76 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Walter Scott’s early nineteenth-century Waverley novels, set predominantly
in Scotland, cemented the highland hold on the romantic imagination. His fi rst,
Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), exposes its English protagonist to the
sublime Scottish uplands and their insurgent clans in the wake of the 1745 Jaco-
bite uprising. Th e popular novelist’s own juxtaposition of highland and lowland
within Scottish historical geography identifi es the former as an imaginatively
dominant if peripheral and, in due course, doomed space. Lowland contexts –
in Waverley represented by both England and the Hanoverian strongholds of
Scotland – signal centralization, civilization and progress. As Saree Makdisi has
noted, ‘coextensive with the overarching spatial opposition between Highlands
and Lowlands is an overarching temporal opposition between past and present’.^10
Kingsley’s adoption, over fi ft y years later, of a romantic discourse for a specifi cally
lowland setting would seem to run counter to Scott’s underscoring of an enlight-
ened, modern and low-lying future. But in East Anglia, if not in Scotland, the
temporal opposition between past and present is played out in the same spatial
environment. Scott’s historicism, with a few medieval exceptions (Ivanhoe being
the most prominent), is primarily early modern; in most cases, as the subtitle to
Waverley – ’Tis Sixty Years Since – suggests, he is reanimating the history of liv-
ing memory. But the passage of time between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and
the publication of Hereward the Wake exactly 800 years later – and the radical
transformation of the East Anglian terrain – allow Kingsley to romanticize the
pre-drainage Fens and set their heroic spirit against the commercial enterprise
and conformist character of the Victorian lowlands.^11
Th e Fens are a distinct region of East Anglia and the East Midlands encom-
passing areas of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suff olk. Th e natural
terrain of the Fens is nutrient-rich marshland, close to sea level. Th ese fresh- or
salt-water wetlands have been drained intermittently since Roman settlement in
the area – by the digging of drains and the use of primitive hydraulics – but it was
in the seventeenth century that concerted eff orts were made to drain the Fens
and make them fi t for intensive arable farming. Famously, Cornelius Vermuyden
brought Dutch land reclamation methods to England in the 1620s although the
failure of the Dutchman and many others to recognize the delicate ecolog y of
the Fens – and that the drying of the earth would cause peat to shrink, lower-
ing the land further below sea level – resulted in an increased vulnerability to
fl ooding by the end of the seventeenth century. In the early nineteenth century,
steam drainage engines replaced the wind pumps previously used to divert water
and prevent fl ooding , alleviating the problems caused by the drop in land levels.
With a drainage system to harness its natural verdancy, the Fens currently con-
tain roughly half of the grade 1 agricultural land in England. Charles Kingsley
recognizes the Fens’ commercial signifi cance – ‘lowlands of a fertility inexhaust-
ible’ – but also the poetic losses sustained in the transformation of the landscape: