In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford’s historical tragedy, Charles the First, was banned by the new Examiner of Plays, George Colman. In 1737, William Havard’s play, King Charles I was performed at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just before the 1737 Licensing Act established legislative State censorship of the British theatre. There is an intriguing timeline here: in 1737 a play about Charles I ran for several months at a Theatre Royal, and was subsequently played throughout Britain for the next fifty years; in 1824 another play about Charles I was banned before it reached the stage. These events bookend the period covered by this book, and this chapter works between them to explore aspects of the cultural memory of Charles I in the English theatre, and the impact of censorship not only on Mitford’s career but also the broader question of women’s participation in the theatre in the early nineteenth century. Mitford’s playwriting career spanned the end of John Larpent’s time and the start of George Colman’s tenure as Examiner of Plays, and her experience points to the increasing constraints on women playwrights’ agency and confidence in the period.

This chapter re-visits Raymond Williams’s imagined journey in ‘Three around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973), to explore the meanings of georgic in a period of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. It suggests that William Cobbett might be read as a writer engaged with the georgic mode and shows how his writings on rural England contain recognisably pastoral and georgic themes, tropes and rhetorical strategies. It examines Cobbett’s attempts to inhabit the rural ideal through his various farming ventures before reading Rural Rides (1830) as a work in the georgic mode, realised through Cobbett’s detailed mapping of the English countryside. This parallels Cottage Economy (1821–1822), an attempt to take georgic away from elite literary culture and down to the level of the cottage. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Cobbett’s later tours of industrial Britain imagine a union between agricultural and industrial workers as the only possibility for political reform.

By examining a constellation of writings originating in the years 1822 to 1824, this chapter brings together various forms of mobility and speculation. Galt’s Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk depicts an enterprising protagonist’s move from rural Scotland to London and back again, once he has undergone a performative process of identity construction in a series of socio–economic fields. Published first in periodicals and then collected into volumes entitled Our Village, Mitford’s prose sketches about life in rural Berkshire document changes caused by speculation on property and new modes of transportation that increase both voluntary and involuntary mobility. Saint Ronan’s Well, Scott’s only novel set in the nineteenth century, presents the related but contrasting scenario of a Scottish village disrupted by the speculative development of a fashionable spa; it interweaves themes of gambling and identity theft with a critique of contemporary print culture and reading habits. Recurring motifs in these works show how authors and characters respond to changes in socio-economic relations as increased mobility affects their capacity to control literary, personal, and real property.

Chapter 1 puts Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne in conversation with Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village and Jane Austen’s Emma. White’s natural history is the seminal text of English reverent natural history, establishing for much of the nineteenth century a model for reverent observation of the ordinary and local natural world. The chapter considers the formal commonalities and broad theoretical underpinnings of a naturalist, a novelist, and a sketch/prose artist. These three genres – reverent natural history, sketch narrative, novel of English provincial realism – offer sustained and reverent attention to the everyday aspects of their natural and social ecologies. Divided into three sections, the chapter considers White, Mitford, and Austen on their own terms, but also as modes of English realism, with Emma as an important predecessor the mid-nineteenth century novels of English provincial realism.