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Landscape Preservation, ‘advertising disfigurement’, and English National Identity c. 1890–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Paul Readman
Paul Readman
Affiliation:
Christ's College, Cambridge, CB2 3BU, UK.
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Abstract

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2001 , pp. 61 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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32. A year and a half after its formation, membership of SCAPA was 730 (A Beautiful World, 3 (June 1894), 121). Though exact figures are lacking, it is unlikely that it much exceeded 1,000 before 1914. But that influential rather than mass support was sought is clear from a 1901 petition presented to the government urging legislation for the regulation of advertisements. Appended to the list of 150 names was a note explaining that ‘the idea was not to obtain numerous Signatories, but a limited number of names representative of various great national interests’. This aim would seem to have been successful, as the list included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor of London, 24 MPs, various peers, numerous prominent academics, writers and artists (amongst them Frederick Pollock, Charles Booth and the President of the Royal Academy), H.M. Inspector of Schools, the Directors of the Natural History and British Museums, the Lord Justice of Appeal, and the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge. (See A Beautiful World, 9 (1900–3), 21–3. The original circular (with signatures) is preserved in the London Metropolitan Archives, A/SCA/IV/3.)

33. Woburn Advertiser, 8th May 1898 (coll. SCAPA press cuttings, Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/VI/1/1.)

34. Evans, Richardson, An Account of the SCAPA Society (London, 1926), p. 55. For a typical example of such support see ‘The Desecration of Scenery’, Spectator, August 1900, pp. 202–3. As with other preservationist bodies, The Times was a particularly reliable ally. Between 1890 and 1905 the newspaper published at least 30 letters by Richardson Evans alone. As he himself explained in one of them, that ‘I have become a habitual trespasser upon your space … is because your kindness has sympathetically condoned the offence’ (Times, 26th January 1904, p. 5).Google Scholar

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36. For the debate over the Bill (which passed its 3rd reading in the Commons by 207 votes to 12), see Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., 176, cc. 11–32.

37. Nevett, Advertising, p. 118.

38. Letter of E. D. Till to Richardson Evans, 9th November 1909 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/111/3.) Despite the apparent illegality of these actions, the firms affected did not seek redress in the Courts.

39. As the Austrian playwright and social commentator Karl Kraus asked in 1904: Is there life beyond the posters? When a train takes us outside the city, we do see a green meadow - but this green meadow is only a poster which that lubricant manufacturer has concocted in league with nature in order to pay his respects to us in the country as well (‘The World of Posters’, in Zohn, Harry, ed., In these great times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Manchester, 1984), p. 45).Google Scholar

40. Peters, Carl [karl], England and the English (London, 1904), p. 120.Google Scholar

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42. Lecky, W. E. H. et at., ‘The Advertisement Nuisance’, New Review, 9 (November 1893), 466–81.Google Scholar

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44. Although we must be careful not to postulate too sharp a dichotomy between ‘town’ and ‘country’. As we shall see, the Dover case in 1901 demonstrated that ‘English scenery’ did not necessarily stop where towns began. An appreciation of this fact was demonstrated in later bills of 1905 and 1906, and also in the 1907 Act, which gave regulatory powers both to county and borough authorities.

45. For Blanche Elliott, SCAPA was set up in response to fears that the 1889 Indecent Advertisement Act had not done enough to discourage impropriety in posters. (See Elliott, Blanche B., A History of British Advertising (London, 1962), p. 165).Google Scholar

46. Letter of Evans to Howard, 7th October 1903 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/III/9/5.)

47. Times, 23rd November 1892, p. 14.

48. Hunter, Robert, ‘Places of Interest and Things of Beauty’, Nineteenth Century, 43 (April 1898), 570–89Google ScholarHill, Octavia, ‘Natural Beauty as a National Asset’, Nineteenth Century and After, 58 (December 1905), 935–41. See alsoGoogle ScholarRawnsley, H. D., ‘The National Trust: Its Work and Needs’, Nature Notes, 1 (September 1896), 190–91 Eversley, Commons, pp. 323–5.Google Scholar

49. See Ranlett, ‘“Checking nature's desecration’”.

50. Peacock, Alfred J., ‘Land Reform 1880–1919: A Study of the Activities of the English Land Restoration Leagues and the Land Nationalisation Society’ (Unpublished M.A. dissertation, Southampton University, 1961). And cf Hunter, ‘Places of interest’, pp. 570, 589.Google Scholar

51. Evans, Richardson, The Age of Disfigurement (London, 1893), p. 95.Google Scholar

52. The Rural Advertisements Bill [Beautiful World leaflets 1, 1st February 1895], 2–3 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/V/3/1.)

53. ibid., pp. 37–8.

