Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

80 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

can be imaginatively reclaimed. Th e tale’s central section takes place in northern
France. Close to the Low Countries, this is a landscape that the exiled Hereward
recognizes: ‘Hereward was silent. It was so like his own native fens’.^27 Hereward
responds instinctively and nostalgically to this redolent landscape. But his future
wife, the Provençal Torfrida, has no such connection to the levelled landscape.
Her only means of elevating such a space is via her imaginative faculties:

So Torfrida beguiled her lonely life in that dull town, looking out over dreary fl ats

and muddy dykes, by a whole dream-world of fantastic imaginations, and was ripe

and ready for any wild deed which her wild brain might suggest.^28

Like Torfrida, Kingsley sees imagination as the key to romanticizing the novel’s
fl atlands. Unlike Scott, who is fortunate in inhabiting an already sublime rural
landscape, Kingsley must poeticize the Fens. Th e distinction Kingsley makes
between the two authors establishes a useful paradigm; it promotes Kingsley’s
literary achievement while diminishing Scott’s. But it also acknowledges the
extent to which Kingsley situates his novel in the shadow (or glow) of Scott’s
achievement.
Th e problem that Kingsley immediately encounters in challenging Scott is
one of literary precedent. In characterizing the Victorian Fens as unromantic,
the novelist takes advantage of the easy alignment of low-lying ground, moral
turpitude and the binary imagery of fl at/raised. Consider this description of the
modern lowlander:

He has little or nothing around him to refi ne or lift up his soul, and unless he meet

with a religion and with a civilization which can deliver him, he may sink into that dull

brutality which is too common amongst the lowest classes of the English lowlands.^29

As Kingsley suggests here in his use of the word ‘lift ’, the inevitable romantic coun-
ter to a literary alignment of low-lying ground and moral turpitude is the equation
of higher ground and moral elevation. Reverting to the medieval Fens, Kingsley
begins to apply the romantic rhetoric of the highlands to his lowland setting. Like
the heroes of Scott’s fi ction, standing out in ‘vivid relief ’, Kingsley’s lowlanders
are raised from the page.^30 Hereward – in addition to cutting a particularly mus-
cular fi gure – is imaged in the likeness of a Scottish noble. In his wilder youth,
Hereward makes mischief with his men-at-arms: ‘To keep a following of stout
housecarles, or men-at-arms, was the pride as well as the duty of an Anglo-Danish
lord, as it was, till lately, of a Scoto-Danish highland laird’.^31 Hereward’s household
resembles that of a highland aristocrat – one of his messengers later appears in a
‘kilt’ – but his physical appearance is even more suggestive:

His face was of extraordinary beauty, save that the lower jaw was too long and heavy,

and that his eyes wore a strange and almost sinister expression, from the fact that the

one of them was gray and the other blue. He was short, but of immense breadth of