This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

In his Journal of a West India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis documented numerous encounters with the people he enslaved. Guided by Wedderburn’s argument that the provision grounds must be guarded “above all” for Black liberation, this chapter argues that tensions over provision grounds permeated Lewis’s encounters. After granting an additional day per week on the provision grounds as “a matter of right,” Lewis documented that enslaved people were growing poisons, unleashing fires, harboring crowds of destructive livestock, and providing sustenance for self-liberated Black people. Despite noticing these dangers, Lewis wrote to William Wilberforce detailing a plan for emancipating the people he enslaved by giving them his plantation, a proposal feared to be “dangerous to the island.” Lewis’s Journal recorded that his plantations were undermined, not by overt rebellion, but rather by the success of the Black ecological project: The botanical and animal ecologies of the provision grounds were anticipatory abolitionist commons that would be drawn upon in the coming emancipation.

This chapter argues that the provision grounds continued to trouble the Victorian imagination. The radical nature of the provision grounds emerged vividly during and after the abolition of slavery in 1834 when newly freed Black people challenged the plantocracy by staying put on their communal provision grounds. Both antislavery and proslavery writers developed strategies for displacing Black Jamaicans from their land. Abolitionist Joseph Sturge, for example, recommended importing provisions from Haiti to weaken Jamaica’s internal markets and make workers dependent on wages. Thomas Carlyle’s notorious “Discourse” seethed with racist rage focused on “Quashee” surrounded by pumpkins, a synecdoche for independent, agriculturally successful Black people. In Carlyle’s essay, the planter picturesque becomes an abolitionist grotesque of “waste fertility,” an environment of seemingly out-of-control plants and animals swarming around free Black people unwilling to participate in Britain’s wage labor economy. Carlyle’s coinage of “waste fertility” inadvertently illustrated the Black geographies championed by Wedderburn.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

This chapter examineswhat happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead—when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason; however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech.

Chapter 5 focuses on Britain, arguing that Wordsworth represents his native Lake District as a miniature Switzerland in order to appropriate the Swiss myth’s republican energies and to create the simulacrum of an autonomous community in Grasmere. Various texts in verse and prose that Wordsworth composed between 1800 and 1820 respond to the post-revolutionary problem of political sovereignty and the growing demands in Britain for popular rights by developing the comparison between Switzerland and the Lake District, using picturesque conventions to transpose the Alps onto the Lake District. By palimpsestically inscribing his ‘visionary mountain republic’ over his earlier representations of the Alps, and by casting himself as the true representative of the people, Wordsworth can claim a continuity between his past and present self, while at the same time arguing that demands for political reform are a dangerous misrepresentation of the sovereign will.

This chapter examines the Italian translation of Langston Hughes’s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s against the grain of Hughes’s life experience in Italy in the summer of 1924, as evidenced in The Big Sea and the letters written during this time. It argues that the work of translation reflects Italy’s fascist racial thinking, which makes the poet’s Blackness either obscurely picturesque or altogether invisible. Hughes’s own reading of Italy, in turn, makes Blackness historically visible by uncovering the rhetorical illusion that plagued both the conventional view of African American poetic expression as folkloric and the conventional view Italy as idyllic.

The introductory chapter provides geographical contexts and briefly outlines both the history of the search for the Northwest Passage and the Franklin expedition. It gives an overview of the searches that ensued for the missing expedition over twelve years and emphasises the centrality of visuality and the importance of skills like drawing to shipboard life, as well as highlighting the gaps in the literature that this book will fill, in particular the neglect of rich primary-source visual material (such as on-the-spot sketches and watercolours) as a key source of information and evidence. It notes, too, the sparseness of scholarly work addressing this period of Arctic exploration history and the absence of detailed visual analyses of documentary art from the Arctic. This chapter introduces the key debates in the study of exploration literature, Victorian visuality, and historical geography. These include the gendered space of polar exploration, the imperial gaze, and theories of space and place. It looks too at how visual evidence can be seen as layers of representation, with each response departing further from the original sketch.

The Gypsy is one of the most prominent vagrant figures in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and has received a considerable amount of critical attention. This chapter situates the Gypsy alongside other rural itinerants, such as hawkers and handicraft tramps, in order to address how racial and aesthetic assumptions conditioned the representation of Gypsies in British print culture. Focusing on the period 1830–60, this chapter first examines how a legacy of picturesque representation combined with more recent theories of extinction, and how these were combined in periodical articles that depicted the Gypsies as a ‘vanishing race’. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of George Borrow’s autobiography Lavengro (1851) and its sequel The Romany Rye (1857). Here I argue that while Borrow reiterated racial interpretations of English Gypsies, he actively critiqued the picturesque tradition that sought to idealise them and other rural itinerants in Britain. Alongside Borrow, this chapter examines works by George Eliot and Mary Russell Mitford.

