Katey Castellano (Auth.) - The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837 (2013, Palgrave Macmillan UK)

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Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
The Ecology of British
Romantic Conservatism,
1790–1837
Katey Castellano
Associate Professor, James Madison University, USA
Palgrave
macmillan
© Katey Castellano 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-35419-8
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Conservatism and the Intergenerational

Imagination 1
Part I Imagination
1 Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France 15
2 “Their graves are green”: Conservation in
Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Ballads 37
Part II Habitation
3 Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds and
the Politics of the Miniature 65
4 Conservation or Catastrophe: Reflexive
Regionalism in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Tales 91
5 Subsistence as Resistance: William Cobbett’s
Food Politics 113
6 Anthropomorphism and the Critique of Liberal
Rights in John Clare’s Enclosure Elegies 141
Epilogue 163
Notes 169
Bibliography 197
Index 211
v
List of Figures
3.1 “The Newcastle Arms on a Boundary Stone,”

engraving for the title page of the History of British Birds:
Land Birds (1797). Courtesy of the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania 75
3.2 “Winnowing Corn in a Farmyard,” engraving from the
introduction to History of British Birds: Land Birds (1797).
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
University of Pennsylvania 77
3.3 “The Beggar and his Dog at the Rich Man’s Gate,”
tailpiece engraving from History of British Birds: Water
Birds (1804). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, University of Pennsylvania 81
3.4 Tailpiece engraving from History of British Birds: Water
Birds (1804). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, University of Pennsylvania 88
vi
Acknowledgements
Many people and institutions have provided assistance and encour-

agement during the development and writing of this book. My interest
in Romantic conservatism began during my graduate studies at Duke
University. I owe a great debt to my dissertation advisor, Thomas Pfau,
who challenged me to pursue my intellectual interests in conserva-
tism. Thanks are also due to Rob Mitchell, who encouraged my early
ideas about the environmental implications of conservatism. Other
faculty and fellow students at Duke supported my work and sharpened
my thinking: Monique Allewaert, Ian Baucom, Max Brzezinski, Nihad
Farooq, Cara Hersh, and Susan Thorne. My dissertation focused on
the aesthetics of Romantic conservatism. This book is a new project
that was written during my years at James Madison University, where
colleagues supported my research by reading chapter drafts and offer-
ing encouragement and knowledgeable guidance: Dabney Bankert,
Dawn Goode, Laura Lewis, Chris Morris, Mark Parker, and Siân White
have my gratitude. Thanks are also due to the generous community of
scholars at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
and the International Conference on Romanticism, where I presented
drafts of several chapters. In particular I am indebted to the intellectual
generosity and acumen of Ron Broglio, David L. Clark, David Collings,
Allison Dushane, Elizabeth Fay, Michael Gamer, Noah Heringman,
Scott Hess, Kevin Hutchings, Nick Mason, and Scott McEathron.
Ghislaine McDayter, John Rickard, and Harold Schweizer offered
insightful suggestions after a presentation at Bucknell University.
For their guidance in shaping the book, I thank the editors of
Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Cultures
of Print, Anne Mellor and Clifford Siskin. The detailed, thoughtful
suggestions of the anonymous reviewers made this a more coherent,
carefully argued book. Many thanks are also due to commissioning
editor Ben Doyle and his assistant Sophie Ainscough for their patient
direction through the publishing process. John Pollack, Lynne
Farrington, and Elton Torres at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
University of Pennsylvania assisted with my research. The engravings
from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds appear in this book due
vii
viii Acknowledgements
to their assistance and kind permission. Research materials were also

provided by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Duke University, and the Albert and Shirley Small Special
Collections Library, University of Virginia. I am most grateful to the
librarians at James Madison University’s Carrier Library, who tire-
lessly facilitated my access to research materials. Without the support
of Pete Bsumek, I would have been unable to complete this project;
his criticism of the chapters sharpened the arguments, and the inter-
generational optimism that stirs his activism inspires me.
Portions of the material in the introduction and first and second

chapters originally appeared in “Romantic Conservation in Burke,
Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry,” SubStance #125, 40.2 (2011): 73–91.
© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Excerpts are reproduced courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press.
List of Abbreviations
A Edgeworth, The Absentee

BB1 Bewick, History of British Birds: Land Birds, vol. 1
BB2 Bewick, History of British Birds: Water Birds, vol. 2
BH Clare, By Himself
CE Cobbett, Cottage Economy
CR Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent
E Edgeworth, Ennui
HQ Bewick, History of Quadrupeds
LB Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
M Bewick, Memoir
O Edgeworth, Ormond
PW Wordsworth, Prose Works
R Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
SW Hazlitt, Selected Writing
TPR Paine, The Paine Reader
ix
Introduction
Conservatism and the Intergenerational
Imagination
An astute reader of Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt recognized that

within Burke’s conservatism lurked an anti-capitalist social ecology:
he writes, “To think of reducing all mankind to the same insipid
level, seemed to him [Burke] the same absurdity as to destroy the
inequalities of surface in a country, for the benefit of agriculture
and commerce.” As much as he was opposed to the hierarchical and
nationalist aspects of Burke’s work, Hazlitt admires his critique of
competitive individualism, particularly the ways in which it reveals
how the scramble for privatization, improvement, and profit will
irrevocably erode diverse, communal, social ecologies. Like Hazlitt,
in my reading of Burkean conservatism, “I do not say that his argu-
ments are conclusive; but they are profound and true, as far as they
go” (SW 56). This book argues that Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790) is the beginning of a strand of Romantic political
conservatism that is committed to environmental conservation.
Romantic conservative critiques of modernity – found in texts as
diverse as poetry, novels, political philosophy, natural history, and
agricultural periodicals – all manifest conservative-conservationist
reactions against the progressive ideology of capitalist modernity. Like
the Reflections, they locate communal futurity in the past by cham-
pioning localized, customary communities and practices that have
been, in Burke’s words, “formed by habit” (R 315). In other words, in
a time period when heated political arguments about land use tacked
between an ethos of conservation and the desire for conquest,1 the
conservative texts taken up in this book all insist that the telos of land
should be more complex than just the production of wealth.
1
2 The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837
The argument that Romantic conservatism and environmental con-

servation emerge together may at first seem counterintuitive, because
in our contemporary political landscape, environmentalism is more
often affiliated with liberalism while conservatism advocates for free-
market capitalism without regard for the environmental consequences.
British Romantic conservatism, however, emerged in reaction against
capitalist modernity every bit as much as its leftist counterpart. Yet,
perhaps because of its contemporary political associations, neither
conservatism’s modern origins nor its aspirations have attracted
anywhere near the same scale of scholarship as has the liberal thought
of the era. Thomas Pfau observes, “The eagerness of contemporary
criticism in the humanities to uncover certain thought-formations
or strategies of writing as conservative – and in doing so presume to
discredit them – leaves the actual nature of conservatism unexamined.”2
As a result of the lack of scholarly attention to the commitments
of a specifically Romantic conservatism, there has been a problematic
misreading of the politics of “green” Romanticism within environ-
mental readings of the period. Critics often take for granted that the
Romantic emphasis on the conservation of land or preservation of
wilderness spaces arises from liberal political commitments. Jonathan
Bate argues, for example, that the Romantic view explores “the
relationship between the Love of Nature and the Love of Mankind
and, conversely, between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Nature.”
Although Bate claims that this environmental awareness finally
“transcends the politics of both Paine and Burke,” his insistence that
the liberal, individualistic “Rights of Man” are the basis for Romantic
environmental thought affirms a largely unchallenged assumption
in both Romanticism and in environmental studies: environmental
awareness and advocacy is tethered to liberal progressivism and its
expanding concept of individual rights.3 In order to revise the prob-
lematic conflation of liberalism and environmentalism in Romantic
studies, I return to the famous political debate that Bate evokes – the
one between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the legitimacy of
individual rights – in order to explore the environmental ethics implicit
in Burke’s conservative position, which is guided by the imagination
of intergenerational responsibility when making decisions about
culture or land.
The field of Romanticism most often represents conservatism by
immediate and pejorative association with the repression of Jacobin
Introduction 3
activities in England or as a forerunner to today’s free-market neo-

conservatism. However, I take my cue from Fredric Jameson, who
has pointed out that “the initial critiques of the nascent world
of capitalism emerge on the Right: in this sense, Edmund Burke’s
seminal assault on Jacobinism can be read, less as a denunciation
of social revolution, than as an anticipatory critique of emergent
bourgeois social life.”4 Romantic Burkean conservatism bears little
resemblance to today’s free-market neo-conservatism, which would
best be understood as an outgrowth of the Victorian Prime Minister
Disraeli’s combination of nationalism, imperialism, and free-market
liberalism.5 Rather than understanding Romantic conservatives as
either unthinkingly defending the status quo or as staunch propo-
nents of industrial capitalism, my claim is that Romantic conserva-
tives view modernity as a threatening break with the past and instead
advocate for an imaginative attachment to both past and future
generations. The conservative intergenerational imagination impels
a substantial environmental ethic that is overlooked by both
Romantic and environmental studies.
Instead of resorting to our contemporary left/right, democratic/
republican political paradigms, or to the often utilized radical/
loyalist binary in Romantic scholarship, I analyze political positions
as falling into liberal individualist and conservative traditionalist
stances. The conservative traditionalist position may then be more
radical – taking the term “radical” to mean a political position that
opposes the hegemony of the capitalist economy and ethos – than
the liberal position of the 1790s, whose interests in “equality” and
“leveling” the playing field were aimed at allowing free-market com-
petition.6 By identifying Romantic social projects that attempt to
reinvest value in reciprocal, customary cultures, I locate a common
social ecology outside the established left/right political paradigm
that brings to light continuities between canonical Romantic
authors who are typically assigned to opposite ends of the political
spectrum, such as Burke and the early Wordsworth.7 The first part of
the book focuses on “imagination” and examines the way in which
Burke and Wordsworth’s intergenerational imagination chronicles
the consequences of modernity and seeks to conserve customary
ways of thinking. Rather than simply idealizing the second nature
of tradition, Burke’s Reflections and Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry
plead, with a nascent environmental ethos, for intergenerational
responsibility and continuity in land use. The second part of the

book investigates “habitation”; or how the conservative intergenera-
tional imagination emerges as localized, embodied engagement with
the land in the work of Romantic regionalist texts, including the
natural histories of Thomas Bewick, the regionalist novels of Maria
Edgeworth, the agricultural periodicals and pamphlets of William
Cobbett, and the elegiac poetry of John Clare. In this light, Romantic
conservatism emerges as a pre-socialist protest against capitalism
and modernity that seeks to embed custom and tradition within the
material environment: burial places, landscapes, gardens, or animals
become tokens of collective cultural identity that might resist
society’s degeneration into competitive bourgeois individualism.
If modernity and the rise of capitalism are characterized by a pro-

gressive vision of knowledge, time, and humanity, then the revi-
talization of an intergenerational moral imagination emerges as a
counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress. The Romantic
conservative texts examined in this book cultivate the imagina-
tion of intergenerational responsibility by forewarning that a world
based on a purely individualistic, competitive economic order would
be bereft of the ethical and civic engagements that hold society
together. Burke decried the “decoupling of public personhood from
those inherited lands and forms of property that tie individuals to
a fixed, traditional community of obligations,” Ian Baucom argues,
because it is the precondition “for the invention of the abstract,
anonymous, mode of personhood.”8 Burke’s Reflections and the other
Romantic conservative texts examined in this book contest what
Charles Taylor identifies as the liberal “punctual individual,” who is
“defined in abstraction from any constitutive concerns.”9 Romantic
conservatism’s intergenerational imagination – in which obligations
to past and future generations determine subjectivity – is against
individualism; it instead insists that humans are always born into
and shaped by pre-existing cultural traditions and local environs. As
Ron Broglio observes about Wordsworth’s poetics, “Identity is not
prior to encounters with the environment but arises from them.”10
By highlighting the social ecology of an entangled, inherited culture
and environment that is constitutive of human identity and behavior,
Romantic conservatism holds up a critical mirror to liberalism: it
contends “that inheritances are in some crucial measure involuntary
Introduction 5
and that they bind us,” or, in other words, “we are always in medias
res,” as Uday Singh Mehta points out.11
Romantic conservatism insists we are always born into a common
culture and environment that is our “second nature.” My argument is
indebted to James K. Chandler, who analyzes Burke and Wordsworth’s
“second nature”: “The work of the traditionalist or anti-ideologue
would then be to make these principles invisible again by redissolving
them back into the continuity of practice. The traditionalist, in other
words, must return ideology to a state of second nature.”12 While
Chandler’s suggestive argument focuses on political implications,
I examine how the practices and habits of “second nature” amount to
repetitive and reciprocal encounters with the more-than-human life
that shares land and culture. In this way, conservative traditionalism
coincides with a conservationist environmental ethic. The conserva-
tive, conservationist ethic then materializes as a form of what Peter
Linebaugh has called “commoning,” the active protection of culture
and land from privatization through communal practices.13 Countering
both the enclosure of the commons and the liberal, negative concep-
tion of rights, Romantic conservatism asserts a demand for a collective
common right to flourish, in which humans, animals, and land emerge
as mutually constitutive communities.
Romantic conservatism’s strange politics, manifesting a radical
critique of capitalism through Burkean traditionalism, can be further
illuminated by David Collings’s argument that Romanticists carefully
attend to “a history of antagonism, one that places modern practices
within the context of those that preceded them, making it possible
to rethink modern society itself from the perspective of its continuity
with what it pretends to have eclipsed and thus to overcome a certain
ethnocentrism of the modern.” Collings crafts a genealogy of Romantic
era “traditionalist radicalism” that “formulated new concepts of tra-
ditional right,” in a vision of revitalized custom and communitas.14
The traditionalist return to and re-creation of what E.P. Thompson
calls “customs in common” attempts to reenact reciprocity between
the wealthy and the poor. In other words, conservatives advocate
not only for submitting to our obligations but also for demanding
affirmative responsibility from others, particularly those in power.
To Collings’s suggestion that conservative traditionalism is a demand
for economic communitas between the wealthy and the poor,
I add that traditionalism in the Romantic period further generates
an intergenerational communitas between the living, the dead, and

those yet to be born. In other words, I argue that by refusing the
idea that social and political mediation exists only between peers,
the hereditary system of conservatism shifts social mediation back to
an intergenerational ethos that imagines moral obligations extend
far beyond the present into both the past and the future.
Romantic conservation becomes a manner of cultivation, then: as cus-
tomary culture is celebrated, its counter-narrative to progress is endowed
with emergent potential. Residual culture, according to Raymond
Williams, is “lived and practiced on the basis of the residue – cultural
as well as social – of some previous social and cultural institution
or formation.” The potential of the residual lies in the way that it
“may have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the domi-
nant culture.”15 Romantic conservative texts suggest that, to borrow
Williams’s terms, the emergent ideology of the monied interest is
colluding with the still dominant power of the landed class. Thus con-
servatives struggle to preserve tokens of residual culture: Wordsworth
invests value in the country graveyard, Bewick considers the lives
of birds as models for traditional behavior, Edgeworth documents
traditional Irish customary rights, Cobbett conserves disappearing
domestic practices such as brewing beer and baking bread, and Clare
imagines fidelity with displaced animals.
By returning to a residual hereditary culture, Romantic conservatism
does not simply look backwards; it also resembles “reflective nostal-
gia,” in which, as Svetlana Boym writes, “The past is not made in the
image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster;
rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological
possibilities of historic development.”16 Romantic conservatism then
manifests the temporality that Paul de Man has noted in Wordsworth’s
poetry, in which, “Seeming to be remembering, to be moving to a
past, he is in fact anticipating a future.” In this way, the conservative
inscription of the past becomes “anticipatory or prefigurative.”17 Not
simply an ideological escape from the alienating aspects of modernity,
the conservation of residual culture through textual inscription holds
open a space for alternative notions of community that are not subject
to the progressive telos of modernity.
The texts explored in this book are not only interested in conserving
residual customs: within conservation also lies the recognition that
bioregional distinctiveness is becoming residual. Donna Landry argues
Introduction 7
that in the eighteenth century, ecological sensibility was located in the