54. A Beautiful World, 10 (September 1909), 27.

55. Hill, , ‘Natural beauty], 936. See also her, ‘Colour, Space and Music for the People’, Nineteenth Century, 15 (May 1884), 741–52 and seeGoogle ScholarEvans, Richardson, ‘Advertising as a Trespass on the Public’, Nineteenth Century, 37 (June 1895), 969–70.Google Scholar

56. Evans, SCAPA, p. 219.

57. Evans, Age of Disfigurement, p. 75 [italics added].

58. ibid..

59. Evans, , ‘Advertising Disfigurement’, Westminster Review, 151 (March 1899), 253. See also Age of Disfigurement, p. 80 Lecky et at., ‘Advertisement Nuisance’, pp. 478–9 ‘To Members’, A Beautiful World, 9 (1900–3), 7.Google Scholar

60. Letter of Evans, Richardson (Times, 5th September, 1902, p. 6) A Beautiful World, 10 (September 1909), 226–7.Google Scholar

61. Evans, ‘Advertising as a Trespass’, p. 972.

62. See, for instance, the advert for Pears' Soap in the Illustrated London News, October 29th, 1887 (reproduced in Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford, 1990), p. 250).Google Scholar

63. Dover and County Chronicle, 28th September 1901, p. 5.

64. A Beautiful World, 9 (1900–3), 9–10.

65. Dover Standard, 12th October, 1901, p. 5.

66. And with good reason. Writing in 1830, the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper described Dover and the cliffs above it as a place ‘both naturally and poetically fine, for, when one reflects that this accidental formation is precisely at the point where the island is nearest the continent, it has the character of a magnificent gateway to a great nation’ (Gleanings in Europe (2 vols., New York, 1828–30), II, pp. 3–4). Karl Peters, a later visitor, was similarly enthusiastic about ‘the shining chalk cliffs’ (England and the English, pp. 10–11).

67. 5th October 1901, p. 3.

68. A Beautiful World, 9 (1900–3), 18.

69. Dover Standard, 24th August, 1901, p. 5 Dover and County Chronicle, 12th October 1901, p. 5.

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71. ibid.. Dover Observer, 24th August 1901, p. 7.

72. Times, 19th April 1900, p. 15.

73. The cliffs of Dover were not, however, the only landscape feature ennobled and nationalised by Shakespearean connotations. The value placed on the scenery of the Chilterns, for example, owed much to the fact that their woods had provided ‘the residence of the famed British King, the “Cymbeline” of the immortal Shakespeare’ (Fowler, J. K., Records of Old Times (London, 1898), p. 4).Google Scholar

74. For instance, Lecky et at. ‘Advertisement Nuisance’, 473.

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76. ibid., 971.

77. In his Memories of 1900, for example, the prominent politician George Brodrick waxed lyrical over the open downland of the Home Counties, the woods of the New Forest, and the moorlands of Devon and Cornwall (Brodrick, George Charles, Memories and Impressions 1S31–1900 (London, 1900), pp. 301, 304–5).Google Scholar

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79. See Rodee, Howard D., ‘The “dreary landscape” as a Background to Scenes of Rural Poverty in Victorian Paintings’, Art Journal, 36 (1977), 307–13.Google Scholar

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82. For examples of anxiety about the destruction of cottages see Shand, A. I., ‘Farmers and Farms’, Cornhill Magazine, n.s., 41 (March 1880), 343–5Google ScholarSmith, Mary Campbell, ‘Picturesque Village Homes’, Westminster Review, 141 (March 1894), 243 and Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders (1887) - which contains a description of the bull-dozing of thatched cottagesGoogle Scholar(Ford, George H., ‘Felicitous Space: The Cottage Controversy’, in Knoepflmacher, U. C. and Tennyson, G. B., eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley, 1977), p. 31).Google Scholar

83. Cited in Treble, Rosemary, ‘The Victorian Picture of the Country’, in Mingay, G. E., ed., The Rural Idyll (London, 1989), p. 54.Google Scholar

84. Huish and Allingham, Happy England, p. 118.

85. For reproductions of these paintings see ibid., pp. 76–7, 114–15.

86. Huish and Allingham, Happy England, pp. 146–7 and see Bell, E. Moberly, Octavia Hill (London, 1942), p. 237.Google Scholar

87. Lowenthal, David, ‘British National Identity and the English Landscape’, Rural History, 2:2 (1991), 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88. Hunter, Michael, ed., Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (Stroud, 1996), p. 7.Google Scholar

89. Cannadine, David, ‘The First Hundred Years’, in Newby, Howard, ed., The National Trust: The Next Hundred Years (London, 1995), p. 11. Although Peter Mandler has given considerable attention to the activities of the Trust in the inter-war years and after in his Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, its early history before 1914 remains almost completely ignored.Google Scholar

90. Cited in Ranlett, ‘“Checking nature's desecration”’ 199.

91. Rawnsley, ‘National Trust’, 190.

92. Octavia Hill; cited in Bell, Octavia Hill, pp. 234–5.

93. Rawnsley, ‘National Trust’, 191. Members of SCAPA were also aware of the particular charm of Barras Head, where - as one of them put it - ‘the ancient fortress of Tintagel, hallowed by so many memories rises against the sky’. ([Richardson Evans?], ‘The preservation of beautiful places’ [MS of speech, c. 1895–6], p. 4 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/V/3/10.)

