Stephen Bending

The writing of rural England, 1500-1800

The Writing of Rural England 1500-1800 documents and contextualizes the conflicting representations of rural life during a crucial period of social, economic and cultural change. It highlights the dialogues and tensions between agriculture and aesthetics, economics and morality, men and women, leisure and labour. By drawing on both canonical and marginal texts, it argues that early-modern writing not only reflected but played a part in constructing the cultural meanings of the English countryside with which we continue to live.

Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-Century Garden History

... All these devices are rather emblematical than expressive; they may be ingenious contrivances, and recall absent ideas to the recollection; but they make no immediate impression ... and though an allusion to a favourite or well known subject of history, poetry, or of tradition, may now and then animate or dignify a scene, yet as the subject does not naturally belong to a garden, the allusion should not be principal; it should seem to have been suggested by the scene: a transitory image, which irresistibly occurred; not sought for, not laboured; and have the force of a metaphor, free from the detail of an allegory. (Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening..., 1770, p. 151) *

Every Man is Naturally an Antiquarian: Francis Grose and Polite Antiquities

Stephen Bending is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Southampton. He has written numerous articles on landscape and polite culture in the eighteenth century and has co–edited with James Raven and Antonia Forster The English Novel 1770–1799: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction in the British Isles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and with Stephen Bygrave Henry Mackenzie’s, The Man of Feeling (World’s Classics, 2002), and is editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Writing of Rural England, 1500–1800 (Longman, 2002). Francis Grose produced well over a thousand low–cost antiquarian images of the antiquities of England and Wales. While it may be tempting to dismiss him as a mere popularizer and a charlatan, his works open up to a wide national public the antiquities of their native land. Central to his venture is at once the commodification of the past and an attempt to represent that commodification as nothing of the kind. Grose sets about repackaging the old as the new – a now classic act of consumerism – but also works hard to deny this activity by drawing on the language of scholarship and accuracy. Ultimately, his cheaply produced and mass–marketed images and texts demonstrate an antiquarian past which repeatedly collapses into a commercial present: cheap prints for a mass market create a national past in the very act of contemporary consumer aesthetics.

Vile Things: William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque

abstract:This essay explores the picturesque writer William Gilpins problematic relationship with English gardens. While his earliest works seem to champion the landscape garden as a great national art, the manuscripts for his picturesque tours are full of sharp criticisms and withering insults aimed at both gardens and their owners. A close reading of the deletions and rephrasing in these manuscripts, set alongside the published tours, helps us to see both Gilpins desire for landscape as a cue for imaginative reverie and his unease about a landowning vision of nature. Gilpins writings are often caricatured as the visions of a dissociated traveler, but his manuscripts insist on the immediacy of shifting emotional states.

Writing in ruins: immediacy and emotion in the English landscape garden

This collection of essays emerged in part from Luke Morgan’s contention that Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s analysis of material objects in Anachronic Renaissance might apply equally well —...

Literature and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century

Drawing on literary, visual, and philosophical sources from the period, this article asks what is landscape, how was it represented and understood in the eighteenth century, and how might we understand its different forms and agenda now? It focuses on why terms such as landscape, nature, and beauty remain problematic; explores ideas of location, scale, and point of view; and discusses the influence of classical georgic and pastoral models on eighteenth-century ways of seeing. The article argues that landscapes were experienced quite differently because of class, gender, and education, and stresses the wide range of landscapes created by eighteenth-century writers of quite different kinds. Finally, it suggests the importance of emotion as a driving force in the construction of landscape and the need to understand landscape not as something “out there,” but rather as centrally concerned with the expression of self.

A cultural history of gardens in the Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment raised fundamental quetions about what it meant to be human in a truly global world. At the heart of debates about nature, culture and history, the garden offered itself as a practical demonstration, a living experiment, and a site of debate and discourse. The design, planting, experience and representation of contemporary gardens in Europe, China and North America reveal intense contributions to debates on aesthetics, both personal and national politics, and on the shaping of nature.

The Discovery of Landscape

‘Landskip’, observed an English connoisseur of the visual arts in 1606, ‘is a Dutch word, and it is as much as we should say in English landship, or expressing of the land by hills, woods, castles, seas, valleys, ruins, hanging rocks, cities, towns etc. as far as may be showed within our horizon’ (Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing, p. 28). This statement drew attention to a new artistic concept in England. Landscape painting was virtually non-existent at this time; while visual representations of the land exist from earlier periods, they tend to be peripheral to the main purpose of a picture, as evident in certain portraits which include a rural background. Similarly, writers devoted surprisingly little attention to the aesthetic representation of their native land, often eschewing attention to local detail in favour of generic pastoral environments, informed by classical and continental sources. Over the following decades, however, painters and poets developed increasingly coherent approaches to the representation of landscape. This movement was influenced not only by continental art, but also by political and cultural forces within England itself. From the reign of Elizabeth there was a fresh interest in the country, especially among the landed elite.

The Georgic Imperative: Labour, Thrift, Improvement

With their insistence that labour and struggle are at the heart of man’s relationship with nature, Virgil’s Georgics set the tone for many of the literary accounts of agriculture which were to follow and they found a particular resonance in England in the early modern period. According to Raymond Williams, the growing popularity of georgic in England can be aligned with the growth of agrarian capitalism and rearticulates the classical model of a country—city divide. More recently, however, critics have come to recognize georgic’s ability to articulate a far more complex relationship not only between city and country, but between nation and empire, aristocrats and yeoman farmers, merchants and the middle classes.

Feudalism and Beyond: the Anxiety of Change

The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the English countryside, which has been the subject of considerable historical debate, is perhaps best appreciated as a process that spanned the early modern period. While the feudal system had effectively collapsed by 1500, commentators worried endlessly about structures of rural social and economic order, and repeatedly sought to define ideals in the face of unsettling patterns of change. Throughout the period covered by this anthology, the dominant conservative ideal was that of the manorial estate. Essentially a post-feudal model, the manorial estate was figured as a strictly hierarchical community, knit together by moralized bonds of deference and responsibility. The model therefore resisted both change and competition. Estates were to be passed in an orderly manner from father to son, tenants and labourers were to live and die on the land, agriculture was geared towards manorial self-sufficiency rather than the demands of a market, and families were expected to know and accept their places within the socioeconomic hierarchy. In many respects it was a seductive ideal, especially for those at the top of the social order; however, it always bore a tenuous relation to more complex realities, and it was relentlessly eroded by changing practices and values.