residual values of conservative landowners: “Maintaining a landscape
to admire, walk in, ride, hunt and shoot over meant conservation,
not thoroughgoing exploitation of the land.”18 The conservation of
residual culture then includes environmental conservation. Romantic
conservatism resists the changes accompanying capitalist modernity,
especially social and topographical mobility, because such mobil-
ity entails an accompanying break with environmental habits that
can only persist in stable, intergenerational communities. Burke’s
rage about the French revolution, for example, has as much to do
with the geometric reorganization of the distinctive bioregions of
the French countryside as the overturn of the aristocracy. Romantic
conservationist authors pay special attention to the inseparability
of environmental history and social custom: as Linebaugh argues,
“common rights are embedded in a particular ecology with its local
husbandry.”19 While Romantic conservatism might be dismissed as
pathetic fallacy or Romantic ideology, I nevertheless seek to explore
the way its nascent social ecology asserts that the fate of humans
and their environment are inseparable. Instead of merely projecting
a comforting ideology through their representations of the natural
world, Romantic conservative texts anticipate William Cronon’s
definition of environmental history: “Changes in the way people
create and re-create their livelihood must be analyzed in terms
of changes not only in their social relations but in their ecological
ones as well.”20
An active, reciprocal relationship with the environment through
cultural practices and activities – such as the burial of the dead, grazing
rights, cooking habits, and gardening – becomes the topos of inter-
generational social ecology. The traditions conserved most often are
customary practices, things held in common, and the collective nature
of these practices contests the enclosure, privatization, and atomiza-
tion of land and culture. Conservation of the localized diversity of
practices counters the emerging “cognitive ecology,” which Broglio
contends arose from the universalizing tendency of maps, surveying
instruments, and classification systems for animals.21 While much
attention has been given to the celebration of “place” in Romantic
literature, I explore how practices, customs, and traditions compose
regional social ecologies.22 Romantic conservatism proposes an inter-
generational ethics that imagines human life and activity through
the Burkean humility of a “life-renter” within the continuity of many

generations, and intergenerational cultural practices are techniques of
the body as much as patterns of thought that constitute communal (as
opposed to individualist) identities.
The book begins by exploring the environmental ethics that
emerge in the political debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas
Paine. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke gives
voice to the fear that people involved in the modern commercial
economy are “destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric
of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them,
a ruin instead of an habitation” (R 192). Paine responds that “Every
age and generation must be free to act for itself,” thus arguing that
we should not be bound to past or future generations when mak-
ing decisions about political institutions or land use (TPR 204).
Possessive liberal individualism, in Burke’s view, attenuates our sense
of responsibility for maintaining a healthy environment for future
generations.23 Burke instead proposes a principle of conservation
that requires each generation to understand their relationship to
the land in terms of “habitation,” that is, as something they inherit
and possess only within the continuity of generations. While many
scholars understandably argue that Burke’s emphasis on inheritance
perpetuates structures of social hierarchy, the inheritance of land
further connotes an intergenerational covenant between past,
present, and future generations. Mehta argues that in Burke’s con-
servative thought “emphasis is placed on the imagination as a way
of morally engaging with the world and with the other.”24 While
Mehta is discussing the way that Burke’s anti-colonial stance involves
a moral imagination of other cultures, Burke’s moral imagination
also entails an intergenerational environmental ethic that requires
each generation to value land as a gift from past generations and to
preserve that gift as sign of fidelity to future generations.
Whereas Burke insists tradition and habits will preserve an imagina-
tive connection with the dead and the unborn, Wordsworth selects
the country graveyard as a model of habitual relationship with the
dead in a particular place, so that the conservation of memory and
environment happens simultaneously. The second chapter begins
with an examination of Wordsworth’s “We are Seven,” which portrays
a little girl who insists on the importance of native place through
her attachment to a brother and sister buried in a nearby graveyard.
Introduction 9
The girl’s stubborn devotion finally articulates a rage against the

decomposition of culture and land while stressing the importance
of memorializing past generations. Wordsworth’s dramatization of
the girl’s defense of her “green” churchyard playground serves as an
exemplary “epitaphic ballad” because it extols intergenerational
“prolonged companionship” with the dead, and such companionship
conserves regional, communal identity in the face of rural depopula-
tion. I argue that such fidelity to the dead accounts for Wordsworth’s
larger interest in conservation and memorials, which can be found
in the epitaphic ballads in the Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800) and in his
Essays upon Epitaphs (1810). Critics have argued that Wordsworth’s
epitaphic poetry egotistically anticipates his own death, yet I argue epi-
taphic poetry in the Lyrical Ballads evinces what Raymond Williams
has called “militant particularism,” a stubborn fidelity to particular,
regional communal customs that resists the wider phenomenon
of modernity’s disembedding of regional, intergenerational social
imaginaries. Instead of elegiacally seeking to individualize loss,
Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry reads epitaphs as public monuments
that can transform “individual worth” into “the common benefit
of the living” (PW II.53). In the face of social fragmentation caused
by the enclosure of the commons, agricultural capitalism, and rural
depopulation, Wordsworth takes on the role of the sexton, tending to
and preserving the dead, the poor, and the environment in order to
cultivate a residual culture that ushers in a field of emergent potential.
Wordsworth’s conservative, epitaphic vision is closely tied to the
engravings of plebian conservative Thomas Bewick. In “The Two
Thieves,” Wordsworth declares, “Oh now that the genius of Bewick
were mine / And the skill which He learn’d on the Banks of the
Tyne” (LB 1–2). On the banks of the River Tyne in Newcastle and in
a manner even more militantly regional than Wordsworth, Bewick
seeks to engrave and conserve the customs and common rights of an
existing set of relations in his A History of British Birds (Vol. I, 1797;
Vol. II, 1804). While natural history expanded outward to categorize
all life on the planet, Bewick’s British Birds aimed to conserve instead
an involuted collection of the small, miniature details of provincial
knowledge. The knowledge presented in British Birds is grounded
in Newcastle and evinces a provincial place-based nostalgia. Yet
Bewick’s text also conserves an ecological vision in which the niche
of these birds in their habitat is rendered analogous to the practice of
human culture in its habitus, as in Bourdieu’s sense, an “embod-

ied history, internalized as a second nature.”25 Unlike commoners,
birds are not restrained by the fences of enclosure; whether the land
is privatized or not, they find a place to live and take what materi-
als might be necessary for their nests or meals. Bewick argues that
birds are “the sub-tenants of the cultivated world” and sets up bird
life as a parallel and model for human life in order to encode and
naturalize residual practical tactics. These tactics may be used by the
propertyless to negotiate and even rebel against the emergent notion
of absolute property rights that fueled the enclosure of common land
and the extinction of customary perquisites.
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) also patiently documents
traditional forms of customary perquisites. The novel’s narrative form
performs a particularly reflexive type of regionalism as Thady’s nar-
rative is supplemented and undermined by pages of comparative,
ethnographic editorial notes that provide an Anglo-Irish perspective
on the lower-class Irish. The tension between Thady’s narrative and
the editorial notes mimics what E.P. Thompson has called “gentry-
crowd reciprocity,” wherein “both parties of the equation were, in
some degree, the prisoners of each other.”26 Castle Rackrent’s textual
reciprocity amounts to a way of thinking that engenders a way of liv-
ing in the world, and the reciprocity between the tenant narrator and
Anglo-Irish editor further points to the shared reciprocity between
humans and the estate on which they depend. Edgeworth’s reflexive
regionalism further reveals that the Anglo-Irish estate can easily lapse
into a dangerous social ecology whose default is attritional catastro-
phe. In Castle Rackrent the health of the land, the native Irish, and
the Anglo-Irish landlords are all subject to a process akin to what Rob
Nixon defines as “slow violence,” environmental and social erosion
that emerges slowly over time.27 The overall narrative then points to
the way that only an intergenerational imagination that spans several
generations can apprehend the slow violence being done to land that
is used for profit. Such slow erosion of social and environmental reci-
procity continues to be explored in Edgeworth’s subsequent Irish tales,
Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817). Taken together,
Edgeworth’s four Irish tales repeatedly represent the absentee owner
and excessive consumer debts as immediate threats to a stable social
ecology. Women, Irish tenants, and the estate alike are vulnerable to
the whims of the absentee and/or indebted owner. Thus the gender
Introduction 11
dimension of these novels articulates nascent ecological concerns

about the unintended consequences that arise when property is no
longer conserved as an inhabited estate but is understood as “real
estate,” a commodity untethered from intergenerational care.
The commodification of land is also taken up by William Cobbett,
whose call for subsistence as a form of resistance is explored in the
fifth chapter. Initially published as a series of seven pamphlets for
the rural poor, Cottage Economy (1821) is a food manifesto that aims
to conserve and promote traditional knowledge of basic farming
and subsistence practices, such as making beer, baking bread, keep-
ing livestock, and gardening. Cobbett hopes subsistence practices
and local foods might provide a measure of self-sufficiency from
the wage-labor economy and the vicissitudes of paper money. For
example, Cobbett rails against the shift in British drinking habits
from beer to tea because tea is an imported commodity and therefore
expensive. Tea also did not create revenue for British farmers. Instead
of buying tea, Cobbett provides extensive instructions for brewing
ale at home with local ingredients so as to reduce dependence on
foreign commodities. By ascribing social stability to local farms and
foods, Cobbett prophetically analyzes the political economy of food
with the goal of reducing the public’s dependency on a global agri-
cultural network whose distribution policies neglect the poor.
The last chapter presents a darker view, since John Clare’s enclosure
elegies (1818–1837) represent the end-stage of Romantic conserva-
tism. Clare no longer has the option to slow progress with tradition.
He desires to return to the world of his forefathers but is unable to
find any tangible remnants of that social memory in the irrevocably
damaged commons of his childhood, so Clare’s conservative view
then shifts into a negative critique of liberal rights. Clare’s elegies
claim that liberal, individualist conceptions of rights allow humans
to engage in the predatory privatization and exploitation of the land,
animals, and the poor. Clare’s resistance to enclosure does not call for
inclusion of the poor, and by extension animals and the environment,
in the regime of liberal rights. Instead his elegies engender a critique
of the liberal subject position understood as an autonomous, rational,
and individualized self. Clare challenges the notion of autonomous
subjectivity through the repeated use of anthropomorphism as a rep-
resentational strategy. Clare’s anthropomorphic identification with
non-human life establishes a collective among forms of life that are
being appropriated into property (land, trees, animals, the poor).

As Clare’s morphology effaces the perceived boundary between
human and non-human life, at the same time it poetically trans-
forms the Romantic ideal of leisure based on the privileging of the
autonomous individual into an environmental ethic of “neglect” that
opposes the privatization and improvement of common life.
Taken together, these chapters establish that a specifically Romantic
conservatism insists on the absolute structural necessity of considering
both past and future generations when making decisions about land use.
Imagining this partnership, the Romantic conservative texts explored
in this book affirm that, whether we take responsibility for it or not,
human beings are attached to previous and future generations through
our shared habitat and modes of habitation. Scott Hess persuasively
argues that in the Romantic period, “Focusing the entire landscape on
a single point of view also confers a sense of imaginative ownership,
supporting a form of possessive individualism.”28 The Romantic con-
servative intergenerational imagination counters that kind of possessive
individualism by inculcating a point of view that not only includes
diverse, local communities but also honors continuities with past and
future generations. Romantic conservatism seeks to restore a sense of
intergenerational responsibility and dependence by asserting that we all
inherit the consequences of past environmental use and abuse, and
all have a part in determining what will be left for the future.
Part I
Imagination
1
Intergenerational Imagination in
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France
Although many scholars have discussed Edmund Burke’s counter-

revolutionary argument in favor of the aristocracy and church in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the way in which his con-
servative, organic view is further associated with a concern for the health
of the environment remains largely unexplored. Yet the preservation of
land through inheritance is a cornerstone of the Burkean political
position. For instance, he writes, “the idea of inheritance furnishes a
sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission;
without at all excluding a principle of improvement” (R 119–20).
Admittedly Burke intends to reinforce social hierarchies; however, he also
articulates a tension in the debates about land use during the Romantic
period – that is, the virtues of inheritance, which is a conservative valu-
ation of land as an estate, versus that of improvement, which is a liberal,
free-market approach that views land as a commodity, or as real estate.
In the eighteenth century, Raymond Williams argues, “An estate passed
from being regarded as an inheritance, carrying such and such income,
to being calculated as an opportunity for investment, carrying greatly
increased returns.”1 The principle of improvement sought progressively
to make the land more profitable, and thus precipitated the enclosure
and privatization of the commons in England. The Reflections and the
other Romantic conservative texts explored in this book assert that
land should be protected from unregulated privatization and industrial
expansion. Inheritance becomes a means by which the ideology of
“improvement” could be countered.
This chapter explores the neglected connection between Romantic
political conservatism and environmental conservation. I suggest
15
that Burke’s “principle of conservation” amounts to a resistance to

modernity by rejecting liberal, rational individualism and by empha-
sizing human vulnerability and dependence on both local communi-
ties and the lived environment. Anthony Quinton describes British
conservatism as a “politics of imperfection” with three major tenets:
organicism, traditionalism, and skepticism.2 Conservative skepticism
insists that punctual, individual rationality can and will err without
the guiding ethos of history encoded in tradition and organic local
communities. Therefore, rational, utilitarian decisions about land
use that are severed from any consultation with history, tradition,
and community will lead to unanticipated, unintended negative con-
sequences. There is more at stake, then, in the conservative tenets of
traditionalism and organicism than a mere reinforcement of the status
quo. Burkean conservatism articulates a social ecology that views the
human place in the natural world as embedded and reciprocal rather
than as rational and dominant.
In the first part of this chapter, I argue that Burke’s traditional-
ism aspires to prevent humans from being “unmindful of what
they have received from their ancestors.” It is therefore a theory
of relations with the dead that seeks to inculcate humility and
moderation when people make decisions about altering current
environmental or social structures. While Burke’s traditionalism is
central to the conservative, conservationist position, studying it
without also considering his organicism neglects the way that he
collapses time from both ends, so in the second part of the chapter
I explore how organicism emerges as a theory of intergenerational
connection: the dead influence the living, while the living plan
for future generations. I conclude by arguing the active conserva-
tion of what Burke calls “the whole original fabric of their society”
contains an ecological dimension that conceptualizes the human
relationship with the non-human environment as a mode of
“habitation.” Here human cultural habits reciprocally interact with
the non-human environment, shaping and in turn being shaped
by the distinctive features of their particular bioregion. Together
traditionalism and organicism create and reinforce the guiding
conservationist ethos of the intergenerational imagination. Burke
insists that a properly moral imagination views land and culture
as inherited gifts from past generations that must be transmitted
intact to future generations.
Intergenerational Imagination in Burke’s Reflections 17
Traditionalism and the intergenerational imagination
Scholars of Burke’s work agree that Burke’s conservatism espouses

a political predisposition towards history and tradition as a way
of countering modernity, empire, and liberal individualism. Burke
advocates a “practice of establishing the rules of political behavior
by an appeal to history,” according to J.G.A. Pocock. More recently,
F.R. Ankersmit argues, “it is for Burke only in history that human
nature can articulate itself.”3 Yet traditionalism in the Reflections
differs from the antiquarianism, historicism, and overall penchant
for a “revival of the past” that Hans-Georg Gadamer claims are “the
great achievements of romanticism.”4 A specifically Burkean con-
servative traditionalism developed in reference to generations past
arises out of acute anxiety about future change and progress. Early
in the Reflections, Burke states, “Better to be despised for too anxious
apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security” (R 92). His
anxiety about the potentially irreversible consequences of abrupt
political or environmental change is revealed in his advocacy for
maintaining imaginary relationships with the dead that might serve
to moderate change. It is not surprising then that the battle over
what the human relationship should be to the dead is fundamental
to the distinction between the political liberalism of Thomas Paine
and the conservatism of Burke. Paine puts it succinctly: “I am contend-
ing for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away,
and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript authority of
the dead; and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead
over the rights and freedom of the living” (TPR 204). Paine’s negative
conception of rights espouses the removal of all barriers to individual
initiative and industry, whereas the diachronic, intergenerational
temporality of Burke’s conservative traditionalism refuses liberalism’s
separation of the present from the past.
Inheritance counteracts spatial and social mobility, advocating
instead for connections between past, present, and future genera-
tions. While this view is problematically hierarchical, at the same
time the conservative ethical conception of the telos of property
looks to obligations beyond the production of wealth; this ethical
aspect of conservatism foreshadows an ecological view that the land
has intrinsic value as a habitat for all life. Most scholars understand-
ably focus on the ways in which inheritance perpetuates structures
of social hierarchy, yet Burke’s Reflections also clearly argues for a

consideration of intergenerational responsibility in land use:
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the
commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the tempo-
rary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have
received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity,
should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not
think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste
on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole
original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who
come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching
these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had
themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. (R 192)
When Burke describes the people who own land as “life-renters” and
“temporary possessors,” he advocates for a conception of inheritance
that is tinged with the humility of a worldview that imagines the
individual life span within the broader continuity of generations.
He recognizes, prophetically, that liberal individualism’s short-term
view, which posits the individual as the “entire master” of a piece
of land, allows us to become “unmindful” of our obligation to con-
serve the land for future generations. Burke’s Reflections, according
to Terence Ball, argues for an ethos of “intergenerational symmetry,”
which entails utilizing natural resources in a way that considers the
memory of what has been inherited from past generations and a pro-
jection of what inheritance will be left for future generations.5 As the
aristocracy become “life-renters,” Burke flattens the social hierarchy,
comparing those who are wealthy to the tenant farmers who only
rent and work the land.
By reducing the landed class to “life-renters” while promoting a
hierarchical system of familial land ownership, Burke introduces
a paradoxical structure not unlike the religious, priestly asceticism in
which one gains power through negating it because preserving the
land for future generations means one cannot strip it of its fecun-
dity. At the same time, Burke’s warning that liberal individualism
and untethered economic growth might well leave the land “a ruin
instead of an habitation” is uncannily prophetic. His tirade against
the French Revolution takes place within the context of financial
and industrial revolutions; he fears that the evolution of a capital-

