Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815-1850.(Review)

by Elizabeth IL Helsinger; pp. x + 290. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, $45.00, [pounds]27.50.

When Emma Woodhouse reads "English verdure, English culture, English comfort" into the view of the Abbey-Mill farm from Donwell Abbey, she is appropriating a rural scene for a national idea. Emma was written in 1814-15, and Jane Austen's chauvinism is francophobic in part. After Austen, in the turbulent period of rural unrest between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition, English writers and artists sought to possess, define, and debate ideas of England through competing representations of the countryside. As local scenes were destroyed or left behind for urban or imperial homes, compensatory. images of the countryside took on powerfully nostalgic meanings. Such images were portable, in the form of books or prints; they were often consoling, occasionally disturbing, and seldom innocent of ideology. How the local became the national, how landscape became "nature," and how the landed ownership of real property became the middle-class ownership of representations - these are Elizabeth Helsinger's concerns in this densely argued and deeply informed study. She examines John …