“The Highest Type of Englishman”: Gender, War, and the Alfred the Great Commemoration of 1901

The 1901 Millenary Commemoration of the death of Alfred the Great was a prescriptive event, designed both to honour the memory of the “father of the English race” and to re-invigorate the supposed masculine virtues of the contemporary nation at a time of imperial crisis. Planned and staged during the politically divisive Anglo-Boer war, the commemoration was promoted by a variety of mostly liberal and progressive organizers. However, the representation of Alfred and what he stood for was fiercely contested, and conservatives and liberal imperialists endorsed the events and appropriated the meaning of Alfred’s legacy for their own political arguments and journalism. The cultural politics of this commemorative moment, most particularly of the monument designed to honour Alfred and the rhetoric of those swept-up in the hyperbolic adulation of Alfred in 1901, provides insight into the processes of the construction of national memory, of the plasticity of ideas about masculine heroism, and of the use of historical icons for completely opposing political objectives.