ist economy, with its “paper-money despotism,” would force all
Englishmen to bow to the “idol of public credit” that rendered fiscal
and moral values unstable (R 126). While the liberal model of land
ownership is certainly more democratic than Burke’s, he neverthe-
less accurately predicts that in a democracy based on the model of
liberal individualism, humans would fail to recognize that they are
the beneficiaries of a gift of land from past generations, and there
would be, as a consequence, no consideration for later generations
who will use the land.
Burke’s advocacy for maintaining an intergenerational imagination
as a nascent land ethic emerges even more clearly when we read his
views alongside Thomas Paine’s response to the Reflections: the Rights
of Man (1791). Paine’s liberalism is built on the idea that humans are
discrete individuals who have no obligation to the past or future.
He argues:
Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet
arrived at it, are as remote from each other, as the utmost stretch
of mortal imagination can conceive: What possible obligation,
then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid
down, that of the two non-entities, the one out of existence and
the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one
should control the other to the end of time? (TPR 204–5)
The notion of the liberal individual comes into being through a neg-
ative conception of freedom, a freedom from the moral obligations
or political principles that might extend from one generation to the
next. In Charles Taylor’s words, the “punctual” liberal individual
emerges from “stance of detachment [that] generates the picture of
ourselves as pure independent consciousness.”6 Although Paine is
most interested in arguing that the present generation be freed from
the “dead hand” of the past, his logic of liberal autonomy further
severs any sense of obligation to future generations, since we can-
not have tangible intercourse with them. But while Paine disregards
the political and ethical possibilities of any relation to past or future
generations, Romantic conservatives understand intergenerational
imagination as a necessary prerequisite to sustainable habitation
within the environment.
Although the full environmental implications of these opposing

arguments were not apparent when the debate took place in the
1790s, it is now clear that Burke and Paine were debating conflicting
environmental ethics. Burke’s principle of conservation argues that
the current generation of human beings must not think of them-
selves alone because to do so would lead to the “ruin” of the envir-
onment. Instead, humans must understand their relationship to the
land in terms of habitation, that is, as something that they own only
because they belong to the continuity of generations. By contrast,
Paine argues that the current generation has no responsibility to
the generation to come, signaling a change in the way that humans
understand their relationship to land under free-market liberalism.
If Romantic conservatism is defined by the conservation of tradi-
tion, then Romantic conservatism is far more indebted to notions
of community, marked by both place and generational time, than
has been previously acknowledged by scholars. Tradition, Anthony
Giddens explains, “contributes in basic fashion to ontological secu-
rity insofar as it sustains trust in the continuity of the past, present,
and future, and connects such trust to routinised social practices.”7
Deference to the authority of the dead is one of the routinized
social practices that liberalism seeks to sever. As Paine argues, “Every
generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its
occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be
accommodated” (TPR 204). If liberals define freedom in part as the
ability to sever themselves from the influence and the power of
the dead in law and culture, it is not surprising that anxiety about
retaining the authority of the dead is found early in the Reflections.
Like Walter Benjamin’s historian, Burke’s anxious traditionalist
urgency reflects that he “is firmly convinced that even the dead will
not be safe from the enemy.”8 With this concern Burke questions the
motives and sympathies of the British Revolution Society: “Do these
theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors, who dragged
the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs?”
(R 107). Drawing on the history of the English Civil War, Burke cre-
ates an image of Richard Price and the men of the Revolution Society
dragging dead bodies out of tombs in order to desecrate decomposing
bodies and to destroy the memorial site. This gothic image portrays
liberal progressivism’s desire to disengage itself, at whatever cost,
from the “manuscript authority of the dead.” “For Burke, the grave is
a place of warning, not of mourning,” Esther Schor observes.9 Indeed

Burke uses the ghastly image of the desecration of dead bodies to
prepare his readers for his warning, “People will not look forward
to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” The principle
of conservation, Burke goes on to argue, views subjects as “grasped as
in a kind of mortmain forever” (R 119–20). Both images – the living
dragging the dead from a tomb and the dead holding authoritatively
on to the living – figuratively picture contact with dead bodies, either
through dragging or grasping. The difference is whether the living or
the dead control the contact.
These two images of the living in physical contact with the dead cor-
respond with liberal and conservative views. The liberal view believes
that humans have the agency and autonomy to drag the dead away
from their perpetual enshrinement, and the conservative view envi-
sions human society as grasped and held steady by the dusty hands
of the dead forever. Mike Goode calls the first scene “Burke’s ‘tale
from the crypt’ – those latter bodies are simultaneously dead enough
to be dragged out of tombs and yet alive enough to have their power
and office retroactively usurped by changes in the law.”10 While a
liberal view imagines a majority vote can change any long-standing
law, the inverse occurs in Burke’s vision of the mortmain, the dead
hand, which connotes at once the gothic image of a moldering hand
reaching out from the grave and controlling the behavior of the
living. Burke’s dead bodies are thus powerful enough to grasp hold of
the living, yet are also dead enough to be threatened by liberalism.
In either case, the dead are always the undead: they might maintain
powers over the living or might be threatened with limited powers. In
spite of its gothic resonance, the figure of the mortmain also signals
Burke’s erotic historicism, which, as Goode argues, “keeps sliding
towards an erotic attachment to the materiality of the past – to
the parchment, to the lawbook, to once-living human bodies.”11 The
term mortmain, moreover, is often used in connection with the lands
of the Catholic Church that are held in trust forever, protected from
development. Emerging from Burke’s crypto-Catholic sympathies,
then, the relationship with the dead hand of the past is intrinsically
tied to the conservation of land.
Although Burke’s Reflections is perhaps most well known for its dra-
matic depiction of the crowd’s mistreatment of the royal family (Marie
Antoinette in particular), as Pocock argues, it was the confiscation of
church land as the basis for issuing paper assignats as legal tender that
was “the central, the absolute, and the unforgivable crime of the
Revolutionaries.” Beyond Burke’s representation of “religion, chivalry
and commerce as trodden down together by the hoofs of paper-money
despotism,” a land ethic emerges when Burke discusses the confisca-
tion of church lands for the purpose of agricultural improvement and
profit.12 Scholars have neglected Burke’s ethical concerns about the
commodification of heredity estates as real estate. For example, Tom
Furniss argues that Burke objects to the confiscation of church lands
because it demonstrated that “even agrarian economies are intrinsi-
cally liable to seismic cataclysms in which the ‘ground’ of all value
may be undermined by a slippage from one representational form
[land] to another [paper money] that can never be halted by ‘real’
wealth.”13 According to Furniss, Burke’s concern about the value
of land is part of his overall defense of capitalism from the perils of
monetary inflation. Burke himself, however, clearly states that his
concern about the seizure and development of Church land is due to
the way it makes the land vulnerable to excessive exploitation, and
thus he implies that land needs to be protected – by a mortmain –
from unregulated development:
By this means [the seizure of lands by the Revolutionaries] the spirit

of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself,
and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation, that species of
property becomes (as it were) volatized; it assumes unnatural and
monstrous activity. (R 308)
The seizure of Church property puts liberal autonomy into practice

by severing the mortmain that held land in trust for future gen-
erations. As Burke warns prophetically, and clearly with Catholic
sympathies, land thus will be rendered deformed and monstrous,
distorted by the unregulated desire for profit.14
Burke’s vision of a proper relationship with the dead can be found
in his desire to look to past generations as models for behavior:
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers,

the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is
tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent
inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents
that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and dis-

gracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By
this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an
imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating
ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its
gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records,
evidences, and titles. (R 121)
Burke’s admonition that we should always act “as if in the presence

of canonized forefathers” so that human freedom is tempered with
“awful gravity” transforms the gothic yet vulnerable image of the
moldering dead hand into a sublime image of power that is now
“imposing,” “majestic,” “monumental.” First proposed in Burke’s
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757), this sublime model of patriarchal power was used, Tim
Fulfold argues, “in order to subdue and terrify those whose actions had
shown them to be rejecting the roles prescribed for them.”15 Tokens
of the canonized forefathers – portraits, records, monuments, and
graves – remind us that culture and land are gifts inherited from previ-
ous generations.
The canonized forefathers, moreover, become moral spectators
that revise Adam Smith’s conception of a “supposed impartial
spectator,” who moderates human behavior and “calls us to an
account for all those omissions and violations.”16 Smith’s “‘impar-
tial spectator’ is the ‘stranger within’ who allows us to stand back
and pull ourselves together,” according to Luke Gibbons, and thus
“[t]he associations of this mechanism with the anonymity of mass
society helped to develop the economic rationality without which
the impersonal forces of the market could not function.”17 Instead
of imagining Smith’s “impartial spectator” to guide one’s actions,
Burke recommends cultivating the imagination of an extremely
partial spectator, a ghost of the past with all its prejudices, habits,
and traditions that insists the present must conform to its expecta-
tions. Burke’s “partial spectator” transforms Adam Smith’s supposed
sympathy between peers into a conservationist moral responsibility
that binds together past and future generations. Being grasped by
the dead hand of the past then involves continual sympathetic com-
munication with the intentions and habits of the dead. While other
Romantic authors effecting a conservative resistance to modernity
forefront relationships with the dead (indeed, the era is defined in

part through its production of gothic ghost stories), in this case,
Burke presents intellectual and moral intercourse with ancestors as
naturalized and habitual.
According to John Whale, “Burke’s deployment of imagination ...
operates in support of a specific national identity and against what
he critiques as atomistic individualism.”18 Yet Burke’s vision of the
individual as nearly effaced and poised momentarily between past and
future generations is not so much national as it is intergenerational.
Against the notion of unfettered freedom for individuals, he advocates
a more limited sense of individual freedom that folds individuality
into the constitutive social customs of a given society. Indeed, Paine’s
response to Burke’s Reflections criticizes Burke’s relationship to the
dead precisely because it contradicts the liberal conception of human
freedom as independent from any obligation to past generations: “But
Mr. Burke has set up sort of a political Adam, in whom all posterity are
bound forever” (TPR 206). Here Paine misreads Burke, however, most
probably due to his own predilection for abstract principles. Burke
is not setting up one Adam, one ancestor to whom all humans are
bound forever, but rather human traditions which, based on the con-
cept of natural law rather than rights, are diverse and multi-cultural.
Directed to the French, he writes:
You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that
belonged to you. You set up your trade without capital. If the
last generations of your country appeared without much luster
in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your
claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under the pious pre-
dilection of those ancestors, your imaginations would have real-
ized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar
practice of the hour. (R 122–3)
Burke’s principle of conservation advocates for choice in deciding

which ancestors shall be emulated in relation to the circumstances of
the times. As Schor observes, for Burke, “the nation’s dead endow the
living rather than bereave them,” and indeed Burke imagines that
the dead endow a nation with the moral capital on which all trade
must be built.19 Although such heritage would provide stability and
moderation in a rapidly modernizing world, conservatism should
also be flexible to localities and times, as long as decisions are

informed and moderated by the past. Burke stops short of William
Wordsworth’s more egalitarian model of including the poor in the
country graveyard as tokens of tradition, but he does suggest scruti-
nizing and then choosing one’s ancestors, which leads to other varia-
tions of Romantic conservatism explored in this book.
Burke insists that political and social change can be slowed and
moderated through selecting ancestors to emulate. This resonates
with his repeated use of the Glorious Revolution as a positive model
of political change: “We wished at the period of the Revolution, and
do now wish, to derive all that we possess as an inheritance from our
forefathers” (R 117). In contrast to the Glorious Revolution, which
placed William and Mary on the throne instead of the Catholic
James in order to preserve both religion and the state, Burke repeat-
edly allies liberal, Jacobin ideology with the terrifying example of
Cromwell and the English Civil War, those men “who dragged the
bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs”
(R 107). Cromwellians and Jacobins alike sought to find political and
personal freedom through severing themselves from the traditions
of past generations. Both groups become synecdochic figures of
modernity, characterized by increasing system differentiation as the
political, domestic, moral, and economic realms become increas-
ingly separated. As a result, Niklas Luhmann suggests, “increasing
system differentiation correlates with an increasing disassociation
between the past and the future.”20 If modernity is characterized
by the disassociation between past and future, then Burke’s con-
servation of relationships with the dead attempts to counter that
disassociation by constructing traditional communal continuity
between the past and future. In other words, individualism, system
differentiation, and the disassociation between past and future are
all hallmarks of modernity. Burke’s adherence to tradition, therefore,
is not only a case of routinizing social practices. It amounts to a
radical resistance to the changes accompanying modernity. Such
resistance to modernization stems from Burke’s Irish identity, and
it is manifested further in his defense of the French monasteries
and in his numerous, life-long attempts to defend Ireland, India, and
America from oppressive British colonial policies.21 Thus, far from
simply reinforcing stability, Burke’s traditionalism seeks to destabilize
liberal assumptions about the abstract universality of human nature
that erases differences between local, organic communities and the

cultures they produce.
Living in an imaginary relationship with one’s ancestors and
descendents de-emphasizes the significance of an individual human
life. The dead are admired, but the dead are also reminders of the
transient nature of existence and of the current generation’s respon-
sibility within the history of ideas, habits, and land use. Burke argues
that ideas of liberty “were understood long before we were born,
altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould
upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its
law upon our pert loquacity” (R 182). Cognizance of imminent death
further asserts the need for tradition, for something that transcends
the individual life span, and in this way Burke’s traditionalism reso-
nates with Hannah Arendt’s assertion that “without being at home
in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and
for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast
to life, this life would never be human.”22 Similarly, Burke suggests
communities come together in continuing past traditions so that
they can be transmitted to future generations. Burke, moreover, goes
beyond Arendt’s built world of homo faber, for Burke’s “man of tools”
must also use traditions and institutions to cultivate an organic
world of ordinary life practices that connect the generations.
“Formed by habit”: Burkean organicism and second

nature
The dead are never absent from Burke’s notion of an organic society.
Such a society is represented as an ecological model of slow change: a
“permanent body composed of transitory parts . . . the whole, at one
time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of
unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of per-
petual decay, fall, renovation, and progression” (R 120). In this view,
humans are born into an already established culture and land, which
are received as gifts, but as gifts with obligations because they must
be bestowed on the next generation. Burke’s organicism champions
habitually inculcated relationships with both past and future genera-
tions through attention to habits and customs inherited from the
past and conserved for the future. The social centrality of the small
community aligns with the conservative principle of organicism,
“which takes a society to be a unitary, natural growth, an organized,

living whole, not a mechanical aggregate.”23
Burke’s advocacy for an organic society based on natural, lived
relations is the basis for his objection to the French Revolution: “But
I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which
relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of
the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness
and solitude of metaphysical abstraction” (R 89–90). Burke goes on
to argue that only “circumstances” can give reality to political prin-
ciples, thus resting his objections on the organic theory of society, in
which, according to O’Gorman, “society is enormously complex, far
more than the sum of its parts and the simple mass of its relation-
ships.”24 The French Revolution is based on an abstract principle of
freedom: it is thus “stripped of every relation,” the social ecologies
or “habitations” unique to particular locales. For Burke, no overall
principle can be applied to all places and all people. Therefore, each
particular region can be best assessed by those who have inhabited
it for many generations and thus have accumulated generations of
local knowledge in their habits and histories.25
James Chandler argues that Burke’s use of the term “nature” in
the Reflections is duplicitous because it naturalizes inequality as it
ostensibly takes its model from the natural world: Burke makes
“claims on the one hand about the timeless and universal condi-
tion of things (including human beings) and on the other about
what human beings acquire as a result of their particular times and
places . . . .”26 I suggest, however, that the second nature of Burke’s
“habitual provincial connections” also includes a cultural commons
of lived relationships between people, history and the environment.
Burke’s model of society is based on particular places and the human
habits embedded in those places: “We begin our public affections
in our families . . . We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our
habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting places.
Such divisions of the country are formed by habit, and not by a sud-
den jerk of authority” (R 315). However counterintuitive it might
seem, Burke’s “habitual provincial connections” bear resemblance to
E.P. Thompson’s notion of “‘customary consciousness,’ in which suc-
cessive generations stand in apprentice relationship to each other.”27
In Burke’s customary consciousness that is “formed by habit” and
not “a sudden jerk of authority,” the social and the ecological are
inseparable. Beyond reinforcing the status quo, every generation’s

