84 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
rowings in a manner that inevitably undermines it. Historians and historicists
have recognized Kingsley’s vacillation in weighing the respective advantages and
disadvantages of Saxon/Danish and Norman culture, but only a close analysis of
his literary behaviour reveals his unfashionable leaning towards the latter and his
experimental appropriation of Scott’s highland romanticism. Georg Lukács has
suggested that Walter Scott
was able to portray objectively the ruination of past social formations, despite all his
human sympathy for, and artistic sensitivity, to the splendid, heroic qualities which they
contained. Objectively, in a large historical and artistic sense; he saw at one and the
same time their outstanding qualities and the historical necessity of their decline.^43Charles Kingsley – omitted by Lukács in his seminal study of the historical novel
- would seem to share Scott’s pragmatism but his playful imitation of Scott’s style
pushes this pragmatism towards cynicism or at least towards an acknowledgement
of the historical novel’s antiquated form, a tag it has found diffi cult to shift since.
Kingsley is not, then, the victim of Scott’s popularity, forced into using an
alien language in order to compete. Th at’s not to say he doesn’t compete with
his fi ctional rival but it is a literary face-off in which Kingsley sidesteps the main
argument and, instead of meeting Scott on his own terms, produces a metanarra-
tive from the traces of Scott’s highland writing. Exploiting echoes also from the
mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon championing works of Bulwer-Lytton
and Disraeli, the eff ect of this imitatio is to discredit both the Gaelic affi liations
of Scott and the Germanic leanings of English historical novelists. Against Kin-
sley’s best anti-Catholic intentions, he ends up siding with the Normans. In the
fi nal analysis, the ‘muscular’ in Kingsley’s muscular Christian is no longer neces-
sary. Th e novelist instead opts for Richard de Rulos’s administrative competencies
and, signifi cantly, his relationship of (near) equality with his wife. Historically,
the Fens were by no means drained by the twelft h century but it is important to
Kingsley’s narrative that the fl atlands are civilized by the novel’s end. Although
traditional feminism might assume that this cultivation of the landscape repre-
sents the taming of a wild and feminine nature by a male hand – and Richard’s
pacifi cation of his fi ery wife would support this – Kingsley suggests instead that
drainage allowed women to fi nally enter the Fens and contribute fully to the
region’s development. And, as the latter Torfrida’s contribution to the monu-
ments of her grandfather, grandmother and husband suggests, women are also
fully involved in an even-handed historicization of the region, one that acknowl-
edges both old and new, wetland and fen farmland, romance and civilization.
Th e Great Fen Project in Cambridgeshire – the UK Government Environ-
ment Agency’s current eff ort to restore the wetlands of East Anglia – is one of
the largest habitat restoration projects in Europe and aims to create a 3,700 hec-
tare landscape to sustain Fen wildlife and expand the region’s green space. Th e