In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it seemed to many
that England was being transformed by various kinds of
'improvements' in agriculture and industry, in gardening and the
ornamentation of landscape. Such changes were understood to reflect
matters of the greatest importance in the moral, social and
political arrangements of the country. In the area of landscape
design, to clear a wood, or plant one, to build a folly or a
cottage, to design in the formal style or the picturesque, was to
express a political orientation of one kind or another. To choose
to employ Capability Brown, Humphry Repton or one of their
lesser-known competitors, was to make a statement regarding the
history of England, its constitutional organisation and the
relationships that ought to exist between its citizens. Although
many landowners may have been oblivious to this, there was a large
body of critical opinion, poetry, theology and social discourse
that offered to inform and correct them. In this illuminating and
stimulating book, Nigel Everett reviews the entire debate, from
about 1760 to 1820, emphasising in particular the attempts of
various writers to defend a 'traditional' or tory view of the
landscape against the aggressive, privatising tendency of
improvement. Challenging the narrow implications of the existing
schools of landscape historians - the 'establishment' historians,
concerned primarily with currents of 'taste', who ignore the wider
issues involved, and the commentators on the Left who have tended
to see landscape politics as the politics of class - Everett
reveals the history of English landscape as a political struggle
between, on the one hand, the mechanical, universal andimpersonal -
whig - point of view and, on the other, the natural, Christian,
particular and organic point of view. Everett depicts a lively,
intelligent debate regarding the development of English society, as
active among cultivated clergymen and landowners as among the
theoreticians. Furthermore, analysing the languages of tory
political thought, Everett engages in a dialogue between the
present and the past, identifying in the detached, artificial and
utilitarian attitudes of the whig 'improvers' the philosophical and
historical origins of a dominant set of values of the late
twentieth century - most recently expressed in the Conservative
Party - in which the interests of private enterprise and commercial
utility preponderate over any other conception of the public good.
This important and passionate book makes an essential and original
contribution to the study of eighteenth-century cultural history in
Britain.
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