habits are shaped by and in turn shape the environment. This kind
of environmental awareness is often considered to be an outgrowth
of liberal thought, but in fact the conservative intergenerational
imagination accounts for much of what has been called “green”
Romanticism.
Even as Burke upholds habits and customs as society’s great stabi-
lizers, he also recognizes them as threatened. Habits instill stability,
yet the ability to acquire new habits attests to the frightening malle-
ability and alarmingly fluid nature of subjectivity. This, in turn, spurs
Burke’s conservative emphasis on organicism as a model for restrain-
ing and shaping the human subject during times of economic and
social change. As William Hazlitt notes,
He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are
not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those
things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man,
and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit,
from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason. (SW 55)
Hazlitt points out that although Burke’s work is considered a defense

of British nationalism, it is perhaps better understood as a manifesto
for local habits and customary relations. Burke’s insistence that
humans are guided first and foremost by irrational habits of attach-
ment links social stability to environmental sustainability. As Roger
Scruton argues, “Long-term social equilibrium, therefore, must include
ecological equilibrium.”28 Far from stopping progressive improvement,
conservatism slows it in order to forecast the possible unintended
negative consequences of change.
Such an organic society of “habitual provincial connections” that are
“formed by habit” makes evident a social ecology in which the health
of human communities and the health of the land are intrinsically
related. Philosopher Félix Ravaisson, whose early nineteenth-century
Catholic spiritualism bears some similarity to Burke’s conservatism,
explains in his essay Of Habit (1838) that habit is not simply a blind
mechanism but rather habit is formed in response to changes in the
environment. The capacity to acquire habits asserts the “plasticity of
the living being against the theory of the animal machine”; it is an
inherently organic response to stimuli observable in human, animal,
and plant life alike.29 Residing between activity and passivity and
between will and instinct, habits begin as conscious responses to
change. Yet, through bodily repetition, new responses become habit-
ual, almost instinctual. “Now once acquired,” Ravaisson observes,
“habit is a general, permanent way of being, and if change is transi-
tory, habit subsists beyond the change which brought it about.”30
In other words, habits both encode and survive history. Moreover,
habits encode history on the body. Beyond the biological sense
of habits that Ravaisson explores, Burke’s notion of habit relates to
the cultural commons that is second nature. While habits are for the
most part “a permanent way of being,” Burke, like Ravaisson, is well
aware that any habit “remains for a possible change”; therefore,
Burke cautions against the development of habits associated with
competitive liberal individualism that would irreversibly degenerate
local communities.31 Burke’s notion of habit and “second nature,”
then, also bears similarities with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the
habitus, which is “embodied history, internalized as a second nature
and so forgotten as history . . . the active presence of the whole past
of which it is the product.” 32 Burke also asserts that the lived relations
among human beings exceed the rationalist systems that attempt to
describe, analyze, or otherwise contain them. He instead suggests
a social ecology in which human habits lie within the entwined
biological, environmental, and social realms. Burke’s social ecology,
then, indicates human dependence on a broader social and ecologi-
cal system, which accounts for his repeated use of the terms habit,
habitual, and habitation in the Reflections.
Burke’s advocacy for the conservation of established habitual pat-
terns in relation to land use underlies his vehement objection to
the geometric reorganization of France with the city of Paris at the
center:
It is boasted, that the geometrical policy has been adopted, that all
local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer
be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans, but Frenchmen, with
one country, one heart, and one assembly. But instead of being
Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that
region will shortly have no country. No man ever was attached by
a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of a
bare measurement. (R 314–5)
Burke fears that “local ideas should be sunk” in the movement from
multiple particular locales to an abstracted nationalism centered
on urban Paris. “Local ideas” refers to a diversity of local human
identities that inform and influence each other within particular biore-
gions. The French Revolution is staged as a conflict between two land
ethics: the rational, utilitarian, geometrical re-organization of land for
profit versus habitual, traditional land use. One of the consequences of
modernity, Anthony Giddens argues, is “disembedding,” or strategic
efforts to “remove social relations from the immediacy of context.”33
If Burke’s emphasis on local communities is a form of resistance to
capitalism’s disembedding of communities from particular places,
then his organicism functions as a kind of critical regionalism that
attempts to attenuate the encroachment of cosmopolitan change
with fidelity to particular communities.
Hazlitt observed the tension between land as a geometric, utilitar-
ian organization space and land as a habitual, functional notion of
place in tandem with practice. Although he was opposed to other
aspects of Burke’s political thought, he did admire Burke’s land ethic:
“To think of reducing all mankind to the same insipid level, seemed
to him [Burke] the same absurdity as to destroy the inequalities of
surface in a country, for the benefit of agriculture and commerce”
(SW 56). Here Hazlitt intuits Burke’s argument that liberalism, indi-
vidual rights, and unrestrained development may erode both land
and social communities. The fear of environmental and social frag-
mentation leads to Burke’s aspiration to conserve locality and place.34
The concept of place, according to Lawrence Buell, is an essential
ecocritical concept because it “gestures in at least three directions at
once—toward environmental materiality, toward social perception
or construction, and toward individual affect or bond.”35 Place, then,
resonates with a Burkean view that aspires toward a full, organic
integration of the individual with his or her environment and local
community.
This stance emerges in reaction to French and Jacobin revolution-
ary idéologie, with its overarching precepts, Roman law (as opposed
to common law), and abstract theories of rights. Burke and other
Romantic conservatives are wary of altering society because the
limited human intellect can never fully anticipate all the potential
repercussions of political changes, particularly those that would
jeopardize existing communities, landscapes, or institutions. In other
words, conservatives fear the unintended, unanticipated, latent con-

sequences emerging from the destruction of historical institutions.
As O’Gorman points out,
Conservatives generally insist that different social arrangements are

appropriate to different times and places. They do not, like classical
liberals, or later doctrinaires like the Fabian socialists, endorse a
timeless idea of civilized order which should be imposed, if neces-
sary by force, on those communities whose historical experience
has not led them to it.36
In an age of optimism about progress, such a stance actively opposes

global, capitalist networks rather than merely defending the status
quo. The conservative belief in leaving an organic community
to its established traditions without interference explains Burke’s
impassioned defenses not only of small British communities, but also
of America, India, and Ireland. “He saw through the abusive distor-
tions of civilizational hierarchies, racial superiority, and assumptions
of cultural impoverishment by which British power justified its terri-
torial expansionism and commercial avarice in India and elsewhere,”
Mehta argues.37 Saree Makdisi similarly asserts, “What makes Burke’s
so radically different from later conceptions of Britain’s imperial
project, is that there is nothing wrong with the otherness on its
own terms, and ‘we’ must accommodate ‘ourselves’ to ‘their’ status,
radical difference, and immutable otherness, not the other way
around.”38 Romantic conservative proponents of a traditional soci-
ety cannot support communally disruptive practices such as the slave
trade or imperialism.
The social ecology of Burke’s notion of habit posits reciprocity
between humans and the environment in which humans, by “working
after the pattern of nature,” are shaped by the land (R 120). Burke
explains:
In the old divisions of the country various accidents at various

times, and the ebb and flow of various properties and jurisdictions,
settle their bounds. These bounds were not made upon any fixed
system undoubtedly. They were subject to some inconveniences,
but they were inconveniences for which use had found remedies,
and habit had supplied accommodation and patience. In this
new pavement of square within square, and this organization

and semi-organization, made on the system of Empedocles and
Buffon, and not upon any politic principle, it is impossible that
innumerable local inconveniences, to which men are not habitu-
ated, must not arise. But these I pass over, because it requires an
accurate knowledge of the country, which I do not possess,
to specify them. (R 286)
Cautioning against the unintended consequences of abrupt changes

in land use that are not based on intimate knowledge of the particu-
lar region, Burke connects the rationalism of the emerging scientific
taxonomy with the calculated reorganization of land in France for
improvement and profit. By evoking Buffon, Burke, like Thomas
Bewick in his History of British Birds, aligns the new systematizing
science that organizes life forms into categories with the new capitalist
system that views land outside its history and turns communal living
into an aggregate of punctual, competitive individuals. Burke’s land
ethic also emerges in the way he refuses to speculate further or make
specific recommendations about the land in France because he is not
knowledgeable about each individual locale.
Epistemological modesty is a central characteristic of conservative
thought, as Jerry Z. Muller points out, and such modesty not only
insists on “the limits of human knowledge,” but also warns “that soci-
ety is too complex to lend itself to theoretical simplification.”39 In a
similar vein, Anthony Quinton argues that early British conservatism,
in both its religious and secular forms, “rests on a belief in the imper-
fection of human nature. This imperfection is both intellectual and
moral.”40 This is a communal vision, in which the liberal individual’s
“private stock of reason” is incomplete and unreliable, unlike the
“general bank and capital of nations, and of ages” (R 183). Against
the “machine of these speculations” advanced by the French Jacobins,
including the destruction of established differentiations in class
hierarchy and regional land use, Burke argues for a longer temporal
view of the land when making decisions about land use. About the
management of the now confiscated church lands in France, he
writes, “Though you were to join in the commission all the directors
of the two academies to the directors of the Caisse d’Escompte, one
old, experienced peasant is worth them all” (R 308–9). Burke’s recog-
nition of the inestimable value in the knowledge of an old peasant
contradicts his characterization of the poor as a “swinish multitude,”

which has been overemphasized in his work. For Burke, the local
economies of rural peasant life facilitate social and environmental
stability, and Burke’s valorization of this peasant amounts to another
dimension of his protest against capitalist modernity. As Walden Bello
argues, “the ‘peasant way’ has relevance not only to peasants but to
everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capi-
tal’s vision for organizing production, community, and life itself.”41
Burke argues that after the confiscation of church lands, “The new
dealers, being all habitually adventurers and without any fixed habits
of local predilections, will purchase to job out again, as the market of
paper or of money or of land shall present an advantage” (R 308).
Anticipating later agrarian arguments for an ethic of care for land over
many generations as opposed to those who farm land only for indi-
vidual profit, the “new dealers,” newly hired managers of the land
who have no “local predilections” or established hereditary connec-
tion to it, are simply “adventurers” seeking to profit quickly instead
of farming with a long-term view. Due to the new distribution of
monastic lands in France, Burke points out, the managers of the newly
disembedded land will not have the benefit of any historical or affective
connection to that land.
Burke’s anxiety about abrupt changes in land use arises from his
belief that our prejudices, habits, and dispositions create social and
environmental stability. “Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit,”
Burke writes, and “through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part
of his nature” (R 183). Prejudice creates habits because it is the psy-
chological predisposition that influences social relations and bodily
actions to the point that they become second nature. Burke notes
that those who are tempted to join in the new speculative economy
must “cast away the coat of prejudice” and detach themselves from
local places and mores; after a short period, then, that specula-
tive economy, based on virtual value and not inherited property,
might become a habit “as extensive as life” (R 310). Soon all social
interactions would be based on abstract, rational, and speculative
notions of value instead of established, practiced ones. This idea of
a malleable culturally and environmentally constructed subjectivity
in relation to historical events evokes great anxiety. Burke largely
blames the French Revolution on malleable tastes: “I knew, indeed,
that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some
sort of palates” (R 165). Ideally, England’s organic society will resist

a taste for monarchical suffering because of its “sullen resistance to
innovation” and “disposition to preserve” (R 181, 267). Dispositions,
aversions or inclinations, and sensations of arousal or disgust that
trigger irrational decision-making, are actually forms of cultural
memory that preserve a living, embodied relationship with the
past. Disposition, another term used repeatedly in the Reflections, is
closely linked with habit and prejudice; one might say that habits
produce dispositions. Disposition is a kind of taste, and in the way
that Burke uses it, a kind of sensus communis, common sense that
will compel people to view the revolution not with a rationalist
response but with “disgust” for the destruction of inherited culture
and institutions.
Burke recognizes the potential environmental danger of the men-
tal disposition to consider only present generations and not past or
future ones when making decisions about land use:
With them [the Revolutionaries] it is a sufficient motive to destroy

an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new,
they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building
run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think
little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place
all their hopes in discovery. (R 184)
This is a cogent description of a progressive disposition: to destroy

the past simply out of a disposition against it, and to create new
objects with no consideration for the duration or consequences of
those objects for future generations. Burke’s thought here resonates
with Hannah Arendt who, considering a more advanced capitalist
culture, wonders: “One of the obvious danger signs that we may be
on our way to bringing into existence the ideal of animal laborans
is the extent to which our whole economy has become a waste
economy, in which things must almost be as quickly devoured and
discarded as they have appeared in the world.”42
Burke clearly connects the health of a culture with the health of
its environment: “I do not like to see any thing destroyed; any void
produced in society; any ruin on the face of the land” (R 245). If
humans fail to conserve the environment and traditional lived rela-
tions within it, not only would the earth become a “ruin instead
of a habitation,” but “No one generation could link with the

other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
Burke goes on to predict that without a sense of intergenerational
responsibility, “the commonwealth itself would, in a few genera-
tions, crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of
individuality, and at length be dispersed to all the winds of heaven”
(193–4). Burke’s representation of a crumbling society into atom-
istic individuals suggests that the fate of political, moral, social,
economic, and environmental systems cannot be separated from
each other. Therefore, the conservation of the social ecology of
established human habits and traditions is of foremost importance
in modernity.
Burke writes approvingly of those who engineered the Glorious
Revolution saying, “They had long views” (R 136). Indeed, he
repeatedly sets up the moral and political primacy of the long view,
a simultaneous forward and backward look. I began this chapter by
examining Burke’s proto-ecological fear that liberal individuals will
be “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or
of what is due to their posterity” (R 192). The assertion of this inter-
generational imagination continues throughout the text; he goes on
to state that all of civic life “becomes a partnership not only between
those who are living, but those who are living, those who are dead,
and those who are to be born” (R 194–5). Burke’s “long view” is not
simply historical, then, but rather it is intergenerational because the
moral imagination is directed both forward and backward in time to
include both past and future generations. As Paine points out, the
living and the dead “are as remote from each other, as the utmost
stretch of mortal imagination can conceive” (TPR 204–5). Romantic
conservation insists that we attempt to breach that utmost stretch
of imagination and consider the individual as always merely a
“life-renter” – of culture, land, and community – who stands between
past and future generations. Romantic conservatism performs a resid-
ual resistance to modernity by refusing individualism, and emphasiz-
ing dependence on reciprocity between the community and the
lived environment. Burke writes, “When antient opinions and rules
of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From
that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know
distinctly to what port we steer” (R 172–3). The trope of being lost at
sea, Thomas Pfau explains, realizes the “philosophical predicament
of modernity,” which is “the ontological indeterminacy of the mod-

ern, self-activating, and self-realizing individual.”43 Ultimately then,
rather than a simple preservation of the status quo, traditionalism
can be a site of radical resistance to the hegemony of bourgeois indi-
vidualism and rationalism. Burke’s traditionalism roots itself in the
past in order to extend communal identity and stability through
the present into the future.
2
“Their graves are green”
Conservation in Wordsworth’s
Epitaphic Ballads
Like many of Wordsworth’s poems in the Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800),