This chapter explains the book's main argument, establishing why Scott needs to be re-assessed and read as an environmental writer. An identification of the types of environment explored in the ensuing chapters is accompanied by a summary of ecocritical theories that shape the arguments. The concept of land ethics is considered at the outset, to show how Scott anticipated that twentieth-century term introduced by American environmentalist Aldo Leopold. The chapter revises more usual readings of Scott’s work to show how he challenged rather than conformed to conventional picturesque understandings of landscape and rural environments. Explorations of the relationships between cities and rural Scotland show how Scott addressed the division between town and country, including his involvement with the energy (oil and coal gas) industry. Examples are taken from Scott's collected ballads, original poetry, fiction and personal writing as well as from his lifelong activity in land management and environmental stewardship.

This chapter analyzes novels set in gentrifying US neighborhoods to propose that the novel’s complex, dialogic system offers opportunities for exploring the negotiations between structure and individual agency that precipitate processes of gentrification. Adept as the novel is at representing a diverse range of subjectivities and interpersonal relations, stories of gentrification must also show how subjecthood is molded by larger historical, political, and economic forces. The texts are read through close attention to genre, treated neither as a taxonomy of fixed structures nor a concept so anarchic as to be practically non-existent, but as a form of textuality emerging through negotiations between communities comprised of individual genre consumers with specific preferences, and the industries producing texts for consumption. Thus, genre is a useful lens for exploring similar interactions between structure and agency underlying gentrification. There is no single genre of gentrification novel. Rather, the best examples bring genres and modes such as the frontier story and the picturesque into collision or merger in order to show gentrification’s effects on different communities.

Enslaved mothers appear as pastoral figures within depictions of the Caribbean plantation as an imagined idyll in the works of George Robertson and James Hakewill. Yet planters’ journals and histories also emphasize the need for the productive and reproductive labour of enslaved women. This essay examines Caribbean images of enslaved women and their children to trace the ‘past in the present’ (Christina Sharpe) as slavery’s legacies persist in the US. Black women in the US are 243 per cent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white women and black babies are twice as likely to die in their first year as white babies. By analysing the range of incompatible discourses that constructed and consumed the slave mother’s body in early Caribbean slavery, this essay exposes the persistence of such devastating discursive forces in the present that have real impacts on the lives of black mothers and their children.

My essay utilizes a comparative interdisciplinary approach to read William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) alongside paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by George Robertson. The essay considers how Caribbean people see their landscape, but more crucially how that seeing has been shaped by visual and scribal pre-texts. As Helen Tiffin argues, Caribbean people’s relation to their landscape is linked ‘with histories of transplantation, slavery and colonialism’ but also with our assimilation of ‘imported European traditions of land and landscape perception and representation’. How we see the Caribbean landscape now is largely determined by earlier ways of seeing which constructed tropical colonies. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I argue that ‘imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics’ in Beckford’s text are reinforced by the images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.

Picturesque theorists disagree vehemently over whether the picturesque deformity that can be appreciated in buildings and landscapes could also be appreciated in people with deformities, be these people real or represented. William Gilpin writes about ruins and people in ways that suggest that they possess the same aesthetic value. Fitness for representation is Gilpin’s criterion for a certain type of aesthetic appreciation, and, using this criterion, he regards picturesque deformity in a positive light. Uvedale Price, however, offers the idea that beauty, the picturesque, and deformity exist on a continuum, making deformity a question of degree. The quality of being striking enables Price to think of people and things as giving aesthetic pleasure in the same way. Drawing on Addison’s aesthetics, Richard Payne Knight makes a distinction between real and represented deformity. Knight argues, like Percy Shelley, that art has a transformative power that makes deformity aesthetically pleasing. The picturesque theorists are concerned with reconciling deformity (as a quality of the picturesque) with the aesthetic pleasure that derives from it.

Chapter 1 considers Austen’s interest in novelistic length, as articulated in her early writing, especially in ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s early fiction returns repeatedly to the subjects of fictional length and organization, often with reference to history writing. The chapter goes on to consider the genesis of Pride and Prejudice and the “contractions” that Cassandra Austen remembered her sister having made. Austen’s interest in narrative organization resonates with contemporary critical writing on the novel, especially the criticism of Anna Barbauld who evoked picturesque theory in describing successful narrative construction.