Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914.(Book review)

Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914, by Paul Readman; pp. x + 242. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2008, 50.00 [pounds sterling], $95.00.

At least since Martin Wiener's assertion in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981) that by the 1850s rural life was seen as the true moral center of the English nation, it has been a scholarly commonplace that representations of the English countryside were conservative and backward looking, part of a symbolic formation allowing the English to block from consciousness the problems of urban industrialization and the wider British Empire. Paul Readman's ambitious and exacting study puts this thesis to the test. Looking to the surprisingly neglected debates surrounding land reform in the two decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, Readman unearths late-Victorian and Edwardian visions of English rural life that were central to national character but not fundamentally conservative and escapist. Instead, land reformers saw the English land as crucial to the preservation of a national character that was …