“We Are Seven” dramatizes an encounter between a middle-class
traveler and the rural poor. The dialogic structure of the poem pits
a little girl with a “rustic, woodland air” (LB 9), who is physically
and emotionally attached to a local graveyard, against an adult male
traveler who attempts to sever her attachment to her dead kin. The
encounter begins as the traveler asks the girl how many brothers
and sisters she has. She replies that there are seven in all. Seeing no
other children with her, the traveler asks of her siblings’ wherea-
bouts. She replies that two lie under a tree in the churchyard, two are
in Conway, two are gone to sea, and she lives with her mother.
The traveler immediately corrects the child’s reckoning, “If two are
in the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five” (35–6), thus arguing
that the only family members who should be counted are those
whose “limbs they are alive” (34). As the traveler repeatedly attempts
to persuade the little girl to relinquish what he sees as her unreason-
able attachment to the dead, she unequivocally replies, “Their graves
are green, they may be seen” (37), and describes how she sits, sings,
eats, and plays on their graves. Thus, while her brother and sister are
no longer alive, she nevertheless continues to live with her kin and
the past through her imagination, which is grounded in a localized
environment “Twelve steps or more from my Mother’s door” (39).
In the dialogue between the traveler and the little girl, the traveler
exhibits a rational, enlightened perspective that attempts to dispel
the myths of childhood and facilitate the child’s mastery over her
world, yet such mastery is revealed as both imaginatively and socially
37
impoverished, as a “disenchantment of the world,” to borrow a phrase

from Horkheimer and Adorno.1 Countering this disenchantment, the
little girl’s world view resonates with Kate Rigby’s ecological readings
of the “Romantic poets of nature,” who “became topographers of
the sacred, tracking the trace of the holy in landscapes, which were,
perhaps, cocreated by the mind but also, more importantly, felt in
the flesh.”2 The little girl recognizes the sacred, communal space of the
graveyard as a topos of intergenerational connection. Her Romantic
view exemplifies Wordsworth’s later epigram, “The Child is Father
of the Man,” because she demonstrates an irrational, but wise and
mystical relationship with the land and the dead. The Romantic
idealization of childhood emerges from the way that children are
“framed as figures of extreme antiquity.”3 If the child is a figure of the
past, the dialogue in “We Are Seven” further manifests, unexpectedly
perhaps, the tensions in the Burke–Paine debate: the child becomes
the conservative figure of the older, pre-capitalist way of thinking,
and the traveler is a figure of modern liberal individualism. The
Romantic idealization of childhood then serves as a synecdoche that
connects modernity to the pre-modern order of human development.
The trajectory of maturation, the move from childhood to adulthood,
in both the individual and society, appears to be one of cultural disin-
tegration effected through detachment from the dead.
After questioning the girl three times about the way she “counts”
her siblings, the traveler becomes frustrated by what he considers her
irrational fidelity to her kin and her environment. He finally demands,
“But they are dead; those two are dead!,” thus insisting that she
comply with his calculation that there are only five children left in
her family (65). The exclamation point punctuates the traveler’s
zeal for separating living things from the lifeless past. The traveler
thus iterates liberal, rational thought that resonates with Tom Paine’s
insistence that there can be no connection or obligation between
the living and the dead: “those who have quitted the world, and those
who are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other, as
the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive” (TPR 204–5).
By “enlightening” the child, then, the traveler wants to sever her
attachment to her family and the past, thus exposing the strictly
computational, Benthamite rationality of the nation-state in contrast
to the local, affective, and fluid communitarian model of an organic
community.4
Conservation in Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Ballads 39
Yet the little girl’s stability and resilience emerge from her active
conservation of a sense of continuity with the past, which, in the
case of Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry, involves contact with a local
graveyard that incorporates the remnants of the dead into the experi-
ence of the living. This poem anticipates Wordsworth’s mediations
about the social ecology of a country graveyard in his Essays upon
Epitaphs (1810):
As in these registers the name is mostly associated with others

of the same family, this is a prolonged companionship, however
shadowy; even a Tomb like this is a shrine to which the fancies of
a scattered family may repair in pilgrimage; the thoughts of the
individuals, without any communication with each other, must
oftentimes meet here. Such a frail memorial then is not without
its tendency to keep families together; it also feeds on local attach-
ment, which is the tap-root of Patriotism. (PW II.93)
The girl’s attachment to her dead siblings is a model of “prolonged

companionship” that “feeds on local attachment.” In spite of a scat-
tered family – her other siblings are in cities and at sea – she recognizes
that the “frail memorial” of her other siblings’ graves is a place of
imaginative communication with her entire family, since she never
merely advocates for her dead kin but always for the entire family
of seven siblings. Thus the heterotopia of the graveyard, as Michel
Foucault argues, “is capable of juxtaposing in a single place several
spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”5 The
graveyard incorporates life and death, presence and absence in order
to unite the family, and the girl refuses to accept the advice of the
traveler, finally shouting back in the last lines of the poem, “Nay! We
are seven!”(69).
The little girl’s last words, “We are seven!,” organically remind the
reader to return to the title of the poem, which is unique within
the Lyrical Ballads (1800) as it is the only poem to take as its title a quo-
tation from the imagined rustic figure. Other poems that reflect what
Gary Harrison has identified as “Wordsworth’s poetry of encounter with
vagrants and solitaries” are often titled with the rustic’s name and/or
occupation: “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,” “The Female Vagrant,”
“The Mad Mother,” “Old Man Travelling,” “The Old Cumberland
Beggar,” and “Michael.”6 Other poems about rustic characters use titles
that refer to an object associated with the character discussed in the

poem, such as “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew Tree,” “The Thorn,”
“The Last of the Flock,” and “Hart-Leap Well.” Like the stunted
thorn that stands for Martha Ray’s stunted development or the last
sheep that stands for the ebbing away of the shepherd’s income and
occupation, the phrase “We Are Seven” also defines the little girl’s
character. Her affirmative language conserves affective, familial,
local relationships that incorporate the memory of the dead into the
experience of the living.
As the poem conveys, the little girl does not understand herself
as an individual, but rather as belonging to a group of seven related
persons, living and dead, some of whom happen to be planted within
a communal graveyard. Her reasoning, moreover, suggests that even
though she cherishes her family as a unit, those siblings who have
gone to the cities or the sea are even more absent than her dead
siblings, whose whereabouts and fate are intimately known to her.
“Their graves are green,” she argues; the green grave reveals her dead
siblings’ incorporation into the soil and their reemergence in the
living grass, perhaps like Lucy in “A slumber did my spirit seal,” who
is perpetually “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks,
and stones, and trees!” (LB 7–8). Yet, unlike Lucy, who has no marked
grave, the locally buried children in “We Are Seven” have not ceased
to exist but rather create life anew. The thriving grass on their graves
becomes the foundation of the living girl’s play. Beyond the depic-
tion of a little girl’s imaginative resilience, then, “We Are Seven”
appears to reflect the kind “collective memory” that, as Svetlana
Boym puts it, “can be seen as a playground, not a graveyard of mul-
tiple individual recollections.”7 While Boym argues that individual
memory is a graveyard, however, in Wordsworth’s work, the grave-
yard is not opposed to a playground, but rather is a playground, a
generative place for a critical resistance to individualism, progress,
and modernity.
Wordsworth’s dramatization of the girl’s defense of her “green”
churchyard playground in “We Are Seven” serves as an exemplary
“epitaphic ballad” because it extols intergenerational “prolonged
companionship” with the dead, and such companionship serves to
conserve regional, communal identity in the face of modernization
and rural depopulation. Whereas Burke fears that liberal individualism
aimed to “hack the aged parent into pieces,” creating intergenerational
and environmental collapse, in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth

represents an agrarian world that is already being hacked to pieces
(R 195). As Harrison points out, many poems in Lyrical Ballads
bring readers face-to-face with individuals who “inhabit an austere
landscape marked with social turbulence, economic deprivation, and
personal degradation.”8 The project of the Lyrical Ballads responds
to the disorienting incomprehensibility of modernity by attempt-
ing to conserve the past in the face of overwhelming, modernizing
change. Instead of merely encoding a brooding, escapist nostalgia for
the past, these poems present an agrarian dystopia that reveals the
enormous ecological and cultural sacrifices demanded by the emerg-
ing political economy, thereby offering a political argument that
agrarian capitalism, enclosure, and urbanization cause the rampant
destruction of local communities, which leads to perplexity, home-
lessness, and even madness. Each poem puts forth a variation on that
theme, reproducing the organic diversity of localized communities,
and demonstrating the diversity of experience and opinion based on
local situatedness. As the experimental project of the Lyrical Ballads
uniquely brings the reflective lyrical voice of the individual to meet
the communal and public ballad form, Wordsworth’s epitaphic
poems within the Lyrical Ballads reflect primarily on graveyards and
epitaphs, spaces and signs that ideally are communal and public.9
While there is only one actual epitaph in the Lyrical Ballads, “A Poet’s
Epitaph,” Wordsworth’s epitaphic poems, like his later essays that
are upon epitaphs, meditate on the residual social ecology encoded
in graveyards.
Whereas Burke seeks to re-establish a sense of responsibility to
past and future generations, Wordsworth’s poetry evolves to reflect a
cultural crisis in which humans are in danger of losing their attach-
ment to the past and, due to social mobility and land development,
are even separated from many members of their own generation.
Although the Essays upon Epitaphs neglect to mention it, K.D.M.
Snell’s historical survey of parish graveyards indicates that grave-
stones often referred to the dead by name and as “of this parish.”
This trend become so strong in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
century that Snell concludes,
this seems to indicate a greater rootedness in locality than underlay

some parish-register usage of the term. . . . A very certain, enduring
and meaningful attachment to place was being chipped into

stone and inscribed to posterity by such a memorial statement.10
Although critics have argued that Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry

egotistically anticipates his own death or mourns the death of his
former selves,11 I argue that Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry in the
Lyrical Ballads in fact evinces what Raymond Williams has called
“militant particularism,” a stubborn fidelity to particular, regional,
communal customs that responds to the wider phenomenon of
modernity’s disembedding of regional, intergenerational social
imaginaries.12 Instead of elegiacally seeking to individualize loss,
Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry reads epitaphs as part of a social ecol-
ogy in which public monuments transform “individual worth” into
“the common benefit of the living” (PW II.53).
Frances Ferguson suggests that Wordsworth proposes a theory
of epitaphic reciprocity in which exchanges are made “between
the poet and the stranger, between the stranger and the deceased
through the poet, and between a dead human and newly invigor-
ated nature.”13 The epitaphic mode brings to light a social ecology
that solicits reciprocity between the living and the dead and between
human cultures and their natural environment. Likewise, Geoffrey
Hartman argues that in Wordsworth’s poetry, “Not only is the
graveyard a major locus for the expression of nature sentiment, but
Nature is herself a larger graveyard inscribed deeply with evidences
of past life.”14 If Wordsworth reads landscape as graves, he also reads
graves as landscape: like human dwellings in the natural world,
epitaphs encode social history. Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry is at
once conservative, looking to preserve the past as a model for the
present, as well as conservationist, championing a nascent environ-
mentalist ethos. My reading of Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry there-
fore intervenes in arguments regarding his politics and his nascent
environmentalism.
The common narrative is that Wordsworth began his career as a
liberal and then became increasingly conservative. This view has
been challenged by James Chandler, who argues, “if we understand
‘conservative’ to mean ideological proximity to Burke, then the
visionary and experimental writing for which Wordsworth is revered,
his program for poetry, is from its very inception impelled by power-
fully conservative motives.”15 My argument is indebted to, but
also complicates, Chandler’s argument; I argue that Wordsworth’s

“conservatism,” particularly in his epitaphic poetry, attempts to con-
serve residual or customary cultures and landscape as a form of
radical resistance to modernity. Wordsworth’s poetry, Anne Janowitz
points out, emerges as “the complex inheritance from the plebian
customary culture being fought over and articulated in both country
and city during the revolutionary years, as well as the pure distill-
ation of Burke’s account of custom.”16 In this sense, Wordsworth’s
poetic vision echoes Burke’s fear that the social and environmental
impact of liberal individualism, social mobility, and land develop-
ment will leave the people and the land “a ruin instead of an habi-
tation.” This reading of Wordsworth links his conservatism to his
advocacy for environmental conservation.
My argument then engages with “green” readings of Wordsworth,
which often elide liberalism and environmentalism. Jonathan Bate,
for example, describes Wordsworth’s project for the Lyrical Ballads as
“ecopoetic,” because it proposes that “when we commune with those
forms [of nature] we live with a particular intensity, and conversely that
our lives are diminished when technology and industrialization alien-
ate us from those forms.” Rigby further suggests that Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads “sought to renovate both the language of poetry and
the vision of the land in light of indigenous traditions.”17 These
characterizations of the ecological dimensions of Wordsworth’s
poetry – as a critique of technology and industrialization or as a
preservation of indigenous traditions – can both be interpreted as
emerging from a conservative point of view that advocates for the
moderation of progress and the conservation of regional identities.
Ron Broglio’s phenomenological reading of Wordsworth argues
that he is a poet who “upsets optical hegemony by using his body
as a tool for mapping space.”18 The use of body as a tool for expe-
riencing and understanding one’s environment is emphasized in
Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry, such as the girl playing on the graves
of her siblings, and I would add to Broglio’s claim that Wordsworth’s
exploration of the body as an alternative “cognitive ecology” is revealed
by epitaphic poems that meditate on the intergenerational space of
the graveyard until the environment emerges as a tactile “contact
zone” between the living and the dead.
In the following, I argue that Wordsworth illustrates the importance
of epitaphic community in “The Brothers, a Pastoral Poem,” which
like “We Are Seven” explores the emotional reaction to the loss of a
sibling. However, “The Brothers” reveals a village’s failure to conserve
intergenerational imagination and community. After discussing “The
Brothers,” I suggest that Wordsworth’s poetic imagination not only
seeks to keep the memory of the dead alive but also tracks down
living, ghostly memorials, such as the Female Vagrant and the Old
Cumberland Beggar, elderly, marginalized people who are tangible,
visible links to the past. Whether a village cares for or ignores these
marginalized figures, and whether it maintains its graveyards, have
the potential to facilitate the intergenerational imagination or to
illustrate its degeneration into competitive, liberal individualism. In
“Michael,” the final poem of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), landscape
emerges as a graveyard that marks and conserves the memory of
a former way of life. In much of Wordsworth’s poetry, Scott Hess
convincingly argues, the land becomes a site of individualist self-
possession “free from the exigencies of social relationship, eco-
nomic need, and humdrum everyday experience,” yet I argue that
Wordsworth’s epitaphic poems in particular take a different tack:
rather than examining common life in order to edify the poet’s
individual mind, in the epitaphic poems Wordsworth ponders
how individual life and loss can be restored to the common good in
a “visible center of community” (PW II.56).19
Epitaphic community
In spite of increasing physical and social mobility, evidenced in the

absence of all her living siblings, the little girl in “We Are Seven,”
with which I began, clings tenaciously to a life among the dead in a
local graveyard. In his reading of Wordsworth’s “politics of nature,”
Nicholas Roe argues that “By deliberately affronting the adult’s – and
the reader’s – preoccupations, the poem leads to a new understanding
of life in relation to death, perhaps to a restored sense of human com-
munity that can transcend loss.”20 This “restored sense of human
community” is linked to the way the child metaphorically echoes
the Burkean view of communal life as grounded in and pledged to a
notion of imaginative, intergenerational responsibility, or, in Burke’s
terms, as a “partnership not only between those who are living,
but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those
who are to be born” (R 96). Although it may seem that the traveler
who confronts the girl is simply insensitive to her emotional, imagi-

nary attachments, when his pedagogical insistence is read through
Paine, it appears that the traveler is insisting that the child imagina-
tively sever herself from the past in the interests of progressive, liberal
individualism. But the girl’s reaction to the traveler’s view defends her
communal outlook on life. Rather than characterizing herself as an
individual, she will continue to “Dwell near them” (24) and her sense
of self will develop through a naturalized necromancy in a localized
place. Wordsworth’s championing of the country graveyard emerges
as particularly conservative, moreover, when read in the context of
nineteenth-century arguments for modern burial reform, in which
“the burial reformers see the promiscuous mingling of the living and
the dead as inviting moral as well as physical infection.”21 In the con-
servative view, grasping the dead hand of the past becomes a way of
psychologically negotiating the vicissitudes of modernity.
In Essays upon Epitaphs Wordsworth goes so far as to argue that the
“village church-yard, lying as it does in the lap of nature” becomes a
site of habitual return every Sunday, and this habit in turn inculcates
a sense of community:
The sensations of pious cheerfulness, which attend the celebration

of the sabbath-day in rural places, are profitably chastised by the
sight of the graves of kindred and friends, gathered together in a
general home towards which the thoughtful yet happy spectators
themselves are journeying. Hence a parish-church, in the stillness
of the country, is a visible centre of a community of the living
and the dead; a point to which are habitually referred the nearest
concerns of both. (PW II.55–6)
Echoing Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”

Wordsworth locates a common cultural good in the rural church-
yard, “a visible center of a community the living and the dead”
that is inextricably tied to the local culture and landscape.22 The
rural churchyard discussed in Essays upon Epitaphs is perpetually
visible to the community just as the little girl in “We Are Seven”
insists, “Their graves are green, they may be seen” (emphasis added,
37). Wordsworth’s valorization of the rural churchyard draws upon
Burke’s conservative themes of habitually returning to the dead for
moral guidance. Yet Wordsworth’s “community of the living and
the dead” emerges as more egalitarian than Burke’s desire that we

always act in the presence of “canonized forefathers,” for Wordsworth
argues that we can be “profitably chastised” into a sense of conser-
vation and moderation through any grave, especially those of the
working class.
In the Lyrical Ballads, both “We Are Seven” and “The Brothers” sug-
gest that attachment between kin and to regional places are insepa-
rable. Both ground that attachment in a similar topos, the country
churchyard. Just as the little girl’s siblings who have gone off to sea
or the city are more absent than her dead kin, in “The Brothers”
Wordsworth represents social mobility as a kind of premature death,
an even more permanent and profound loss of a sibling than death
and local burial. However, while “We Are Seven” is a study of imag-
ined communal resilience in the face of modernity, “The Brothers”
illustrates communal degeneration. Here, James, left behind without
any tangible, local reminder of his brother Leonard who went to sea,
could no longer “dwell near” his brother, which caused his depres-
sion and possibly suicide. In turn, James’s burial in an unmarked
grave hinders Leonard’s reintegration into his native community
upon his return. Due to the lack of active conservation of memory
and community through written epitaphs, the family is therefore
severed from its native land.23
“The Brothers” begins with a monologue of a priest, a community
leader, in which the priest extols his village’s graveyard:
. . . In our church-yard

Is neither epitaph nor monument
Tombstone nor name, only the turf we tread
And a few natural graves (LB 12–15)
The community therefore ostensibly circulates by shared oral epitaphs.

