20 - Nostalgia, or a Ruin with a View

Summary

The literary critic George Steiner gets to the essence of change brought about by the quarter-century of revolution and war after 1789 with his wonderful remark that whenever ‘ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge, they saw bayonets passing’.¹ At first glance, the image is quaint and brings to mind ‘the recent arrival of a militia regiment’ in Meryton in the first pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. With the red coats in their midst, the Bennett sisters were ‘well supplied both with news and happiness’; indeed, soon they would no longer receive ‘pleasure from the society of a man in any other colour’.² But Steiner was remarking on something else beside the novel traffic of warriors in the countryside. The world ‘beyond the garden hedge’ destroyed the tranquillity of the universe bounded by the hedge. ‘It is the events of 1789 to 1815’, Steiner explains, that first ‘interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes’, their dizzying possibilities and terrifying dangers.