78 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
and Africa used romance as both justifi cation and mystifi cation. Other thinkers
concentrate on the class identity of Kingsley’s Anglo-Vikings and the novelist’s
vexed relationship to the Chartist movement and other working-class reform-
ists.^17 Th e tendency Kingsley describes in modern lowlanders towards secularism
and a ‘dull brutality’ warns readers against the dangers of working-class enfran-
chisement and the prospect of genuine devolution.^18 Th e fen dweller, unlike his
highland counterpart, is able to conquer nature by ‘clearing , delving , dyking ,
building’; in knowing no greater force than himself, he rejects religion: ‘With
the awe of Nature, the awe of the unseen dies out in him. Meeting with no visible
superior, he is apt to become, not merely unpoetical and irreverent, but some-
what of a sensualist and an atheist’.^19 Kingsley fears the brute masculinity of the
nineteenth-century working classes. His masculation in Hereward the Wake of
their medieval ancestors is carefully delineated to sidestep a version of manliness
that is unromantic, godless and potentially revolutionary.
But in addition to refl ecting Kingsley’s political affi liations, ethnic prefer-
ences and gender assumptions, romanticizing the Fens also serves his literary
agenda. As well as supporting the burgeoning heritage industry, Kingsley’s
fenland fable wrests literary control from the overwhelmingly popular Scott
and complicates the tension that the earlier novelist had established between
highland and lowland environments.^20 Hereward the Wake – in identifying the
Fens as a romantic space capable of competing with the highlands – captures
the particularity of the lowlands and their peculiar attractions: ‘beauty as of the
sea, of boundless expanse and freedom’.^21 Herbert Butterfi eld has spoken of the
‘devotion to locality’ in the historical novel and, in Hereward the Wake, the fl at-
lands off er a very specifi c vista, a unique spectacle, in fact: ‘Overhead the arch of
heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and that vastness
gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen
nowhere else within these isles’.^22 In these descriptions of the Fens’ specifi city as
a landscape, Kingsley asserts himself as a genuine threat to Scott’s dominance
and the authority of the highlands as the preeminent romantic space. But it
is a distinction that he fails to maintain. Kingsley’s eff orts to romanticize and
indeed masculate a regional environment with no established literary identity
fall short and he is forced to appropriate Scott’s highland discourse – the very
rhetoric he has set himself against – in order to complete the transformation of
the Fens into an appropriate environment. In doing so, Kingsley undermines any
political undercurrents his novel may have – he was a strong advocate for social
reform from a Christian Socialist perspective – and reverts to generic state-
ments of romantic intent. Scott himself recognized, with regret, the process by
which romance as a genre depoliticizes space. Ian Duncan, describing Wa v e r l e y’s
counterintuitive preservation of its banal English hero while its highlanders are
executed for treason, explains that, in Scott’s romantic framework, ‘once Jacobit-