Kurt Fosso argues that in this poem “conversation of the dead forges
social cohesion among the living, making the dead again the invisible
center of the community.”24 Yet “natural graves” lack the mediating
force of the “second nature” of written cultural records that bind
community together. Fosso’s reading accepts the priest’s point of view,
even though the poem invites the reader to distrust it. For example,
when the priest sees Leonard attempting to discriminate between the
unmarked graves, “He took his way, impatient to accost / The Stranger,
whom he saw still lingering there” (LB 35–6). The priest exhibits a
surly reaction to the lingering “Stranger,” while at the same time the
third-person narrator informs the reader that this “Stranger” is Leonard,
who left the village as a young teenager to become a mariner in
order to support his brother James. At sea, Leonard struggled with
“calenture,” a nostalgic sickness for home, and would often see his
homeland within the waves of the ocean. Now, instead of gazing
at waves to find his home, Leonard gazes at the undifferentiated
ground of unmarked graves to determine whether his brother, his
last remaining family member, has died.
Situational irony pervades the remainder of the poem, which turns
into a dialogue between Leonard and the priest: Leonard and the
reader both recognize Leonard’s relationship to the priest and village,
but the priest remains ignorant. Hinting at his intimacy with the area,
Leonard engages the priest by asserting that the landscape in the vil-
lage has changed. The priest first denies any change, but then remem-
bers and admits that mountain cliffs have broken apart, altering the
direction of the stream flowing over them. While missing the obvious
clue that Leonard is intimately familiar with an earlier landscape, the
priest assures Leonard that the history of the area is encoded both in
the priest’s mind and in the parishioners’ individual dwellings:
To chronicle the time, we all have here

A pair of diaries, one serving, Sir,
For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side,
Your’s was a stranger’s judgment: for historians
Commend me to these vallies. (163–7)
The priest tells Leonard that he exhibits a “stranger’s judgment” and

brags that “historians commend me.” Throughout the poem Leonard
asks specific questions about his family, and the priest still does not
recognize Leonard, nor does he become suspicious about the spe-
cificity of his questions. The priest therefore insists that he serves as
the community’s memory even as he displays obvious lapses. Words-
worth alters his familiar formula of championing native knowledge
over the outsider as the poem depicts the degradation of an insular
community that keeps its cultural memory private.25
“The Brothers” illustrates that individualized, private cultural mem-
ory both follows and facilitates the breakdown of communal bonds.
Culture, the poem indicates, needs to be more actively preserved,

even if the preservation must take place through the second nature of
public memorials to facilitate memory. Leonard confronts the priest
about the “natural graves” in the unmarked graveyard, and he reads
the unmarked graves as a counter-memory to the priest’s narrative:
your church-yard
Seems, if such freedom may be used with you,
To say that you are heedless of the past.
Here’s neither head nor footstone, plate of brass,
An orphan could not find his Mother’s grave: (168–72)
Distressed that there is no obvious marking of the graves, even more

importantly Leonard notes that they are not clearly delineated: “the
dead man’s home/ is but a fellow to that pasture field” (174–5). In
this poem, the graves might be green, but they cannot be seen, unlike
the graves in “We Are Seven.” In Leonard’s village the communal
space of the graveyard is not demarcated from utilitarian pasture.
The priest responds, “We have no need of names and epitaphs, /
We talk about the dead by our fire-sides” (179–80). Although the
priest espouses an idealized oral culture, he still does not recognize
Leonard even as Leonard sheds tears about the grave of his brother.
Like the conversation between the traveler and the little girl in “We
Are Seven,” this dialogue exposes a tension in arguments about the
proper relationship to the dead in modernity. Leonard maintains
that his village has failed in making the churchyard a “visible centre
of a community of the living and the dead,” since he cannot tell
the graves from each other or from the open field. While the priest
believes that encoding memory in writing is unnecessary, the past
can live only as long as the natural memory of the village’s inhabit-
ants, and clearly the priest’s memory is failing. While perhaps at
one time oral culture was enough to preserve the past, as modernity
demands more social and physical mobility, a conscious investment
must be made in preserving records of the dead for the sake of con-
servation as well as a cultivation of future community.
Preserving memory of the dead should not enclose communities,
and ideally, in Wordsworth’s estimation, graves should welcome
travelers into the communities that they enter. In his Essays upon
Epitaphs he praises the Greeks and Romans for lining the roads
heading into their cities with graves inscribed with the admoni-
tion “Pause, Traveller!” He imagines these monuments as resting,
welcoming places for those outside the community: “the stranger
is introduced through its [the gravestone’s] mediation to the com-
pany of a friend” (PW II.54). In this moment of interpellation, the
mortmain, the dead hand of the past, calls out to the traveler, who
is then subjectively obliged to acknowledge the mortmain’s continu-
ing existence and influence. Even without any direct admonition to
passersby that they should stop, “The silent voice of the tombstone,
otherwise inert language, is heard when it is read” as Lorna Clymer
argues, and “the deceased, silenced now in death, speaks through
the reader, whose voice is conscripted by this epitaphic posses-
sion.”26 Hailing the traveler who is then conscripted into reading and
remembrance, these public markers inculcate a sense of community,
for without memorials, the dead cannot be known to the living as a
“friend,” and there will be no prolonged and local attachment. Grave
markers and the text written upon them thus become transitional
objects between an ideal organic culture and the emergent culture of
competitive individualism.
As the dialogue in “The Brothers” progresses, Leonard’s native
community exhibits further signs of deterioration. Still failing to
recognize Leonard, the priest tells the story of Leonard’s grandfather,
Walter, who struggled with debt, and then died, leaving his two
grandsons “destitute” orphans. Leonard, weeping, asks to hear more
about the orphans, and the priest replies: “If you weep, Sir, / to hear
a stranger talking about strangers, / Heaven bless you when you are
among your kindred!” (239–41). After Leonard asks about the specific
fate of his brother, the priest describes that James became a “child of
all the dale”, wandering and then staying a few months at one home
and a few at another. While this arrangement sounds communal,
it also indicates that James never found a stable home. He ended
up itinerant, like a vagrant, finally falling off a cliff while despond-
ently wandering. Just as Leonard developed calenture as a mariner,
James, although still at home but having no tangible reminder of his
brother, developed a similar kind of homesickness. A sailor afflicted
by calenture jumps off his ship when he fancies he sees his home
in the waves, and likewise James wanders off a cliff searching for
the home that he had with his brother. Leonard thus left home but
retained the hope that his imagined home was intact. James waited
for Leonard’s return and experienced modernity at home – becoming,

in short, “homeless at home,” to borrow a poignant phrase from the
poet John Clare (BH 264).
“The Brothers” cautions that the already fragile “shadowy rela-
tionship” with the dead is inaccessible to those outside of an insular
community. The result is the loss of an imagination of the past and of
an investment in the future. Leonard planned to retire in his native
community, but after encountering the priest’s failed memory he
returns to the sea where, as a grey headed mariner, “he broods over
how, in trying to rescue his brother, he doomed him,” as Samuel
Baker argues.27 Before returning to sea, Leonard says his final goodbye
through a letter to the priest. Apparently any reconciliation with his
native village, even that of a final farewell, must be accomplished
through the second nature of writing. Wordsworth declares in his
Essays upon Epitaphs that “an epitaph is not a proud writing shut
up for the studious; it is exposed to all” (PW II.59). Leonard’s native
community has precisely the opposite kind of culture: its privatiza-
tion of memory into individual family homes disallows public access
and prevents Leonard’s reintegration into the community. Thus, the
private letter to the priest.
Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” depicts a similar failure of community
in relationship to an unmarked grave. The poem revolves around the
possibility that an illegitimate infant was murdered and not buried
properly. A thorn tree and heap of moss that is “like” an infant’s
grave serves as a locus for gossip, strife, and alienation instead of as
a center of community.28 In both “The Brothers” and “The Thorn,”
the failure to maintain a visible, readable graveyard can be seen as
a failure of community to care for its dead, for its living, and for its
future. Beyond the way that epitaphs on graves form written and
visual communication between the living and the dead, the grave
itself physically incorporates the deceased individual into the com-
munity’s center. In this way, graveyards and epitaphs are anticipa-
tory. As Paul de Man argues about Essays upon Epitaphs, “the power
to anticipate is so closely connected with the power to remember
that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from each other.”29
In other words, Leonard or Martha Ray might have been able to
“remember” their future integration into their local community if
they were able to contemplate their relatives’ well-marked graves
publicly. A thriving social ecology of a community, its graveyard,
and the surrounding environment fortifies the intergenerational

imagination, which in turn holds open a space for a continuing
community.
If, as Jon P. Klancher argues, “a secret ambition of the Ballads –
unconfessable in public prefaces – is to represent the rural poor to
themselves,” then this poem warns about the consequences of failing
to maintain cultural memorials.30 The importance of properly car-
ing for the dead, and more significantly, the markers of the dead, is
the subject of “To a Sexton.” Wordsworth praises the sexton’s work
through contrasting two different ways of relating to the earth. In this
poem, preservation is explicitly linked to the cultivation of a garden:
Look but at the gardener’s pride

How he glories, when he sees
Roses, lilies, side by side,
Violets in families.
By the heart of Man, his tears,
By his hopes and by his fears
Thou, old Grey-beard! art the Warden
Of a far superior garden. (LB 17–24)
The gardener takes pride in his individual accomplishment; he cul-

tivates beauty by improving land and imposing his dominion over
it. The sexton, however, “plants” not just the material bodies of the
dead, but also the heart of humanity, which is not about the accom-
plishment of the individual sexton but rather about his cultivation of
a place where a community can share its hopes and fears. Whereas
the gardener is merely anticipatory in his efforts to create a blooming
space, the sexton’s intergenerational work preserves the memory of
the dead in anticipation of a “far superior garden” of human commu-
nity. Schor argues, “‘Bearing’ the dead means both ‘naturally’ support-
ing them and imaginatively conceiving and giving birth to them.”31
The Sexton tends a superior garden because it bears the dead: he pro-
tects the remains of the deceased and gives birth to their posthumous
life by creating a space where those remains can be imaginatively
connected to the “hopes and fears” of the living. Wordsworth valor-
izes the Sexton, moreover, because in the Lyrical Ballads he also tends
a garden of the dead, locating and preserving remnants of the past
encoded on tombstones, elderly bodies, and landscapes.
Living memorials
Wordsworth’s poetry in the Lyrical Ballads marks “living memorials”

located in the bodies of elderly and marginalized people, who, resid-
ing between death and life, and past and present, embody a former
way of life. These living memorials function in two ways: they either
represent the lost sense of communal responsibility due to enclo-
sure and individualism, as in the case of “The Female Vagrant,” or
they bring community together through their vulnerability, as in
“The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Raymond Williams suggests that the
Cumberland Beggar embodies the “spirit of community,” which “has
been dispossessed and isolated to a wandering, challenging if passive,
embodiment in the beggar.”32 While they reflect neither an ideal
organic community nor the liberal spirit of individualism, the Female
Vagrant and the Old Cumberland Beggar embody a pre-modern spirit
of community disembedded from the localized place, in “an inter-
mediate position between society and nature.”33 The quality of the
community’s care for these living memorials, just as the graveyard in
“We Are Seven” and “The Brothers,” reflects the health or deterioration of
a particular community.
“The Female Vagrant” illustrates the consequences of enclosure
and privatization of the commons on the pre-modern, communal
lives of the poor. In her monologue, the vagrant describes her first
20 years of life as she grew and thrived in her father’s rural cottage
until their way of life is suddenly disrupted by the “improvement” of
the common that had been her family’s home:
Then rose a mansion proud our woods among,

And cottage after cottage owned its sway,
No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray
Through pastures not his own, the master took;
My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay;
He loved his old hereditary nook,
And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook. (LB 39–45)
The pre-modern pastoral is subsumed by a new and “proud” man-

sion, an ostentatious sign of new money built by an aggressive
parvenu devoid of the older values of common right in which land
is a “hereditary nook.” The eighteenth-century phenomenon of the
new country house, Nigel Everett notes, was accompanied by the

“determination of miserly, overgrown, and rapacious farmers to tear
down cottages near their farms and beat down the price of labour
to below the level of subsistence.”34 Similarly, the vagrant woman’s
new neighbor is not satisfied with his mansion; he needs to continu-
ally expand his wealth and power. This characterization recalls the
Burkean fear of this class as the insatiable new monied interest.
The poem thus dramatizes the debate between improvement and
inheritance as the guiding principles in land use. While Burkean
conservatism has been charged with merely defending aristocratic
wealth, in “The Female Vagrant” Wordsworth suggests that inherit-
ance, as an ethos for land use, extends beyond the aristocratic estate
to the practice of subsistence farming on a common.
As the family’s “substance fell into decay” (50), instead of her
father’s land the vagrant woman inherits the bitter consequences of
modernization and improvement. Her cottage industry, for example,
will no longer fetch adequate prices, and the poem notes her “empty
loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel” (89). The loom, hearth, and
spinning wheel of former home employment now left idle function
metonymically to represent a larger phenomenon of domestic work
transferred into the urban factories and the transition from quasi-
independent production to wage labor. The privatization of land
altered the day-to-day circumstances for the agrarian poor, who, as
K.D.M. Snell argues, “lost more than their livestock through enclosure.
They lost also the rights to collect fuel or furze from the commons,
wastes, and nearby woods.”35 Having no other option than watching
the rest of his family die of starvation, the vagrant woman’s
husband is persuaded to join the military to fight in the American
Revolutionary war. The ideology of improvement and enclosure at
home, in short, displaces a group of agrarian poor who will then, in
desperation, be willing to fight in British colonial wars, thus being
drawn through the vicissitudes of wage labor into becoming nation-
alists supporting the political economy that displaced them.
After her husband and children die in America, the female vagrant
returns to England, but her homecoming only reinforces her aliena-
tion: “And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, / And near a
thousand tables pined, and wanted food” (179–80). The burgeoning
wealth of Great Britain that built the thousand homes filled with
food does not extend to the class of former cottagers displaced by
the new economy. Without home or family, the female vagrant is

forced to find a new community with other impoverished, displaced
persons – the “earth’s rude tenants” – yet this new community bears
very little resemblance to the past (218). By the end of the poem,
the environment has become a Malthusian world of scarcity and
biopolitical consequences: the “mercy” of the natural world does
not yield generosity but rather a parsimonious allocation of food. In
this way, the vagrant woman’s fate, now determined by chance, sig-
nifies the ideological and governmental shift in the late eighteenth
century: the movement into a capitalist economy accompanied by a
shift from government as a patriarchal police/benefactor (eighteenth
century) to a government that disciplines the poor simply by remov-
ing institutional barriers to the “bioeconomic laws of population and
subsistence.”36 The state abandons the vagrant woman so that she
might experience, and be educated by, nature’s laws of scarcity.
In spite of her obvious physical suffering, she insists that the psy-
chological, not physical or economic, consequences of this shift are
most difficult, and laments that she has “Foregone the home delight
of constant truth” (260). She mourns her lost identity bound up with
the constancy of her childhood home. The origins of her psychological
instability can be traced back to the moment when her father for the
last time climbed his hill-top to survey the land, where he had vainly
hoped that “his bones might there be laid, / Close by my mother in
their native bowers” (59–60). As he prays, the vagrant woman declares
that she can no longer pray because her connection to her kin and to
her childhood home is lost. As a “vagrant,” her life seems to dramatize
Edmund Burke’s warning, “When antient opinions and rules of life are
taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment
we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to
what port we steer” (R 78). A meditation on such dislocation is the
explicit theme of the initial poem to the 1798 volume, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.” “The Rime” as Baker
points out, “presents a point of view according to which the modern
human condition is that of being at sea (however unknowingly) even
when one is on land.”37 These poems thus dramatize the conservative
belief that leaving home, local traditions and mores, rather than yield-
ing economic profits and cognitive rewards, leads to inestimable loss,
death, and destruction, and that the return home, if accomplished at
all, is experienced as uncanny and haunting.
Locating a social ecology in ghost-like figures and graveyards,

