The Land Question in Britain, 1750-1950 (review)

This collection of essays represents the fruits of a 2005 conference held at the University of Hertfordshire, although its subject has been an abiding concern of both editors for many years. The "land question," they argue, was "a fixture in the political firmament" between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (1), with liberals and radicals launching crusades against landlords and in support of labourers, while conservatives fought to preserve the value and influence of landed property. Specific attention to this issue in the published literature is, however, rare, and this book attempts to fill that gap. While treating the land question as at root a political issue, the book also examines the ideologies underpinning it, its protean character, and its relevance to wider economic, social, and cultural issues. Conveying breadth and complexity through fourteen chapters and an introduction, the book includes chapters by a range of authors as well, from a recent doctoral graduate to one of the most eminent emeritus professors of history.

Organised chronologically rather than thematically, the volume opens with Ian Waites's essay exploring the commemoration of the countryside and the impact of enclosure through the artist William Turner and the working-class novelist and poet Thomas Miller. Both evoke a landscape that by the mid-nineteenth century represented a remnant of a bygone age. Turner and Miller reconstructed that age in local contexts, with a naturalism that was itself being replaced by a new notion of aesthetic realism. Kathryn Beresford's chapter follows, arguing that representations of the English yeoman formed a crucial element in the idealization of the rural community in the early nineteenth century, underpinning the conservative opposition to radical critique. The yeoman's "earthy virtues" lent themselves to campaigns on many fronts (39), however, and the mythology of the stout yeoman of old England—expressed through literature, songs, and political polemic—could be brought to bear in the interests of reform as well as in maintaining the status quo. These are the only chapters to deal essentially with representations, and it is a pity that it was not possible to provide a broader perspective by including further material examining changing artistic, literary, and popular perceptions at the fin de siècle.

Malcolm Chase's account of Chartism and the land question follows, and here we are on more familiar ground. Chase explains the Chartists' disposition to small-scale production as exemplified in the remarkably unsuccessful Land Plan, although his explanation of the apparent contradictions of the Chartist position—critical of private ownership yet apparently seeking private property rights for small-scale producers—is novel in exposing their emphasis on access to, rather than ownership of, land. Anthony Howe revisits the attacks of the Anti-Corn Law League on the landed classes from the late 1830s, explaining the failure of land reform in conventional terms, focusing on the internal weaknesses of the movement and the strength of its opponents. He strikes a more original note in arguing that the League's model of free trade between landlord and tenant was incapable of attracting wider support and failed to detach the farmers from their allegiance to the landlord class.

Matthew Cragoe, Ewen A. Cameron, and Philip Bull turn our attention, respectively, to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where the land question was pursued with varying intensities and to very different effects. Of the three, Wales proved to be the damp squib, never generating the grass-roots urgency found in Ireland nor many tangible results, for here denominational and linguistic differences between landlord and tenant failed to translate into concerted conflict; even the Tithe War of the late 1880s owed more to economic depression than political radicalism. In Scotland, liberal politicians put the land question to better use, with the infamous Highland clearances providing a powerful rallying point. When the economic depression of the 1880s provoked the so-called Crofters' War, farming tenants in northern Scotland elicited reform, while the conservatives introduced...