Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity by Paul Readman (review)

In this insightful, original, and gracefully written analysis of six iconic English landscapes and their relationship to English (and occasionally British) national identity, Readman brings together art and history with great fluidity. As he points out, the value of landscapes often depends on factors other than their perceived physical properties. Nor do the sources of English identity in the nineteenth century—the focus of this book—lie solely in written histories, the evolution of the historical profession, or state-sponsored events such as world's fairs. On the contrary, the places discussed in Storied Ground—the cliffs of Dover, the Northumbrian borderland, the Lake District, the New Forest, the city of Manchester, and the Thames River—show how landscapes helped to define the cultural boundaries of the nation, provided a sense of connection between past and present, and developed and deepened a sense of Englishness that was urban and rural, national and imperial, local and regional, and, most importantly, popular and democratic.

Starting with the basic premises that all landscapes are human constructs and that all nations claim a homeland or bounded territory, Part I traces the process by which landscape was transformed into heritage. As with the American West and the Swiss Alps, the border landscapes that comprise the book's first section—the Dover cliffs and the Northumbrian borderland—complicate English identity. The cliffs, which attracted little attention before the middle of the eighteenth century, became "powerful symbols of defense, defiance and difference," eventually standing for "insular ideas of English nationhood" (26–27). Even as they marked Britain's separateness from the European continent, they also represented home for weary travelers returning from overseas. More complicated was the Northumbrian borderland, a barren, bleak landscape that was rehabilitated not just in purely visual terms but also as an emblem of British national identity, even though its characteristic speech (the burr) gave it a distinctive regional identity.

Part II deals with efforts to preserve the Lake District and the New Forest. In the late nineteenth century, just as the Lake District's appeal as a tourist destination was widening, it became the focus of an emerging preservationist movement. But this change was not solely for the sake of aesthetics; the area came to be seen, in the words of William Words-worth, as "national property" for people of all social classes who traveled there for rest and recreation at a time when the Third Reform Act of 1884/5 was producing a more democratic national identity. Readman argues that the National Trust's campaign to purchase land in the Lake District was not animated by Tory paternalism so much as by popular patriotism. Meanwhile the New Forest lost its relevance as a crown game reserve and a source of timber for Britain's navy, and came to be viewed instead as a "freely accessible historical landscape of liberty" (179). The Rufus Stone, which marked the spot where the unpopular King Rufus had been killed in 1100, and the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, helped to link the forest to England's medieval past as well.

Part III, especially the chapter about Manchester, enriches the story even further. In every way the antithesis of rural England, the dark, dirty, dystopian "shock city" of the Industrial Revolution nonetheless became a popular tourist destination, its factories eliciting expressions of wonder and awe not least because they were seen to be doing "patriotic work" (206). Readman highlights the Italianate designs of its warehouses, which led to Manchester's reputation as "the Florence . . . of the nineteenth century," and the Gothic Revival public buildings, which combined "modernity and historicity" (231), preserving the past even as urban development was laying it to waste. The final chapter traces the Thames River's growing association with commerce, culture, and the course of history as it meandered its way from rural Gloucestershire through London to the North Sea, connecting "countryside and capital, backwater and bustling port" (252), the...