Wordsworth’s poems begin to reflect a dark ecology. Timothy Morton
warns ecocritics against an “environmental romanticism” that futilely
“aims to conserve a piece of the world or subjectivity from the ravages
of industrial capitalism and its ideologies.” He suggests a post-modern
“dark ecology” in response that “is a politicized version of decon-
structive hesitation or aporia. [...] Dark ecology is a melancholic
ethics. Unable fully to introject or digest the idea of the other, we
are caught in its headlights, suspended in the possibility of acting
without being able to act.”38 Yet Morton’s dark ecology may hold
striking similarities with Romantic conservatism. For example, a
dark ecology emerges when, upon returning from the long journey,
the female vagrant discovers that she is “homeless near a thousand
homes” (179). Her return, rather than indulging in nostalgic ambi-
ence, evokes feelings of uncanny alienation. In other words, the
conservative desire to “feel” embedded in a native place is prompted
by the distance from it, and the desire to return to and root current
life in the past faces the impossibility of that desire.
Similarly, in “We Are Seven,” even though the traveler’s aesthetic
appreciation for the girl’s rustic beauty motivates his encounter, when
attempting to talk with her, he finds that the girl’s background is,
from an outsider’s point of view, traumatic: her brothers and sisters
are lost to the cities and the sea, and to poverty and disease. The trave-
ler’s encounter with the rustic past defuses his fantasy of it: the little
girl’s odd refusal to accept the death of her siblings profoundly disturbs
him and brings his understanding of her to a screeching halt. Instead
of learning something about the pre-modern lifestyle, the traveler
realizes that he is epistemologically and emotionally severed from the
very thing that he desires to return to and know again. Perhaps this is
why Wordsworth repeatedly tries to mark the dead who are unburied,
like Lucy or the Danish Boy, or those who are buried but are in dan-
ger of being forgotten like his schoolteacher Matthew and the Boy of
Winander. Although being embedded in place is no longer an option,
just as an entirely oral epitaphic community is no longer possible, the
cultivation of community based on active memory and habit in rela-
tion to the dead might serve to counter the simultaneous erosion of
people and place in capitalist modernity.
Continuing to read Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads as epitaphic
meditations on a garden of the dead, “The Old Cumberland Beggar”
represents a still viable community formed by the inhabitants of a vil-

lage habitually tending to the needs of this marginalized figure. The
introduction to the poem states, “The class of Beggars to which
the old man here described belongs, will probably soon be extinct”
(p. 205). His threatened existence, like figures such as Goody Blake,
Simon Lee, and the Female Vagrant, makes him a living anachro-
nism: he is a figure of the past haunting the present. Yet unlike the
Female Vagrant, who has become detached from place and wields no
power over others, the Cumberland Beggar is able to retain his local
identity because he is not simply wandering, but instead regularly
receives charity on “certain fixed days” in a particular place.
The poem begins with a description of the old man’s vulnerability
that noticeably lacks eighteenth-century sentimentality about the
beauty of the suffering poor: he can barely eat because of his shaking,
palsied hands, and he is so “bowbent” that at any given time “one
little span of earth / Is all his prospect” (50–1). The Old Cumberland
Beggar’s view is toward the earth, the grave, and because his kind
is “almost extinct,” the lines of the poem become epitaphic in
their desire to record his life and the particular kind of residual,
local economy he inculcates in the community. In the same way
that Wordsworth defends the moral efficacy of shared commerce
between the living and the dead, his epitaph for this living memo-
rial asks readers to “deem not this man useless.” The poem directly
criticizes the utilitarian morality of improvers, “Who are so restless
in your wisdom, ye / Who have a broom still ready in your hands /
To rid the world of nuisances” (68–70). Although he is describing
the way in which a utilitarian, modernized society would seek to
eliminate the beggar because he is not a productive worker, scholars
have suggested Wordsworth might be defending his own occupation
as a poet. Alex J. Dick argues this poem “signals Wordsworth’s own
consciousness of unproductivity as the negation of economic devel-
opment.”39 The beggar then becomes a figure that unites an entire
system of loss: he has lost his ability to work or care for himself,
thus inspiring continual loss in the community through the giving
of alms. In this way, like the little girl in “We Are Seven,” the beg-
gar’s localized resilience holds open a space for a coming communal
emergence.
The system of expenditure and loss in “The Old Cumberland
Beggar” bears remarkable similarities to the graveyard, where a place
of loss and grief creates community. Yet in this poem, instead of a

gravestone, it is the beggar’s body that records the past:
From door to door, the Villagers in him

Behold a record which together binds
Past deeds and offices of charity
Else unremember’d . . . (80–3)
In this passage, the beggar’s body is rendered like a tombstone that

preserves a record of the past that might otherwise be “unremember’d.”
As James Averill suggests, “The analogy between the old, nearly blind
man and a parish registry of charitable deeds tends to turn the
Beggar into a piece of writing.”40 The beggar then becomes a living,
breathing epitaph like the tombstone that asks a traveler to “pause.”
Moreover, as the tombstones and epitaphs in a country churchyard
“profitably chastise” current generations, the poem asserts that the
beggar becomes “a silent monitor” of the entire community (115).
By repeatedly visiting the doors of the village’s inhabitants, the
beggar’s vulnerability inculcates a habit of community generosity:
Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,

The Mild necessity of use compels
To acts of love; and habit does the work
Of reason . . . (90–3)
The beggar’s visitations create a community “formed by habit,” to

use Burke’s phrase, brought together by emotion, not by the reason
of liberal, punctual individuals. When “habit does the work of rea-
son,” a community is in a settled state. Habits begin as conscious
bodily changes developed in response to an event. Through practice,
change is rendered second nature. Thus bodily habits record the past.
Habit counters the illusion of “the accomplished unity” of the indi-
vidual, according to Félix Ravaisson, by foregrounding the way that
all living forms, even plants, are trained and thus are marked by
their social and physical environment and its history. As he explains,
“The history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or
rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontane-
ity.”41 Wordsworth’s poetry attempts to record just such an invasion
of “natural spontaneity” into rational freedom in order to counter
notions of regimented individualism.42 “The Old Cumberland

Beggar” records numerous habits or secular rituals of deference that
develop in response to the beggar’s vulnerability: the strong, the
wealthy, and the young go out of their way to not interfere with his
slow passage along the road.
Even more importantly, the villagers living in homes that he visits
regularly have developed habits of material generosity. As Harrison
argues, this poem “compels us to see that the apparently useless
rounds of begging constitute a kind of regular industry that manu-
factures good will and action of kindness among the villagers.”43
Wordsworth describes the “punctual care” of his neighbor:
Duly as Friday comes, though press’d herself

By her own wants, she from her chest of meal
Takes one unsparing handful for the scrip
Of this old Mendicant . . . (149–52)
Just as an encounter with an epitaph insists one “Pause!” by the side

of the road, a similar kind of interpellation occurs with the beggar,
as his palsied dead hand of the past knocks on the door. Although
verbally uncommunicative, his presence demands recognition and
assistance. “The Old Cumberland Beggar” demonstrates the way in
which even for the very poor, being rooted and known in a particular
place, like the corpse that is properly buried, cultivates commonal-
ity and community through their vulnerability. While the Female
Vagrant is also a figure out-of-place, the Old Cumberland Beggar is
not marginal to the community. Instead, he is central to it, as David
Collings points out: “he wanders through the village from house
to house, creating a strangely fractured community.”44 While the
community does indeed appear to be individualized in its responses,
everyone is required to respond to the same demand, and in that
sense the beggar serves as a kind of common ground. In this way, he
emerges as a mediator that hovers, like the epitaph, between Burke’s
ideal organic community and the new political economy of competi-
tive individualism.
Wordsworth further undermines the new political economy when
he locates value in the “unproductive” labor of the beggar. In response
to arguments for the regulation of the poor through workhouses, he
admonishes: “May never the House, misnamed of industry, / Make
him a captive” (172–3). David Simpson reminds us, “Wordsworth was

writing for a generation in which many were in favor of abolishing
beggars altogether, not out a desire for an improved society (in the
spirit of the poet’s early letter to Llandaff), but because beggars were
non-industrious or disgusting.”45 In this light, “The Old Cumberland
Beggar” appears to be a protest of that vision of the poor as disgusting
and expendable, and in this way Wordsworth’s conservatism is far
more attentive to the suffering of the poor than Burke’s. Whereas
Burke locates residual communities in ancestors and traditions,
Wordsworth insists that the beggar’s relationship to the land and
community creates moral capital in its bodily enactment of residual
practices. Rob Mitchell argues, the poem “does not describe the beg-
gar but rather the social relation of begging,” and I would add that
the poem also describes the ecological relation, for Wordsworth
imagines the beggar’s death and incorporation into the natural world
at the end of the poem, which is envisioned as an escape from the
workhouse that would seek to hold him “captive.”46 Wordsworth
intuits that the emerging biopolitical project of the workhouse, which,
as Michel Foucault argues, “endeavors to administer, optimize, and
multiply it [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations” in its fostering and controlling of life.47 As the beggar dies
outdoors, in the same place where he had interacted with the villagers,
there emerges a social ecology that reincorporates the abject back in to
the community in order to effect a transformation of waste and loss
into a common good.
The transformation of waste and ruin into a common good is the
theme of the final poem of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), “Michael.” In this
poem, Wordsworth challenges his own views about the social efficacy
of graves or the elderly as tangible reminders of the older economic
system: Michael’s attempt to bind Luke to the land by showing him
his ancestors’ graves and laying the cornerstone of the sheepfold fails.
Moreover, rather than being “nearly extinct” like the Old Cumberland
Beggar, Michael is long departed, and even the land has been trans-
formed as “great changes have been wrought / In all the neighbor-
hood” (487–8). Michael presents an additional epitaphic focus on
the ability to detect environmental and social history within the
landscape. Hence the poem narrates Wordsworth’s walk through what
appears to be an “utter solitude” until the poet notices “one object
which you might pass by, / Might see and notice not” (13, 15–16).
Pointing out “a straggling heap of unhewn stones,” the poem then

proposes that landscape encodes the past, and if one is appropriately
attentive to one’s surroundings, the successes and failures of previous
generations are made manifest (17). Unfolding as a reading of stones,
“Michael” contains the hallmarks of an epitaphic poem as the stones
and the poem itself are transformed into a memorial to the pastoral.
Geoffrey Hartman argues, “The poet reads landscape as if it were a
monument or grave.”48 Wordsworth’s sense of obligation to provide
a story for these stones is an extension of the epitaphic obligation; in
“Michael” the dead hand of the past resides in the landscape itself.
As burial places or ruins of a dwelling become tokens of collective
cultural identity that might resist degeneration into competitive
bourgeois individualism, the landscape in many of the Lyrical Ballads
is similarly represented as a vulnerable “living memorial” to the suc-
cesses and care of previous generations.
The narrator describes Michael’s former way of life as a model of
reciprocity between humans and environment, “these fields, these hills
/ Which were his living Being, even more / Than his own Blood . . .”
(74–6). In the beginning of the poem, the family lives out a model of
Burkean organicism, in which habitually inculcated relationships with
both past and future generations emerge as a nascent social ecology
concerned with “habitation.” However, this pastoral setting, as Pfau
notes, is not innocent but “affiliated with the intricate and hazardous
urban world of manufacture, trade, and credit-based speculation,”
and thus Michael becomes “an unwilling participant in a historically
distinctive phase of England’s evolving political economy.”49 A gen-
erational shift takes place, moreover, in which the younger generation
severs the intergenerational moral imagination that considers the
welfare of past and future generations. The younger generation, influ-
enced by social mobility and consumerism, spends profligately and
racks up debt that is then cast backwards upon the elderly who still
hold land. Michael refuses, however, to part with his patrimonial
lands: “. . . if these fields of ours / Should pass into a Stranger’s hand,
I think / That I could not lie quiet in my grave” (240–2). Instead of for-
feiting his land, he sends his only son Luke to the city with the hope
that he might make enough money to preserve the family land intact.
The abandoned sheepfold in the landscape is not the only epitaphic
marker in the poem, because, before Luke leaves for the city, his
father takes him to the family graveyard to admonish him:
. . . I still
Remember them who lov’d me in my youth.
Both of them sleep together: here they liv’d
As all their Forefathers had done, and when
At length their time was come, they were not loth
To give their bodies to the family mold. (375–80)
Michael hopes Luke will be “profitably chastised” at the family grave-

yard, which might convey the gravity of Luke’s intergenerational
responsibility to maintain his forefathers’ land. Yet the prompting
of Luke’s intergenerational imagination appears to have little effect.
Luke is sent off to the city to work off the debt that his cousin
has incurred, yet he quickly begins to “slacken in his duty” and
finally “in the dissolute city gave himself / To evil courses . . .”
(452–4). Although the dead had previously endowed the living
with land and culture, within modernity, the debts incurred by the
current generation rapidly overtake and destroy the work of many
previous generations; this phenomenon emerges as a major theme
in Edgeworth’s Irish novels. The long history of a stable social and
environmental community is emphasized within the structure of
the poem, for Michael’s long life and his building of a reciprocal
relationship with his land is narrated in a lengthy 433 lines. The
rapidity with which modernization severs families from that past is
also reflected as Luke’s departure and dissolution takes place in just
24 lines. Disconnected from his family and his past, Luke cannot
fail to be as dissolute as his cousin. He never returns, and the land
passes into a “stranger’s hand.” Wordsworth notes that “the plough-
share has been through the ground” and “great changes have been
wrought” (486–7). Wordsworth’s tone is subdued in this passage, yet
at the same time the poem cautions that the “great changes” wrought
by agricultural capitalism irrevocably erode local cultures and their
subsistence economies. In this way, Wordsworth’s “Michael” antici-
pates John Clare’s distress at watching the commons and wastes of
his youth being enclosed and transformed into ploughed, efficient
fields. Clare laments what he calls “the rage of the blundering plough,”
thus representing the intensity and rapidity of improvement and
agricultural capitalism as nothing less than a violent personal assault.50
While the violence of modernization is subdued in “Michael,”
Wordsworth clearly displays the end of that change: the only trace of
the former occupants can be found in the “remains” – the sheepfold

and the oak tree – that have not been ploughed under. Wordsworth’s
description of a uninhabited landscape and former whole way of life,
like the graveyards or ghosts that populate the Lyrical Ballads, then
emerge as spectral place markers that conserve a coming community.
The temporal structure of Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry, according
to de Man, “demands the description of a future experience by
means of the fiction of a past experience which is itself anticipatory
or prefigurative.”51 While the progressive, liberal view insists that
freedom exists in severing the self from past, Wordsworth again plays
the role of the sexton by marking fragments and ruins that might
remind others that there have been alternatives to the hegemony of
modernization. The Lyrical Ballads then do not engage in political
escapism through a displacement of history and politics into a rarefied
“spiritual economy” nor are they a liberal moment in Wordsworth’s
authorship before his downward spiral into political conservatism and
aesthetic banality.52 The ballads, rather, constitute a radically-engaged
conservative experiment that attempts to create, in poetic form, the
social memory of rural, local communities while pointing to the
material reality of these communities’ disappearance within modernity.
As Alan Bewell writes, Wordsworth’s writing amounts to “a domestic
anthropology, which seeks to give a ‘substance and life’ to a specific
way of life that he knew was disappearing.”53 In the face of social frag-
mentation caused by the enclosure of the commons, agricultural capi-
talism, and rural depopulation, Wordsworth takes on the role of the
sexton, tending to and preserving the dead, the marginalized, and the
environment in order to cultivate a counter-memory that challenges
stark economic realities. The heterotopia of the graveyard, Foucault
argues, allows “a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time
in an immobile place,” and for Wordsworth any site that engenders
an imagined “community of the living and the dead” – country grave-
yards, the living memorials of the elderly, or landscape that encodes a
former way of living – preserves a social ecology, a second nature, of
communal intergenerational intimacy.54 In other words, not only are
Wordsworth’s graves green, but attending to them also cultivates the
“far superior garden” of a residual culture with emergent potentialities.
Part II
Habitation
3
Thomas Bewick’s A History of
British Birds and the Politics
of the Miniature
Eighteenth century natural history is inextricably linked to colonial

expansion, which brought with it a swell of new species to be named,
examined, and categorized – a “burgeoning proliferation of colonial
natures.”1 As Mary Louise Pratt points out, the cosmopolitan, system-
atic arrangement of plants and animals led to “a new form of what one
might call planetary consciousness among Europeans.” A consequence
of this planetary consciousness, Pratt observes, was the way in which
“the system of nature overwrote local and peasant ways of knowing
within Europe just as it did indigenous ones abroad.”2 While natural
history expanded outward to classify all life on the planet, Thomas
Bewick’s A History of British Birds (Vol. I, 1797; Vol. II, 1804) aimed to
conserve a complex collection of small, miniature details of regional
knowledge. Instead of placing animals within a global, Linnaean system
that pursued and applied the regularities of laws, Bewick employed and
conserved a provincial folk taxonomy, which defined and categorized
birds by their “ecological proclivity,” their interrelationships with
other animal, human, and plant life.3 By narrating bird behavior and
habits within a circumscribed space, Bewick’s British Birds additionally
chronicles a “second nature” as the text records social customs and
relations within Bewick’s native Northumberland. Bewick’s British
Birds suggests, like Claude Lévi-Strauss, “everything objective con-
spires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human
society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?”4
In other words, British Birds renders the natural habits of birds
homologous to Bourdieu’s sense of a cultural habitus as “embodied
history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.”5
65
Bewick acknowledges systematic natural history, but he also remains

