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Evelyn Waugh's Country House Trinity: Memory, History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited

In a letter to Nancy Mitford in 1952 Evelyn Waugh remarked that the loss of an aristocratic heritage after the Second World War had disinherited the nation from sound social values: ‘I am afraid you are right when you say that there are no ladies and gentlemen now. It was a most important distinction basic to English health and happiness’. Waugh reveals his anxiety regarding the relegation of the class system after 1945, and locates the social order as central to ideas of Englishness and national identity. For Waugh the intentions and implications of the Welfare State threatened to erase these most important distinctions, which he saw as fundamental to the reconstruction of a fragmented society. A work like Brideshead Revisited (1945), often dismissed as mere personal sentiment, can thus be read as a more significant document of post-war societal reorganisation, where the country house figures as a pre-eminent site of memory and heritage. Previous criticism of Brideshead Revisited has organised itself around the perceived romanticism of Waugh’s Catholicism and related visions of interwar England. David Rothstein’s more recent article on memory processes within the novel challenges this interpretation, and argues instead that the novel is preoccupied with the ‘preservation and fictional reconstitution of an aristocratic Catholic heritage in England’ achieved through memory. Rothstein underpins his investigation with an interpretation of Pierre Nora’s late twentieth-century writing on the production of memory in modern culture. Rothstein’s text raises many questions regarding the nature and function of memory and history as defined in the aftermath of the Second World War. This essay aims to explore this area of neglect, re-contextualising Evelyn Waugh’s Country House Trinity: Memory, History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited