ChapTer seven
New roles for nature
introduction
The fate of England’s wildlife in the later eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries cannot be understood entirely in terms of the direct impacts of
industrialization and agricultural ‘improvement’. We need also to consider a
number of related social developments. In particular, more people than ever
before now lived without any direct involvement in the business of farming,
or any practical engagement with the countryside. Large numbers of workers
were employed in industry; an industrializing economy required engineers,
accountants, surveyors, bankers, as well as factory workers, while the larger
and more centralized state which emerged from the late seventeenth century
needed a standing army, and a growing cohort of administrators and tax
collectors. This new body of town-dwellers required more shops, inns and
other facilities than rural ones. In short, the population became steadily
more urban, and less rural, in character.
Of particular importance were the lifestyles enjoyed by the upper
tiers of society, their interests and attitudes. Members of the established
landed elite were fully involved in industrial and colonial expansion and
in the eighteenth century forged social links with the upper echelons
of the expanding middle classes, the two groups coalescing into a single
‘polite society’ with shared fashions, tastes and norms.^1 Subsequently, as
industrialization gathered pace in the nineteenth century, the middle class
as a whole became more economically, culturally and – in time – politically
important. But throughout the period most members of these dominant
groups shared a similar range of views regarding the ‘natural world’. They
possessed, in particular, a tendency – present to some extent in the seventeenth
century but now more prominent in public discourse – to conflate, or at
least to confuse, ‘nature’ and ‘the countryside’, to see the rural landscape as