Aims
This course aims to:
- give you a richer understanding of the practical realities of rural husbandry in the 18th century
- equip you to explore the place of the countryside in the 18th-century English imagination
- reveal a pre-Romantic vision of countryside and country living before the era of the Lakes poets and Nature worship
Content
This five-day course explores ideas surrounding the countryside and country living as well as the practical realities of rural husbandry in the 18th century. Never the quaint, unchanging idyll of sentimental recollection, the countryside in the 18th century was in fact home to a vibrant and complex society: economically dynamic, culturally rich, and imaginatively contested. ‘Countryside and Country Living in the 18th Century’ aims to reconstruct this world.
Presentation of the course
This course will be taught across five seminars. Each seminar will pursue a different aspect of the period’s history, and will involve a mixture of lecture, class discussion and group activity. The style of the seminars is informal, friendly and relaxed, and questions are actively encouraged at all stages!
Course sessions
- Country society: order and change
- Rural customs and folklore
- Time and timekeeping in the English shires
- Nature stewardship: theory and practice
- Capitalistic farming and the wealth of nations
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
- to deepen your knowledge of life in the English countryside in the 18th century
- to reveal the ways in which the countryside and country living figured in the
18th-century imagination
- to see the world of the English countryside through eyes other than the Romantics’
and Sentimentalists’
Required reading
Please read at least one of the following three items before the course:
Mingay, G, E, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Paul, 1963)
Neeson, J, M, Commoners: Common Rights, Enclosure and Social Change in England,
1700-1820 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993)
Overton, M, Agricultural Revolution in England 1500-1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996)
