THE GEORGIANS
The industrial revolution changed the face of the country – as our cities grew, so did some people’s fortunes. It drove many people to seek solace beyond the urban sprawl, either in nature or palatial stately homes, says Hannah Greig
The 18th century saw artists and writers extolling the countryside as a place of solace and escape, says Hannah Greig
Often regarded as the age of elegance, Georgian Britain evokes Palladian facades, sweeping crescents and assembly room balls. There is, however, more to its history than sash-windowed houses ringing with the clink of china teacups.
A time of dramatic transformation, Britain waged war abroad, both with old enemy France and newly independent America, while at home there was unrest. Radical ideals fermented and people struggled with dramatic economic fluctuations. There was also innovation, as new kinds of products – from watches to steam technology – made their mark on everyday life.
The countryside was regarded by many as the calming tonic to such social, political and economic upheaval. By the end of the Georgian age, John Constable’s paintings of babbling brooks and grazing cattle, William Turner’s fog-strewn hills and crashing waves, and William Wordsworth’s poetic passion for the ‘dizzy raptures’ of rural beauty, showcased a Britain composed of majestic panoramas, over which nature ruled supreme.
A veneration of the pastoral went hand in hand with concerns about its future loss as towns mushroomed in size. The Georgians fretted about London’s accelerating growth. Even the bucolic villages of Chelsea and Kensington to the west and Hackney to the east looked like they would soon be overwhelmed by the expanding girth of this ‘great wen’, as it was described by William Cobbett, champion of country life, in 1820. Yet the rapid industrialisation that created belching cities by the late 19th century was still to come. Most towns were tiny, home to only one or two thousand people. The majority of people lived in the countryside, as they had for generations. Space was ample and rural solitude abundant.
For most people, nature still determined the rhythm of daily life. The working day was dictated by the rising and setting of the sun and the various types of work – ploughing, harvesting, fruit picking, gleaning and even poaching – were seasonal activities. The majority of industry was still pursued in cottages housing weavers, spinners, tanners, lace-makers, shoe-makers and more. Their trades were yoked to local economies that ebbed and flowed with the seasons, intertwining the lives of craftsmen with those whose fingers were muddied with soil. It was the hand of nature – the combination of rain,
sunlight and temperature – that decided the success or failure of a harvest and set the tone of life across the entire country. Corn was the most highly prized commodity, driving nationwide booms and busts. Its pre-eminence was recognised by the Government in Acts of Parliament and by ordinary people in acts of riot, both designed to try to control prices, pushing them higher or lower, depending on whether profit or affordability was the goal.
Uncultivated land was wrestled into production to feed a growing population. Views were entirely remade as vast open fields, wasteland and common land were enclosed and brought under private control. Britain’s patchwork landscape of straight-edged fields flanked by hedgerows and dry-stone walls was the visual result of this change. Land enclosures supported the emergence of large, tenanted farms that yielded more crops and plumper stock. Of course, such reallocation of land came at a cost. Ordinary people lost access to open grazing that had enabled them to keep a pig or hens as a supplement. The poorest, who had relied on squatting rights and gleaning to get by, were dispossessed.
MASTERING NATURE
At the top of the social ladder, an appetite for remodelling the land extended beyond the productivity of agricultural reform, and the very wealthy carved out fashionable new vistas at their sprawling country estates. As with all good makeovers, the artifice had to masquerade as nature. None were more skilled in this alchemy than Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Many of the parklands surrounding 18th-century country houses aren’t the work of nature at all, but of Georgian grand design.
Perhaps it was this remodelling of Britain’s map for profit and pleasure that made its natural landscapes all the more alluring in the closing decades of the Georgian era. It was to the country’s remote, rugged regions that the Romantic artists were drawn. However capable, even Lancelot Brown would have met his match in the soaring peaks and deep waters of the Lake District, on Cornwall’s craggy coasts pocked with smugglers’ caves, or amid the ancient lochs and highlands of Scotland. This is where many Georgian painters and poets turned to commune with nature, who in Wordsworth’s words, “never did betray the heart that loved her”.
But the Georgian interest in the natural world wasn’t just romantic. While some gazed in awe across epic landscapes, others focused in on the tiniest elements of it and scrutinised the details. A time of analysis as well as art, citizen scientists attempted to catalogue natural history just as vigorously as artists tried to capture its beauty. Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, had a natural history collection so large she employed a curator among her staff. Fossils, feathers, shells, flora and fauna were collected by life-long experts and fashion-following amateurs alike. As a result, even the newly built townhouses that ranged down Georgian terraces contained specimens of nature, with shells adorning small boxes or large, purposebuilt grottos and flowers painted onto canvas or pressed and ordered into books.
Contemporaries might have feared the relentless march of urban life, but town and country were never far apart. Georgian Britain was ruled by four kings, but Mother Nature remained a powerful queen.
“It was to the remote, rugged regions that the Romantic artists were drawn”