(^116) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
something almost independent of human activity. Vicesimus Knox in 1779
typically described the ‘natural delights of rural scenery’; William Cowper
in 1785 more famously asserted that ‘God made the country and man made
the town’.^2 Landscapes became objectified: their appearance and visual
qualities were discussed and celebrated in a manner that effectively divorced
them from the processes of their creation. The countryside became a fitting
subject for painting; rural landscapes were described in painterly terms;
while the grounds of mansions might, under the supervision of designers
like William Kent in the 1730s and 40s, be composed like the paintings of
Claude Lorraine, with a carefully contrived foreground, middle ground and
distance. But concepts were shifting and uncertain, and in the 1750s and 60s,
under Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and his contemporaries, extensive tracts
of ground around country houses were shaped along supposedly ‘natural’
lines which consciously rejected many of the characteristics of normal
rural scenery, such as farms and cornfields, comprising instead sweeping
panoramas of grazed turf, woods and scattered trees, free of obvious human
activity, agrarian or otherwise. The words employed by critics of Brown’s
style betray further confusion, William Chambers for example asserting
that his parklands ‘differ little from common fields, so closely is common
nature copied in most of them’.^3 Towards the end of the century, and into
the nineteenth, there were further developments. ‘Picturesque’ writers like
Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight advocated, as Kent had done before
them, that landscapes should be designed in the form of paintings, while
tourists equipped with the Rev Gilpin’s guide books sought out the correct
places from which to view a series of rural prospects.^4 Such people favoured
more rugged terrain, as opposed to gently pastoral scenery, although in
both the design and the appreciation of landscape the ‘picturesque’ was also
about variety and detail.^5 Beauty could be found in the lowlands as much
as the uplands: in the rutted lane with high hedgebanks, where ‘The winter
torrents, in some places wash down the mould from the upper grounds and
form projections... with the most luxuriant vegetation; in other parts they
tear the banks into deep hollows, discovering the different strata of earth,
and the shaggy roots of trees’.^6 People in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries thus discussed and appreciated landscapes as never before, and to
varying extents considered the countryside as something essentially ‘natural’
in character. More importantly, they were able to impose their ideas on the
environment in an unprecedented way. In spite of escalating demands for
food, more and more of the land surface came to be managed for aesthetics
and recreation. There were two main aspects to this.
First, towns and cities increased in scale and began to exhibit a measure
of social zoning. Areas occupied by the homes of the ‘polite’ contrasted with
central districts increasingly given over to trade and manufacture and, in
the case of the larger examples, overcrowded slums.^7 In such working-class
districts, conditions were often unsanitary, with closely packed houses and
unpaved streets. But in the more salubrious suburbs, gardens filled with
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