Nation & Landscape, 1840-1920

Nation & Landscape, 1840- 1920.

by Simon Grimble

Roger Ebbatson. An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. vii + 232 pp. $89.95

THIS IS a timely book on an important theme, but one whose claim on our attention is undermined by problems with its construction and its writing style. Ebbatson's aim is to describe the development of the notion of Englishness from 1840 to 1920 in relation to the representation of landscape in literature, arguing that, rather than each embodying, as we might suppose, both a settled identity and"a sense of national continuity," they instead exhibit symptoms of hybridity and displacement, alongside their general aspiration to a secure feeling of belonging. He argues his case by examining a series of texts, by authors as various as Alfred Tennyson and his brother, Charles Tennyson Turner, as well as Thomas Hardy, the rural essayist and novelist, Richard Jefferies, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence. Ebbatson's stated concern is to use "a group of marginalised texts by canonical authors" as well as a group of texts by noncanonical writers to "enable Englishness to be conceptualised as a type of 'border study,'" where these texts can be "read and theorised in terms of a transcultural dialogue between dominant and resistant voices." Ebbatson uses the insights of contemporary cultural theory, especially postcolonial theory, to reconsider these works, showing how Englishness was in fact shaped by a relationship between what was thought of as the centre--of England, of "home"--and what was on the periphery or margin of the empire or of the self.

There is a clear merit in Ebbatson's approach: national identity always, necessarily, functions in a comparative way, and so any discussion about Englishness calls into question the other places, people or literary works that it is not, directly, talking about. In particular, the self-conscious kind of Englishness that developed in some parts of late-nineteenth-century literary culture clearly did so in relation to those other places: to European countries like Germany which seemed more adept at marshalling a public-minded and patriotic spirit; to a United States that, despite its divisions, seemed to still be associated with the positive implications of a progressive, western movement; and to those places at the margins of the British empire from which many fictional heroes returned, either confirmed and strengthened in their masculinity, or given a new, troubled awareness of the primitive in the world, or even in themselves. Such awareness was reflected in the ways that English landscapes were described in the literature of the period: they often take on a new kind of privacy or inwardness, as shown in the new interest in a domesticated "south country," with its occluded spaces, like the hidden path that is the real "heart of England," in Edward Thomas's phrase, "because nobody owns it and nobody uses it." The difficulty with An Imaginary England is that it tends to revolve these concerns rather than really addressing them, despite the fact that it contains many interesting and sometimes fascinating insights in passing. Ebbatson begins his preface by noting that "this study has been a long time gestating," and it does seem that the book is the expression of a constellation of long-held interests rather than the working out of a continuous argument. An aspect of this is the comparative lack of detailed historical context about the worlds in which these texts circulated, even though Ebbatson commits himself to a "fundamentally materialist or historicist" critique; instead, the worlds of the texts examined are placed alongside the words of recent critics and theorists--without any recourse to, say, description of how these works were received when first published-- a method which tends to have a flattening effect on the literary and cultural history that he is trying to illuminate.

Furthermore, there is often a kind of unevenness in Ebbatson's treatment of these figures, which seems to be the product of slightly confused political impulses. In his introduction he states, boldly, that "An Imaginary England seeks to unmask some of the ideological aspects of landscape representation, reading against the grain to reveal the gender, race and class implications that haunt the political unconscious of my chosen texts." However, this is in fact only partially the case: Ebbatson reads "against the grain" when dealing with authors with whom he has no clear sympathy and whose works are susceptible to a critical political interpretation, such as Quiller-Couch, but in a more intuitive and less ideological manner when writing about those, such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, with whom he seems to share some measure of identification. This latter point is by no means a criticism: the chapter on Charles Tennyson Turner is a very interesting study of this reclusive poet, but its centre is a series of rather sensitive close readings of Tennyson Turner's modest yet self-possessed sonnets rather than anything that could be described as "unmasking." Instead, Ebbatson is more concerned with describing the development of Tennyson Turner's "individual voice" and even evaluating his achievement; one sonnet is described, very fairly, as "nicely judged." Such tendencies are also demonstrated in the chapter on Thomas, which is full of excellent quotations, even if it exhibits the wider tendency in criticism on Thomas to fall into the same sympathising cadence in thinking of him positioned as the alienated, "superfluous man," only able to find his poetic self after the outbreak of the First World War when his life as a "hack" writer of reviews and travel books was forced to end: in short, to think of him as a victim of certain historical processes rather than as a rather artful creator.

But here, as well, the writing is focused and to the point, whilst in other parts of the books there are various kinds of problems: chapters come to a rapid and unforeseen conclusion, whilst paragraphs are often extended beyond any advisable limits. Passages of clarity and interest are interrupted by sudden dives into opaque theory-speak. The problem for Ebbatson is that there is still apparently a lack of fit between the strand of close reading in his work (perhaps a sign of earlier stages in his intellectual formation) and the desire to integrate recent cultural theory: whilst the former strand maintains a desire to be critical of the texts with which it deals, the latter deals rather uncritically with the theoretical exponents that he draws on. In truth, Ebbatson would on occasion be better off without some of these latter-day authority figures; they can get in the way of both his writing and his argument.

As a whole, An Imaginary England commemorates an important and worthy desire to bring such thinking to bear on what has sometimes been the rather parochial study of "Englishness," but the book would have been better served by either becoming a more focused historical study or a volume that was more frankly essayistic in its intent.

SIMON GRIMBLE

University of Durham