Abstract
Historians of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain have paid much attention to the cultural significance of contemporary interest in land, landscape and the rural. Since the publication of Martin Wiener’s seminal English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981), many scholars have argued that national identity found powerful expression through a ruralised Englishness. The repositories of this Englishness included the poetry and prose of writers like P. H. Ditchfield, Alfred Austin and Thomas Hardy, landscape preservation (the National Trust being founded in 1894), the folk song revival and pastoral trends in photography and pictorial art.1 In these years, Krishan Kumar has remarked, ‘the essential England was rural’.2 Now, it may be that the Wiener-inspired model of Englishness exaggerates the reactionary character of ruralist concerns: interest in the culture of the countryside and even the distant rural past was in no way confined to conservatives, as recent studies of the early preservationist movement have shown.3 That said, there is little reason to doubt that land and nation were closely connected in the popular imagination, albeit in different ways.
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See, for example, A. Helmreich, The English Garden and National Identity (Cambridge, 2002);
D. P. Corbett, et al. (eds), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940 (New Haven, 2002);
J. Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester, 1995);
G. Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993);
D. Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cambridge, 1993);
A. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London, 1986).
K. Kumar, The Making of British National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), p. 211.
P. Readman, ‘Landscape Preservation, “Advertising Disfigurement”, and English National Identity, c. 1890–1914’, Rural History, 12 (2001), 61–83; idem, ‘Preserving the English Landscape’, Cultural and Social History, 5 (2008), 197–218.
See, for example, P. Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism (Dublin, 1996);
M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales, 1832–1886 (Oxford, 2004);
E. A. Cameron, Land for the People? The British People and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1925 (East Linton, 1996).
See, for example, H. Cunningham, ‘The Conservative Party and Patriotism’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, pp. 283–307;
P. Readman, ‘The Liberal Party and Patriotism in Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), 269–302.
J. P. Cornford, ‘The Parliamentary Foundations of the Hotel Cecil’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), p. 310.
E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995).
A. Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999), pp. 499–500.
M. A. Havinden, Estate Villages: A Study of the Berkshire Villages of Ardington and Lockinge (London, 1966), pp. 88–9;
F. Impey, ‘Lord Tollemache, the Labourer’s Lord’, New Review, 9 (September 1893), 299–313.
Earl of Onslow, Landlords and Allotments (London, 1886).
Cable, 26 August 1893, p. 360. For more on Winchilsea and the NAU, see P. Readman, ‘Conservatives and the Politics of Land: Lord Winchilsea’s National Agricultural Union, 1893–1900’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), 25–69.
J. A. Froude, ‘On the Uses of a Landed Gentry’, in Short Studies on Great Subjects, ed. D. Ogg (London, 1963 [1887–83]), pp. 255–77.
P. Greg, ‘The New Radicals’, National Review, 5 (April 1885), 166; H. Chaplin, Hansard, 3rd ser., 282 (20 July 1883), col. 110;
R. E. Prothero, The Pioneers and Progress of British Farming (London, 1888), pp. 128, 137–40.
F. P. Verney, ‘Peasant Properties in France’, National Review, 10 (December 1887), 551;
F. M. de Borring, ‘The Peasant Proprietor of the South’, National Review, 6 (November 1885), 348–50;
[H. Reeve], ‘Plain Truths and Popular Fallacies’, Edinburgh Review, 162 (October 1885), 578;
H. S. Constable, Letters to County Newspapers on Radicalism and Socialism (London 1886), esp. pp. 1–9, 145–67, at 160.
J. R. Fisher, ‘Public Opinion and Agriculture 1875–1900’ ( PhD thesis, Hull, 1972), pp. 780–1.
See, for example, H. Rider Haggard, Rural England (London, 1906); idem., Rural Denmark and its Lessons (London, 1911); J. Collings, Land Reform (London, 1906).
Green, Crisis, pp. 290–4, 297. For the activities of the USRC more generally, see J. Ridley, ‘The Unionist Social Reform Committee, 1911–14: Wets before the Deluge’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 391–413.
I. Packer, ‘The Conservatives and the Ideology of Landownership, 1910– 1914’, in M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds), The Conservatives and British society, 1880–1990 (Cardiff, 1996), p. 47.
G. Boyce (ed.), The Crisis of British Unionism: Lord Selborne’s Domestic Political Papers, 1885–1922 (London, 1987), pp. 85–6.
J. Saville, Rural Depopulation in England and Wales 1851–1951 (London, 1957), p. 61.
J. E. Barker, ‘The Land, the Landlords and the People’, Nineteenth Century, 66 (October 1909), 550–1, 566.
A. K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906 (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 65.
J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (5th edn, Leicester, 1971).
G. C. Brodrick, The Reform of the English Land System (London, 1883);
J. Kay, Free Trade in Land (2nd edn, London, 1879);
A. Arnold, Free Land (London, 1880);
E. Spring, ‘Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England’, American Journal of Legal History, 21 (1977), 56–7.
C. S. Orwin and W. F. Darke, Back to the Land (London, 1935), pp. 22–3, 28.
I. Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906–1914 (Woodbridge, 2001).
Land Law Reform Association, Nineteenth Annual meeting (London, 1906), p. 9.
For example, F. A. Channing, Memories of Midland Politics, 1885–1910 (London, 1918), p. 362;
Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, Times, 22 April 1907, p. 18.
Cf. H. Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), 8–33.
See, for example, H. Allingham and S. Dick, The Cottage Homes of England (London, 1909);
M. B. Huish and H. Allingham, Happy England (London, 1903);
H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster (London, 1986 [1906]), esp. pp. 132–3;
P. Readman, ‘The Role of Land and Landscape in English Cultural and Politic Debate, c. 1880–1914’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2002), pp. 25–6, 185–90.
G. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (London, 1907);
J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (London, 1911);
W. Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (London, 1908).
Carrington, preface to C. Grant, The Small Holdings and Allotment Handbook (Bristol, 1908), pp. vi–vii.
Liberal Publication Department, The case for Dissolution: A Speech Delivered by the Right Hon. Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman (London, 1905), p. 12.
For example, M. Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886–1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), esp. pp. 49–51.
P. Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 112–34.
E. F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community (Cambridge, 1996).
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Readman, P. (2010). The Edwardian Land Question. In: Cragoe, M., Readman, P. (eds) The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248472_11
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