The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature by Richard Bevis (review)

378 letters in canada 1999 her thesis is to discuss a particular trend and then to examine one or two geographers whose work in her opinion best illustrates that trend. For instance, Godlewska takes the career of the last of the Cassini dynasty of map-makers as symptomatic of the conservatism of geographers in the late eighteenth century. His failure to move from his traditional methods cost him salaried appointments and membership in professional societies. Of those who tried to revive descriptive geography, Malte-Brun emerges as the most effective. Among the innovators Godlewska singles out for analysis are Chabrol de Volvic, who was a long-term prefect of Paris, Adrien Balbi, the prolific Jean-Antoine Letronne, and von Humboldt, who rates an entire chapter. Yet, Godlewska finds the work of the innovators wanting, arguing that they had influence only on the margins of the discipline and failed to restore it to academic prominence. This approach to the topic does raise some questions. Why this apparent need to come to a negative conclusion? Cannot the contributions of some of the geographers she has studied be interpreted in a more positive way? Von Humboldt certainly deserves his chapter. He was one of the founders of physical geography as we now understand it and he did inject interest even into descriptive geography. In their use of social statistics, Chabrol de Volvic and Balbi forged an alliance between statistics and geography that has proved enduring. The fault in Letronne's historical geography seems to lie in his choice of topic B the classical world B and not in his method. Historical geography also has become an enduring branch of the discipline. Secondly, is Godlweska's definition of geography rather limited? There is nothing here about two basic themes in the history of geography: environmental determinism and its opposite, the role of humankind in changing the environment. What was being written in France on these themes in these years? Godleska might have reflected on a broader context for her study. Was decline just a characteristic of geography in France or was it true also of geography in other countries? Three of her major geographers were foreigners whose claim to inclusion here was that they lived some years in France. Von Humboldt was Prussian, Balbi Venetian and Malte-Brun Danish. Would-be readers concerned about my mention of Foucault can rest reassured: his vocabulary only occasionally intrudes. I will end my review on a positive note: this book is extremely scholarly, the result of very wide reading, and will find an important place in the literature on the history of geography. (J.H. GALLOWAY) Richard Bevis. The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature McGill-Queen's University Press. xxiv, 409. $75.00 In an apt prefatorial comparison, Richard Bevis likens his book to Clarence humanities 379 Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore, a monumental study of Western environmental ideas. The Road to Egdon Heath seeks with similar wideranging erudition to write the history of the emergence of a modern appreciation for vast deserted spaces B the `aesthetics of the great.' Extending Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom and Glory beyond mountains to include four other sublime landscapes B seas, deserts, heavens, and polar wastes B Bevis explores how increasingly writers looked to the such regions as being those most suited to a modern sensibility. As Thomas Hardy remarked, in the description of Egdon Heath referred to in the title of this book, `human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young.' Bevis sees here the articulation of a `a major shift in western aesthetics,' as the heath is `both a logical outcome and a cultural barometer' of the emergence of a more chastened sublime, reflecting transformations in Western ideas of nature, the environment, and geological time. The book examines the various strands of thought that eventually contributed to this new appreciation for waste spaces such as Egdon Heath. The forward movement of this model, however, is complicated by Bevis's assertion that the five spaces that encompass the `aesthetics of the great' were already...