The Eighteenth-Century Landscape

Reviews The Eighteenth-Century Landscape DOUGLAS CHAMBERS John Goodridge. Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought 27 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995; repr 1997.228. us $59.95 Charlotte Klonk. Science and the Perception ojNature: British Ltmdscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries London and New Haven: Yale University Press 1996. 198. us $55.00 After reading John Goodridge's Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, one's first sense is that there is nothing left to be said on the subject. The two parts of the book deal first withThomson, Duck, and Collier and then (much more extensively) with Dyer's The Fleece, whenGoodridge seems to come into his own. More than half the book is on sheep: a solidly old-fashioned piece of work that does not trouble itself very much with the argument about the politics of pastoral in spite of Goodridge's frequent citation of John Barrell. Indeed, the book has a strangely deracinated quality, not only in the partiality of the authors selected but in the absence of the argument about georgic and pastoral that had been raging in Britain at least since More's Utopia. There is, for example, almost nothing about the extensive legal literature that (in England) derived from John Fitzherbert's Boke ofSurveyeng and Improvmentes (1543), was augmented by the Digger debates ofthe Commonwealth, and made a canonical subject in Locke's Two Treatises on Government. The seventeenth-century writers on agriculture - Samuel Hartlib, William Coles, Ralph Austen, John Speed, Richard Weston, and Samuel Worlidge - all contributed to the debate about proper agriculture that continued into the early eighteenth century in the editions of Bradley and Harris and in the arguments of Swift, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. None of these authors' works on husbandry and nature is cited by Goodridge, nor are such writers on agriculture as Samuel Collins, Edward Laurence, John Cowper, Richard Neve, William Mackintosh, Robert Maxwell, or even Jethro Tull. Richard Greene's book on Mary Leapor was published in 1993 - early enough, surely, to have drawn attention to her importance for a study of this kind. Would UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1999 706 DOUGLAS CHAMBERS not Richard Savage's The Wanderer have been a relevant text '.. or the poems of the Wartons or even of Nicholas James or George Farewell"let alone Goldsmith's Deserted Village and the extensive critical literature around it? There is also a considerable secondary literature about husbandry thatought not to have been overlooked: the extensive writings of Joan Thirsk, the articles of Stephen Daniels, the work ofAndrew McRae, Neal Wood's John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism, and J.M. Neeson's Commoners: Common Right, Enclosureand Social Change in England 1700-1800 (1993), for example. Even Oliver Rackham's The History ofthe Countryside (1986) has chapters relevant to Goodridge's study. Art history also has something to offer: John Harris's The Artist and the English CountnJ House (in both its recensions) or DemelzaSpargo's interesting and useful The Land Is Our Land: Aspects ofAgriculture in English Art (1989). Georgie Iiterature cannotbe considered apart from its politics, as AlastairFowler has pointed out in two influential articles. The English translation of Virgil's phrase 'ingentia rural was commonly an inversion of the original sense in Georgics 2, and Virgil's sense of 'angusta' is far away from the meanness that such eighteenthcentury writers as Addison attributed to it. Much of this is elaborated in the useful and extensive notes to Richard Thomas's edition of The Georgics, published indeed by Cambridge University Press! The roots of the argument over agriculture in Dyer's mid-century poetry lie a century earlier at least in the arguments between John Evelyn and John Beale about the trUe nature of georgic and pastoral. This debate, as Simon Schama points out in Landscape and Memory (1995), emerged in Evelyn's Sylva and Terra and changed the mythology of English agriculture. It also emerged in Paradise Lost, in which Eden is a georgk landscape. The artifice ofThomson'5 treatment of agriculture has been extenSively explored previously by both J01m Barrell and E...