94. See Eversley, Commons, pp. 167–71 Pasmore, Anthony, Verderers of the New Forest ([Beaulieu, 1976]), pp. 48–50, 62–66.Google Scholar

95. Eversley, Commons, p. 168 letter of Herbert, Auberon to The Times, 18th April 1890, p. 13 and ‘The Last Bit of Natural Woodland’, Nineteenth Century, 30 (September 1891), 354. See alsoGoogle ScholarKing, Joseph, ‘The New Forest and the War Office’, Westminster Review, 137 (March 1892), 261–7.Google Scholar

96. As a Times editorial warned, such insensitive planting would simply amount to a replication of the dreary coniferous landscape of the Landes of south-west France ‘on English soil, which has been proved capable of better things’ (19th September 1885, p. 9; and see also 18th April 1890, p. 9).

97. King, ‘New Forest’, p. 262.

98. Lowenthal, David and Prince, Hugh were the first to make this connection, with reference to the Britain of the 1960s (‘English Landscape Tastes’, The Geographical Review, 55 (1965), 207). Since the publication of Wiener's book, however, it is a view that has been enthusiastically adopted by historians.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

99. Sheldon, Cyril, History of Poster Advertising (London, 1937), p. 102.Google Scholar

100. A Beautiful World, 4 (December 1894), 124.

101. On the basis of the lists of members and of signatories to petitions (both of which were printed in A Beautiful World), as well as who backed anti-advertising bills in Parliament, it can be calculated that between 1893 and 1907 23 Conservative, 11 Liberal Unionist, 24 Liberal, and 4 ‘Lib-Lab’ or Labour MPs had declared their sympathies with the ideals of SCAPA.

102. A Beautiful World, 3 (June 1894), 127–8. The speaker was the widow of the Liberal MP Henry Fawcett, a considerable figure in her own right actively involved in SCAPA, the CPS and the National Trust (and later, of course, in the suffragette movement).

103. Evans, Richardson, ‘Memorandum on the legislative aspect of the work of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising’, 28th January 1904, p. 6 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/1V/4.)Google Scholar

104. See for example the speech of Lord Balfour of Burleigh in the House of Lords, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., 142, cc. 866–7; also Evans, Age of Disfigurement, pp. 32–3 and ‘Landscape and Legislation’, Cornhill Magazine, n.s. 23 (December 1907), 813.

105. Evans, ‘Advertising as a Trespass1, 973. See also his letters to The Times (e.g. 4th February, 1896, p. 7 26th April 1899, p. 12; 25Th March 1902, P. 6).

106. Speech of Griffin, Sir Lepel, A Beautiful World, 6 (December 1896), 15. And as E. S. Turner has commented, SCAPA might well have had a point. The ‘soap war’ of the late nineteenth century, for example, was certainly wasteful and of no benefit to the companies involved. (The Shocking History of Advertising (rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 133).Google Scholar

107. A Beautiful World, 2 (February 1894), 94 ibid., 9 (1900–3), 106.

108. Evans, ‘Advertising Disfigurement’, 257.

109. ibid.. Evans, ‘Advertising Disfigurement’, 257.

110. Evans, , SCAPA: Why it Exists: What it May Hope to do [pamphlet, 1896], p. 4 [emphasis tadded] (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/V/3/1.)Google Scholar

111. A Beautiful World, 9 (1900–3), 126–7.

112. Evans ‘Advertising as a Trespass’, p. 968 ‘A Memorandum Regarding the Need of Concerted Action in the Defence of the Picturesque’, 5th May 1898 (Lon. Met. Arch., A/SCA/V/3/1), pp. 1–3 (Landscape and Legislation', p. 816.

