count—s.he’s not conspicuous at all. What would there be to say about a person like /X? Why mention where s.he came from?”

(2) “But s/he said ‘Please don’t write about me’ so I promised I never would.”

People from English-speaking countries have a large amount of control of how conspicuous we want to be in the other English-speaking countries. My guess would be that most people now living in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand have met someone from each of the other countries. We might not even have noticed.

There's an Englishman living in my town. People who like him don't seem to mention his having been born somewhere other than here. People who don't like him notice that his accent's not local, though, since it's not pure BBC, they take all sorts of wild guesses about where it comes from.

There was an Englishwoman: the War Bride. She died old, a few years ago. There was some excuse for the way people never forgot her being The English War Bride, though people who didn't know her well showed confusion about which one she was. It seems that four men in my parents' generation of my family married women who weren't from my town, and all of their given names began with B. Grandma Bonnie Peters was one of the four. Then there were a few cousins whose names also began with B. All of the Miss B's were pretty when young. All of them matured into white-haired, top-heavy, active and healthy matirarchs who seemed as if they might have been fifty or sixty when they were eighty or ninety. Only two of them worked closely together. GBP was, of course, the one from Indiana. People lost track of which one was from Indiana, which one was from England, which one was from Appalachia--the town fifty miles away. All I ever heard any of them say about the confusion was that in the 1990s someone asked the English War Bride if she still missed England. She said she did, and GBP burst out: "I'm not surprised! If a person can live here for fifty years and never get to be a neighbor, just 'the one from' somewhere else, why would that person not want to go home!"

Jack Welch, at The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, didn't seem to mind making Scottishness a trademark. Travelling widely is, after all, traditional for Scots. The Welches had their very own "An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Welshman..." joke:

"

When she arrived she was met at the door by an Englishman who asked what her business was. “I’m marrying a Scotsman”– he shook his head and said, “Well, I wish you luck,” and sent her up to the next floor, where a Welshman asked her what her business was. “I’m – – – “Oh dear, well someone has to marry them,” he said, before sending her up to the next floor, where there was an Irishman (yep – just like a million jokes) who asked her the usual question, but in true Celtic solidarity he said “Oh, congratulations, my lass! They make excellent husbands if you can train them.”

"

https://wendy-welch.com/2023/08/09/a-journey-with-no-end-6/

My husband was born a British subject. British West Indian, anyway. His parents were Barbadian but he grew up mostly on Trinidad island. His brother went to university in England and immigrated legally as an Englishman in the 1970s, and my husband went to McGill and immigrated as a Canadian. Neither of them was typical of anything. People trying to guess what nationality they looked or sounded like guessed all over the map. Perhaps because baby-boomers and the older generation, at least, learned in childhood that people in England had a mixed lot of Celtic and German ancestors, people almost never guess that Brown people might be, legally, English.

So it's not so surprising that when writers create roles for British characters in American fiction they're often cameo roles. What comes to mind as an example is a single line in William Pene du Bois's short book, Porko von Popbutton: "His English teacher, wo happened to be English..." The character gets one line but no name. I think that may actually be typical of how people in the English-speaking countries see people from the other Engllish-speaking countries, today. There might be one at your school or office; person is accepted, person fits in, and because you respect the person's background enough not to want to write ignorantly about it, and respect the person's privacy enough not to write fiction about that person, what's left? So you give the English character, or the Australian or Jamaican or whatever other kind of character, a cameo role. All your major characters were born where they are. Right?

It can be easy to write in a :beloved outsider: character as a sort of joke, like Adrian Mole’s American pen-friend. Americans can see exactly why Sue Townsend wrote that character into The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13-3/4. He’s there so that the book can include a glossary of words American teenagers might not have recognized without offense to older readers. He is a joke, like all the characterst in that series. At an age where even the brightest and best of children are awkward and inconvenient, he’s also hyperactive and undisciplined. As a specimen of undisciplined hyperactive early-teen trolls he’s perfectly believable. As an American I don't find him so believable. I think he's a British brat pretending to be American as a joke on Adrian Mole, obviously.

Why? Because of the timing of one specific pop-culture detail. M&M-Mars was a US-based company, and Mars Bars were a popular snack in the US in the 1970s. Everyone had seen them on candy racks in stores. (For those who don’t remember, they were basically the same candy as Almond Snickers.) Living mostly out of TV-range, I didn’t hear any advertisements for them before the fatal one: “You get big crunchy nuts in a Mars Bae!” That ad came along just as boys the age of Adrian Mole and friends were starting to associate the phrase “big crunchy nuts” with something different. Mars Bars remained in the stores for a few years. I personally liked the crunchy whole almonds. People with brittle elderly teeth did not. But a crucial sector of the junkfood market were not even thinking about the hazards of biting into a whole almond as they remembered the commercial. Do teenaged boys ever forget a piece of pop culture that lends itself to dirty jokes? But Townsend edited the dirty jokes down to bearability. Readers are grateful.

One reason for the lack of memorable roles for “foreign” characters generally, other than enemy spies, may be the lingering effect of an etiquette fad: After an era when joke collections used to include sections of “ethnic jokes,” often stale ones where “moron” could be substituted for the term of ethnic identity, came an era when it seemed generally more polite not to mention ethnicity, unless it was your topic. Giving a character a name from a minority language was supposed to be enough. But how many people remembered that Stacey was originally marketed as “Barbie’s English Cousin”? (She wore more distinctively British fashions. Serious collectors were fashion-conscious enough to notice.) Only serious collectors recognized a difference between Stacey’s and Barbie’s faces. They were just plastic dolls with short arms (for easier dressing) and shapes that looked unrealistic when undressed (for realistic proportions when dressed). It is possible that, just as (according to Rowling) Hermione always was Black and neither Harry nor Ron ever cared enough to mention it, some characters in recent American fiction always were British and nobody mentions it.

It’s an interesting challenge for US bloggers who’ve resolved to write fiction, anyway. Can you include a visitor or immigrant from somewhere in the UK, realistically, in the story? And how can other characters tell that that one is British? Can they tell? Do they care?