The Making of an English Countryside:
Tourism and Literary Representation in Nineteenth-Century England

Donald Ulin

We come ... with the high poetry of a thousand intellectual associations to take possession of woodland freedom. We have all the power of Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ariosto upon us; and how delicious seems the picturesque England of the feudal ages!

(William Howitt, The Rural Life of England [1838])

It is a curious contradiction that the emergence of modern England in the nineteenth century as the world's first urban, industrial nation coincides with the emergence of a powerful national myth defining Englishness as essentially rural. As Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would put it early in our own century, "England is the country, and the country is England." Most critics and historians have accepted Martin Wiener's thesis that this English romance with its rural areas represented an anti-modern attitude and an impediment to the development of a bourgeoisie along the lines of France, Germany, or the United States. While the idealization of rural over urban life constitutes a crucial--perhaps the central--component of English national identity, what many writers have failed to consider is the fluidity of the categories "rural" and "urban." Recognizing that fluidity, it becomes possible to imagine the emergence of the idea of an English countryside during this period as the result of the creative and often contestatory process of assimilating rural life to the needs and aims of an urban middle-class society.

The approach I take is both sociological and literary. It is sociological insofar as I examine changing patterns of mobility and the rise of mass tourism in terms of the "web" of culture described by Clifford Geertz: "[t]he concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs" (14). Not only were people traveling in new ways and for new purposes in the nineteenth century, but the cultural significance of that travel was changing as well, especially the significance of recreational travel, or tourism. While travel had traditionally been a prerogative of the upper classes, middle-class and even working-class tourism brought, perhaps paradoxically, both a democratization of travel and a new cultural vocabulary for the articulation of class difference (expressed most fundamentally in terms of how and where one traveled). My approach is literary insofar as I take the process of assigning cultural significance to be a creative one onto which poets, novelists, and other "creative" writers offer a particularly vivid window. Representations of rural life in poetry or fiction cannot avoid either affiliation or dialogue with a variety of more or less established modes of representation, including Georgic, pastoral, sublime, and so on. As they a negotiate between the demands of tradition and the demand for contemporary relevance, these texts attempt a revisionary reconciliation of history and modernity.

I begin with William Wordsworth whose poetry of "low and rustic life" promoted the idea of the countryside as therapeutic on both an individual and a social level. Wordsworth's early poetry introduces a radically mobile poetics, moving the narrator and the audience into what Deleuze and Guattari describe as "nomad space"--that world of beggars, discharged soldiers, pedlars, and mendicants who inhabit Lyrical Ballads. However, as an identification with these marginal and even socially disruptive figures produced a sense of class anxiety, Wordsworth backed off from the identification, while retaining a more circumspect attachment to a mobile perspective. The result is one of the earliest expressions of both the aims and contradictions of the touristic perspective in relation to the domestic landscape, as it encourages readers to participate in a common experience of rural life even as it articulates social distinctions according to an individual's mode of participation in that experience. In later life, his Guide to the Lakes contributed tremendously to the popularization of the rural vacation by encouraging a broad-based audience to take advantage of what he called "a sort of national property."

With the next chapter, I move to William Howitt, a self-proclaimed disciple of Wordsworth and a promoter of English rural life. In his encyclopedic The Rural Life of England, Howitt offers a much fuller and more explicit elaboration than Wordsworth of the role tourism might play in the conversion of rural life to national heritage. Howitt's cosmopolitan tourist performs a triangulation of culture (especially poetry), rural life, and national identity: landscape and literature, defined in nationalistic terms, reciprocate in a process of mutual authentication out of which a sense of national identity is both constructed and affirmed. While Howitt defines his project in terms of an extension of Wordsworthian Republicanism--opening up the countryside to the masses--his own vision is colored by the reformer's desire for social control, as the experience of rural life is organized around such bourgeois values as self-help, and uncomplaining labor.

The next chapter takes up the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, who was both a close friend of William Howitt and a believer in the redemptive power of Wordsworthian "sympathy." Focusing primarily on Mary Barton and North and South, I show how Gaskell, in applying the idea of sympathy to an urban setting, challenges the fundamental distinction that Wordsworth imagined between the city and the country. Just as Gaskell herself moved from the country to the city, the movement of her characters between those two spaces becomes the means of exploring the possibilities for a new relationship between rural and urban in the modern world. In North and South, Margaret Hale moves to Milton Northern with a Wordsworthian preconception of the city as a "babel din" only to gain a new appreciation for urban life. At the end, when she returns to Helstone, the newly urbanized heroine finds that rural life, too, has assumed a new meaning: following her initial revulsion at the backwardness of rural life, she embraces her new identity as a tourist from the city, declaring that although she could never live in Helstone, "to her it would always be the prettiest spot in the world."

From the manufacturing world of Gaskell's Manchester, I move to the academic and professional world of Oxford with a chapter on Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, two writers whose efforts at reconciling tradition and modernity find expression in a sometimes troubled engagement with rural life. Although Wiener identifies the professional sector of the middle-class as the citadel of anti-industrialism and the principal promoters of aristocratic (rural) values, my study of Clough and Arnold demonstrates a great deal of complicity between the professional and manufacturing classes in their efforts to map the English countryside in touristic terms as a scene of middle-class leisure. Clough is especially interesting in this regard as his self-proclaimed "long-vacation pastoral" both invokes and contests a wide range of literary modes in an attempt to construct a meaningful modern relationship to the countryside.

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Send comments or suggestions regarding this website to Don Ulin at  ulin+@pitt.edu