74 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
ward the Wake lift s the English lowlands into the higher sphere of romance. But
while Abbott’s satire looks forward to a multi-dimensional and enfranchised
future, Kingsley’s mytholog y appears to look back to a ‘history’ of authentic
Englishness and rugged muscularity.
Th is paean to an imaginary English past – familiar to readers of historical
fi ction as a nationalist trope – may of course align Kingsley with the contem-
porary concerns of Britain’s nineteenth-century imperialists but its elegiac (and
ultimately defeatist) register compromises the extent to which it can be used
as a form of modern propaganda. And, although Kingsley’s re-masculation of
fenland space suggests that a controlled landscape is always coded female – an
image of both cultivation and suppression – it also identifi es heroic masculin-
ity as archaic, the anachronistic feature of another time and place, and hints at
a new freedom of female existence in the low-lying and commercial regions of
Victorian Britain. At a time when the UK Government Environment Agency
- through its Great Fen Project – looks to restore parts of the Fens to a pre-agri-
cultural state, this chapter examines the gender politics of this transformative
landscape and asks whether attempts to recreate the wetlands can ever be
entirely without agenda. It also suggests that Kingsley’s romantic reimaging of
the Fens as a backdrop for his favoured personality type – the muscular Chris-
tian – situates him not only within the context of a wider gender debate but
in direct literary competition with his fi ctional forbear, Sir Walter Scott. Th is
much more personal act of male one-upmanship informs Kingsley’s transfor-
mation of the English Fens and problematizes any straightforward reading of
Hereward the Wake as a portrayal of confi dent masculinity.
Hereward the Wake opens with a scene-setting prelude; this sizeable section,
entitled ‘Of the Fens’, comprises an ethnographic study of medieval Englishness,
a comprehensive genealog y of the novel’s eponymous hero and – signifi cantly
in my view – a robust justifi cation of the tale’s fenland context. Kingsley is, of
course, bound by the realities of Hereward’s history, as far as they can be evi-
denced. Although Hereward’s parentage has never been established conclusively - Kingsley opts for the most aristocratic proposition and presents him as the son
of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva – the outlaw’s association with East
Anglia is documented in all the major sources for his life and death.^4 Most nota-
bly, Hereward fi gures as one of several English rebels besieged on the Isle of Ely
by William the Conqueror in 1071; all the rebels surrendered ‘except Hereward
alone and those who could escape with him, and he led them out valiantly’.^5 Th e
novel follows Hereward’s young manhood; outlawed at his parent’s request for
riotous behaviour, he adventures as a sword for hire across Europe (in many of
the more traditionally romantic and heroic locales: Scotland; Ireland; Cornwall)
before returning home to defend the Fens against the Normans. Kingsley has no
choice but to adopt the Fens as his novel’s principal setting but his employment