113. Harris, Jose, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London, 1994), pp. 32–6Google ScholarLowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), p. 102 Mandler, Fall and Rise, esp. pp. 109–15 and ‘Against “Englishness”’, 158–61.Google Scholar

114. Harris, Private Lives, p. 33.

115. Lowenthal, Past is a Foreign Country, p. 102.

116. On this see for instance, Raphael Samuel, ‘Continuous National History’, in Samuel, , Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (3 vols., London, 1989), I, pp. 10–13.Google Scholar

117. Creighton, Mandell, ‘The Picturesque in History’, in Creighton, Historical Lectures and Addresses, ed. Creighton, Louise (London, 1903), p. 262.Google Scholar

118. Kent, W. H., ‘Patriotism or Imperialism?’, Westminster Review, 157 (February 1902), 132.Google Scholar

119. Speeches of Dilke, Sir Charles at Chelsea and Halifax, Times, 7th October 1885, p. 10Google Scholar; 14th October 1885, p. 7. Articles in periodicals frequently stressed these themes. See, for example, Acland, Arthur H. D., ‘What can be done for our County Villages’, New Review, 4 (April 1891), 323–5Google ScholarLong, R. Seymour, ‘Progressing by going Back’, Westminster Review, 148 (September 1897), 293.Google Scholar

120. Report from the Select Committee on Small Holdings With The Proceedings Of The Committee vol. 3 (1890), Ix.

121. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”’, p. 160.

122. Hunter, Michael, ‘The Preconditions of Preservation: A Historical Perspective’, in Lowenthal, David and Binney, Marcus, eds., Our Past Before Us: Why Do We Save It? (London, 1981), pp. 27–8. Hunter's argument, it should be noted, is solely concerned with historic monuments, but in the light of what has already been said here it is perfectly reasonable to extend it to include landscape.Google Scholar

123. Evans, Age of Disfigurement, p. 37.

124. Including Henry and Millicent Fawcett, William Morris, and Sir Robert Hunter.

125. Huish and Allingham, Happy England, pp. 143–4.

126. See, for instance, The Children's Maypole (1886), Spring on the Kentish Downs (1900), Night-Jar Lane, Whitley (1887). Reproductions of these paintings can be found in ibid., pp. 96, 102–3, 116–17.

127. In contrast to the approach taken by his predecessors, Green taught his readers that the doings of great men were in fact ‘secondary matters, and important only in so far as they affect the welfare and stimulate the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of undistinguished humanity in whose hands the fate of a nation lies’ (Bryce, James, ‘John Richard Green. In Memoriam’, Macmillan's Magazine, 48 (May 1883), 59–74). This new emphasis on the history of ‘the common people of England’ was very influential, and informed many late nineteenth and early twentieth century interpretations of the enclosure movement. In the light of the evidence of the hardship it caused the rural poor, historians began to come to conclusions at variance with the assumption that enclosure had been necessary for progress. Not only did some hesitate before accepting that it ‘must have been an unmixed benefit to the nation’, but others felt it constituted nothing less than ‘a policy of slow extermination of the peasantry’Google Scholar(Hasbach, W., A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (English translation, London, 1908 [1894]), p. 92Google ScholarSlater, Gilbert, The Making of Modern England (London, 1913), p. 34 and seeGoogle ScholarSlater, , The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (London, 1907), passim). Such views clearly had an influence on policy makers like the agrarian campaigner Jesse Collings and, later on, the Liberal Minister for Agriculture Lord Carrington. (SeeGoogle ScholarCollings, Land Reform: Occupying Ownership, Peasant Proprietary and Rural Education (new ed., London, 1908 [1906]), pp. 51–64 and Carrington's preface to Slater, English Peasantry).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

128. See, for e.g., Hasbach, English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 71–8.

129. Cited in Bell, Octavia Hill, p. 231.

130. Hunter, Sir Robert, Footpaths and Commons and Parish and District Councils (London, 1895), p. 6Google ScholarHill, Octavia, ‘Footpath Preservation’, Nature Notes, 3 (October 1892), 196Google Scholar; Clarke, Archibald, ‘Footpaths and Commons’, Nature Notes, 7 (January 1896), 9–11. See alsoGoogle ScholarRawnsley, H. D., ‘Footpath Preservation: A National Need’, Contemporary Review, 50 (September 1886), 373–386.Google Scholar

131. Cited in Legg, National Trust, p. 15. Hill's views are also well illustrated by the quotations she sent Nature Notes from William Howitt's popular Book of the Seasons, many of which instance arbitrary action taken by landlords in blocking public rights of way. One, with its reference to the ‘village patriot’ Hampden, clearly reveals her populist, even radical, sympathies:

When the path of immemorial usage is closed – when the little streak, almost as fine as a mathematical line, along the wealthy man's ample field is grudgingly erased - it is impossible not to feel indignant at the pitiful monopoly … Is there no local ‘Hampden with doubtless breast’ to ‘withstand the petty tyrants of the fields’ and to save our good old footpaths? (‘Field Paths’, Nature Notes, 1 (September 15, 1890), 139).

132. For examples of such views see Bunce, Countryside Ideal, p. 182 Weideger, Paula, Gilding the Acorn: Behind the Facade of the National Trust (London, 1994), pp. 8, 35–6.Google Scholar