10 - Country matters

Summary

An enormous amount of British Romantic literary production is situated in the countryside, as a setting for narrated action, a scene for poetic meditation, or a place to write. One thinks immediately of Wordsworth’s relation to the Lake District, indeed of a whole school called ‘the Lakers’ (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey); or of a writer like John Clare, identified with the peasantry, or of William Cobbett, a keen and critical observer of the changing character of the countryside in his Rural Rides. Landscape painting, most famously exemplified by Constable and Turner, displaces portraiture and history painting in the hierarchy of the visual arts in the Romantic period. The cult of the Picturesque in tourism and landscape gardening becomes a fad and an object of satire in the caricatures of Rowlandson and the novels of Jane Austen. When one thinks of England in the Romantic period, then, one thinks of the country, and it is difficult to imagine what would be left of Romantic literature if it were divested of its natural objects and rural settings, if it lacked flowers, trees, birds, fields, rivers, mountains, seashores and the innumerable ‘prospects’ that invite the traveller to stop and stare at the countryside. Beyond the literary domain, the country becomes the object of a newly intensified attention in the Romantic period.