The Country and the City

William’s book uses literature to analyse the polar concepts of Country and City in Great Britain.

He begins by pointing out the different meanings and associations of the two terms:

• Country
  • Nation
  • Land
  • Rural Environment
  • Innocence
• City
  • Capital
  • Civilisation
  • London Trading Environment
  • Worldliness

Perhaps the key point of the book is to look at the persistence of the rural idyll as a notion, well beyond the industrial revolution and imperial phases that between them transformed not just the city but the rural economy as well.

To explore this Williams compares unmediated nature with working agriculture “in which much of nature is produced” (Williams, 1975:5). Nature, as other authors have pointed out, is not a reality but a concept constructed in the mind – despite seeming so overtly “natural”. Williams also notes what Tree described as shifting baseline syndrome in some detail, which he concludes is a problem of perspective when positioning ourselves within a changing landscape (Williams, 1975:18-22) – Wyatt also references this. Williams explores this through nostalgia in literature: “we notice their location in the childhood of their authors” (Williams, 1975:16). References to the pastoral are frequently literary, rather than factual, and can be chased back through time – perhaps in vain hope of a romantic era that never really existed, or if it did has long since vanished to be replaced by a representation of country. The idea of returning to the “traditional” is in fact a reaction to change, especially the development of agrarian capitalism, a response that is more enduring than any exact period to which we could return. The poems that Williams quotes deal in ideas and ideals far more than facts. There is no evidence that life was easy for subsistence farmers.

Williams traces this back to Hesiod in 900BC, and the concept of the Golden Age (where the land provides without the need for farming). He locates the emergence of the literal pastoral with Theocritus in 300BC. At this point the pastoral concept reflected the rhythmic tensions of winter/summer and work/golden age. But the negative aspects were gradually removed to create the idyll.

The pastoral then undergoes a further step away from working reality towards natural beauty. Hence art plays the role of erasing the real with the Golden Age. Looking out from the City, the Country represents an escape from the bustle towards this unrealistic idyll. The counter- pastoral lauded the city life and created an imaginary Arcadia within urban life, and lamented the loss of the rural pastoral. “It is a social order, and a consequent way of seeing, which we are now not likely to forget” (Williams, 1975:48). For Williams makes the point that life on the Country Estate was less idyllic for the average worker. He goes on to propose that, for the lower classes, there is “retrospect as aspiration” (Williams, 1975:59). The primitive community which existed in the Golden Age, where all is shared and the social order is flattened , is then used to look forward to a communist regime (according to the author).

With the development of agrarian capitalism the Country exploits nature and labour (according to the author), which the City intensifies via its role as a market (an original function being as a market to sell produce). Williams discusses how, over time, some of the Estates transfer to City Gentlemen grown wealthy from commerce and/or the support industries such as the Law – however he counters that transfer of land ownership has always occurred (whether by transaction or by force).

Property also transferred by way of marriage, and Williams spends some time analysing this wrt literature since it is a theme of many novels – again, however, it would perhaps be a mistake to romanticise the time before this and try and suggest that previous engagements were made simply for love.

There is nevertheless a focus on the transactional which spells a change in attitude to the land – as an investment requiring return as opposed to an inheritance that is nurtured for the next generation. In fact at the turn of the century, as the Victorian era approaches, intensified land use was viewed very positively and a period of further enclosures, drainage and soil fertility projects began. This “improvement of nature” was also taken up by the Landscape Gardening movement. With hindsight, the negative consequences of intensive use for the land of today are far clearer, and Williams also discusses the social consequences.

TBC

Useful quotes used by Wyatt, from later in Williams:

three meanings to Nature,

the essential quality and character of something;

1. the essential quality and character of something
2. the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both
3. the material world itself taken as including or not including human beings (Williams, 1975:217)

Regarding the final meaning Williams argues this developed during the 18thC, since when:

“Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. The use is especially current in contrasts between town and country: nature is what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago – a hedgerow or a desert – it will usually be included as natural” (Williams, 1975:221-2)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Williams, R. (1975). The Country and the City. London: Vintage (2016 this publication)