faithful to a stubborn provincialism that highlights the boundaries of
his own knowledge: for the most part, his engraved birds are embed-
ded in particularized environments in or around Newcastle. Indeed,
in contrast to the elaborate, detailed backgrounds that characterize
his engravings of British birds, his engravings of “foreign birds” are
noticeably bereft of any landscape detail or textual description. They
exist simply on pages in an uncategorized appendix.6 Bewick’s refusal
to depict the environs with which he has no established, repetitive
intimacy suggests that he foregrounds and even celebrates the limits
imposed by a circumscribed sense of place. He gives equal weight to
all sources of knowledge – scholarly, loco-historical, and anecdotal –
as he proudly acknowledges that the goal of British Birds is not to
be entirely original but to make available to the public aggregated
empirical and provincial information.7 As a folk taxonomist who not
only cataloged birds, but birds in relation to a whole organic way of
life, Bewick resembles Edmund Burke’s ideal “men of untaught feel-
ings; that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish
them to a very considerable degree” (R 87).
As Burkean nature is also always a “second nature” with politi-
cal implications, Bewick’s natural histories carefully outline what he
calls the “animal oeconomy,” a term that highlights the connection
between the materiality of economic and biological systems. While
the bird as a familiar symbol of freedom may seem to resonate with
agitation for liberal rights, on a more literal level, the freedom of birds,
as documented by Bewick, is located in their ability to retrieve from a
common bounty whatever they need to eat and to build their nests.
Flight allows birds to transcend property boundaries, but their migra-
tion is nevertheless depicted as a perpetual return to their old homes
and birthplaces. A member of the Philosophical Club of Newcastle
with Thomas Spence, Bewick believed that the emergent ideology
of the monied class colluded with the still dominant power of the
landed class to enclose and improve common land, which destroyed
the commoners’ way of life. In what is dubbed a “natural history,”
Bewick champions a residual culture through the lives of birds, which
become the repository for customary freedoms and perquisites that
preceded and ideally would transcend the law of enclosure.
Gaston Bachelard proposes, “two images: the calm nest and the old
home, weave the sturdy web of intimacy on the dream loom.”8 Bewick’s
Politics of the Miniature in Bewick’s British Birds 67
study of birds and their nests resonates with the idea of an “old home”
and the intimacy that occurs with repeated, customary intergenera-
tional relationships with both land and community. The emphasis on
intimacy and on knowing something deeply resonates with the redou-
bling, the looking back, and then looking again at the minute habits
within a particular place, which is manifested not only in Bewick’s
epistemology but also in his pictorial representation of birds and
rustic life. Bewick’s biographer remarks that his engravings manifest
a peculiar “miniature intensity”9 by shrinking to focus on small, rural
occasional scenes, and then shrinking even further to consider bird
life within these scenes. If, as Susan Stewart argues, it is the “capacity
of the miniature to create an ‘other’ time . . . which negates change and
the flux of lived reality,” Bewick’s miniature world of birds imagina-
tively invents birds’ lives as rooted in an ancient and immutable history
of customary practices.10 At first glance, his engravings and text seem
to reflect the nostalgic, place-based picturesque that aestheticizes rural
poverty and the pre-enclosed landscape.11 Yet through the embedded
epistemology that guides Bewick’s folk taxonomy, the habitus of birds,
not Newcastle itself, becomes the residual tropological location of what
E.P. Thompson has called customs in common. Bewick might represent
all life as embedded in place, but it is the birds’ practice – how they
actively negotiate being propertyless – that he wishes to memorialize.
This chapter first considers how Bewick’s aspiration to revive the art of
wood engraving before British Birds facilitated his interest in residual
culture. Then it analyzes his taxonomy. Finally it documents how he
symbolically sets up bird life as a model for human life.
Before British Birds: Engraving residual culture in

Bewick’s A General History of Quadrupeds (1790)
Thomas Bewick’s cultivation of residual culture is found in his con-

scious revival of wood engraving. As he notes in his Memoir, when he
began engraving wood, the art was “at the very lowest ebb, in this
country” and his life’s work was “in renewing or bringing into use
(this to me) new art” (M 187). Although many engravers were turn-
ing to copper engraving for book illustration, Bewick self-consciously
attempted to preserve and revitalize this older method. He apprenticed
himself to Ralph Beilby, a silver engraver who owned a jewelry and
engraving shop in Newcastle. His everyday tasks included engraving
and personalizing doorplates, carriages, candlesticks, watchcases, dog

collars, whips, hair-combs, and lockets. The apprenticeship inculcated
an idea of engraving as a trade that, as John Brewer points out, “offered
marks of ownership: names, mottos and insignia to identify the objects
on which they were engraved as someone’s special property.”12 By
engraving and thus individualizing commodities that would other-
wise be undifferentiated from other objects, Bewick discovered how
engraving might renegotiate perceptions of material objects and place
them within a relational framework. Indeed, the idea that engraving
transforms property from an expendable consumer good to an inter-
generational keepsake and memorial becomes a theme in Bewick’s later
woodcut vignette engravings, which aim to conserve a disappearing
way of life.
Bewick’s first book of engravings, A General History of Quadrupeds
(1790), was a global project completed in partnership with Beilby,
who became his business partner. Even though Quadrupeds is in
many ways similar to other cosmopolitan histories published in the
late eighteenth century, within it, there are hints of an epistemology
of residual conservation. For example, the preface announces the
authors’ “disregard of system”:
In disposing the order of the following work, we have not thought

it necessary to confine ourselves strictly within the rules pre-
scribed by systematic writers on this part of Natural History; as it
was not so much the object of our plan to lay down a methodical
arrangement of the various tribes of four-footed animals, as to
give a clear and concise account of the nature, habits, and dispo-
sition of each, accompanied with more accurate representations
than have hitherto appeared in any work of this kind. (HQ iii)
Representing the natural world accurately cannot, therefore, be done

through established rules, systems, or methodical arrangements, but
instead requires close observation of animals’ habits and dispositions.
This mistrust of systematicity resonates with a conservative position
in which, according to David Simpson, a “miscellaneous and diversi-
fied style is intended as a gesture of freedom against the constraints
of form and system.”13 In contrast to a Linnaean taxonomy based on
morphology, Bewick and Beilby order quadrupeds by beginning with
the locally known: “We have endeavored to lay before our readers
a particular account of the animals with which our own country is

abundantly stored, especially those which so materially contribute to
the strength, the wealth, and the happiness of this kingdom” (HQ iii).14
The volume begins with familiar British animals of practical use to
humans – horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs – before venturing into the
unfamiliar territory of camels, lions, zebras, and elephants. It ends
with the most distant and perplexing animal of all, the taxonomical
quandary called merely “an amphibious animal,” the platypus.
Even while engaged in this global project, the distinguishing feature
of Quadrupeds is the way in which Bewick and Beilby ground their work
not just in England but more particularly in Newcastle and its sur-
roundings by placing intricate tailpieces at the end of each entry that
depict various aspects of British rural life. Even as the Northumberland
reader encounters an animal as foreign as the camel or tiger, the entry
often ends with a familiar, nostalgic sight of a man fishing in the Tyne
or traversing it on stilts, of a young boy leading two blind fiddlers,
and of travelling men stopping at a rural intersection, or sleeping,
eating, and relieving themselves by the side of the road.15 In this way
the vignettes become anecdotes, complete stories in themselves that
puncture cosmopolitan natural history and provide a counter-history
to the text’s natural history. If “the anecdote binds structures to what
exceeds them,” as Gallagher and Greenblatt suggest, then the vignettes
of humans interacting with animals in and around buildings and
landscapes specific to Newcastle suggest that the habitus of humans
and animals always exceeds the system that attempts to contain and
classify them.16 The arrangement of Quadrupeds thus manifests an
epistemology wherein established, familiar local relations mediate and
counterbalance new, more abstract information.
Bewick’s conviction of the uniqueness of his own provincial land-
scape and its animals, paradoxically derived from a project as global
as Quadrupeds, extends further to his engraving of the Chillingham
cattle, which carried an influential symbolic charge throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bewick’s description of these
white cattle, according to Harriet Ritvo, marked the beginning of a
popular “narrative that identified the emparked herds of the nine-
teenth century with the animals that had roamed the prehistoric
forests of Britain.”17 As “a very singular species” distinguished by
their color, and “nearly extinct” except on private estates, the unique
physical and behavioral features of the Chillingham cattle are then
relationally tied to a bygone ancient hunting practice that was “the

only modern remains of the grandeur of ancient hunting” (HQ 38–40).
Bewick describes the Chillingham cattle hunt as a model of reci-
procity between the rich and the poor. The hunt was advertised to the
entire neighborhood, and on the day of the hunt, at least 100 horse-
men arrived along with 400–500 people on foot. All classes hunted
together with whatever means they had among “shouts of savage joy
that were echoing from every side.” Bewick remarks, regretfully, that
this type of hunting has been abandoned due to its danger. Now the
park keeper kills the cattle with one shot from a rifled gun. Beyond
its function of attaching local interest to a global natural history, the
Chillingham cattle amount to, in Bewick’s terms, “modern remains”:
living memorials that encode an intergenerational imagination of past
communal values. These conservative values are further confirmed
because cattle exist in Bewick’s time due to their protective enclosure
by magnates, an exemplar of noblesse oblige.
Harriet Ritvo notes that “distinguished, often aristocratic landowners
over whose estates the cattle wandered cherished these claims to wild-
ness, aboriginality, and pure descent; they often regarded these animals
as family mascots or totems.”18 The cattle also come to encode the
feudal past, which resounds with Walter Benjamin’s observation that
in literature animals often become “the receptacles of the forgotten.”
According to Benjamin, when ancestral history is lost and unfathom-
able, “like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors
took him [the writer] down to the animals.”19 While Benjamin is refer-
ring to Kafka’s fabulist stories, a similar dynamic is at work in Bewick’s
Chillingham Bull, as well as in the entire project of the History of British
Birds (and in the unfinished History of British Fishes). These animals
become Bewick’s receptacles of the forgotten, barely decipherable
“modern remains,” to use Bewick’s term again, encoded with all but
lost residual customs and values. In the absence or attenuation of the
power of old families and local histories, Chillingham cattle and British
birds become the repository for these losses.
“Systems have been formed and exploded”: Bewick’s

embedded taxonomy
In the Lyrical Ballads (1800), the poem “The Two Thieves; or, the Last
Stage of Avarice” praises Bewick’s skill: “Oh now that the genius of
Bewick were mine / And the skill which He learn’d on the Banks
of the Tyne” (1–2). Wordsworth’s characterization of Bewick as a
solitary Romantic genius who gathers all of his information directly
from localized habitation rather than from books is reiterated by
John James Audubon who, in his Ornithological Biography, recalls
meeting with Bewick and concludes, “My opinion of this remarkable
man is that he was a son of Nature, purely and simply, and that to
it he owed nearly all that characterized him as a man and artist.”20
Late nineteenth-century scholarly and popular interest in Bewick
continued to consider him a “natural phenomenon,” for whom
“no convention or artifice intervenes between observation and
execution.”21 Modern Bewick scholarship reformulates his Romantic
reputation as a natural, unlearned genius into an engraver who
depicted simple, nostalgic vignettes of rural life in England. For
example, Max F. Schulz claims that Bewick’s vignettes depict a locus
paradisus: “against this background of national alarm and unrest,”
Bewick’s engravings sought “to relive the ‘good old days’ in his own
imagination and to remind other English of them, by associating the
common joys of rural activity and personal fulfillment of village life
with prelapsarian wholeness of heart.”22 Bewick scholarship trans-
forms his reputation into that of a mere recorder of village tradition,
an interpretation of his work that continues to assume that Bewick
simply experienced and recorded rural life. Yet this idea of Bewick as
an intellectually, politically, and socially disengaged “natural” phe-
nomenon working alone and without books is simply inaccurate.
As I will show, Bewick’s organization of British Birds was guided by a
particularly communal, artisan approach.
Bewick is not alone in being pegged as a simple local historian dur-
ing this era. For instance, the celebration of Gilbert White’s localism
in his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) is a kind of
“mythology” that says more about a cultural longing for the past than
it does about White’s relationship to his work. Tobias Menely argues,
“this persistent mythology tells us more about the ideological articu-
lations of a modern nostalgia for autonomous localities than it does
about the methods with which White came to know and represent
his parish.”23 A similar Romantic mythology has been constructed
around Bewick’s engravings for British Birds. Yet Bewick’s localism, like
White’s, complexly registers and conserves existing habits and sets of
relations through a dialectic of local and global knowledge. Instead
of being written by a solitary genius who wished, in Wordsworth’s

words, that “Book-learning and books should be banished from the
land” (“The Two Thieves,” 6), British Birds was a radically comprehen-
sive project that took into account global classification systems, local
histories, and personal anecdotes. While “many ornithologists at the
time thought that they had to choose between Linnaeus and Buffon,
because the contradictions seemed impossible to resolve,” in a typical
entry Bewick included the bird’s common English name, several of its
English local, vernacular names, its Latin name, and its French name.24
The text then generally describes the bird’s morphology in the first
paragraph, while the paragraphs that follow are uneven and eclectic
collections of quotations from Buffon or English local and natural his-
torians. The expertise of these scholars is quoted alongside an anecdote
or recipe from a neighbor. Voracious in his appetite to take in any
knowledge and unapologetically derivative from other authors, Bewick
cobbled together fragments of local, social knowledge with systematic
knowledge: the engravings reflect the realistic features of birds while
the tail-pieces that end each entry depict the diverse activities of
communal rural life in Newcastle.
As with Quadrupeds, Bewick’s British Birds is skeptical about estab-
lished orders of scientific knowledge: “Systems have been formed
and exploded, and new ones have appeared in their stead; but, like
skeletons injudiciously put together, they give but an imperfect
idea of that order and symmetry to which they are intended to be
subservient” (BB1 ii). Such skepticism also contributes to the con-
servative aspects of the project as Bewick contrasts the impoverished
nature of systems to the thickness of lived relations. As British Birds
begins with skepticism about new systems of ordering knowledge,
it reinforces a return to the customary, which becomes a variety
of radical traditionalism – a leaving open of the door of the past.
Bewick’s organization of the birds suggestively returns to the early
modern distinction between “land birds” and “water birds,” classify-
ing them by habitat rather than morphology.25 (Linnaeus had done
away with this distinction in order to classify birds by their beaks and
feet.) Bewick’s birds are categorized by habitat and diet, two aspects
specific to their “common rights”: the freedom to live on common
land and to eat of the abundance of that land.
Bewick’s reputation as a simple nostalgic engraver is due in part
to the way that his engravings are abstracted from his book project.
But the engravings generate more complex political and social views
when read as book illustrations interpreted alongside the text. Bewick
controlled every detail of layout and production with an intensity that
recalls William Blake. While Bewick admittedly lacks Blake’s visionary
zeal, the disjointed, cobbled together aspect of his work can be inter-
preted as a kind of bricolage defined by Jon Mee as “an approach which
unapologetically recombines elements from across discourse bounda-
ries such that the antecedent discourses are fundamentally altered in
the resultant structures.”26 Natural science at this point in time was not
a pure genre, and the literary was not separate from the scientific.27
Yet Bewick’s juxtaposition of the global with the provincial, the
scientific with the vernacular, emerges as a unique embedded relational
epistemology that reflects the way he situated himself both within a
local community and within a larger scholarly community stretching
from the seventeenth century forward.
According to his memoir, Bewick’s close study of the natural world
guided his representations of birds: “At the beginning of this under-
taking, I made up my mind to copy nothing from the Works of others
but to stick to nature as closely as I could – ” (M 117). But for Bewick
the natural order and the social order could not be disentangled. The
landed gentry and farmers alike shipped Bewick live, freshly shot,
and stuffed birds, and Bewick was welcomed in the homes of aristo-
crats with collections of stuffed birds. There was such avid communal
involvement in his project that Bewick despaired at being able to
keep up the acknowledgments of those who had sent him specimens.
He made the effort, however; at the end of many of entries in British
Birds, he acknowledged the local source of the bird in the engraving.28
Long after the initial publication of British Birds, Bewick sought
to correct and enhance his understanding of birds. In the back of a
copy of the book owned by fellow ornithologist John F. M. Dovaston,
Dovaston copied notes about visiting Bewick in Newcastle on
October 15, 1823:
I succeeded by mentioning an error in one of his works, for which,

when I had convinced him, he thanked me; and took the path in
conversation I wished [to natural history], by asking me if I had ever
seen the pied flycatcher in a state of nature. I fortunately had. We
then go on a long discussion on the discriminative qualities among
the willow-wrens, particularly the chiff-chaff.29
In its collective thrust then, the project resembled the concurrent

practice of artisan botany, which, as Anne Secord notes, “was regarded
as part of a collective craft. For an artisan, the ‘Mystery’ or property,
of any craft belonged to no individual but the body of craftsman
past, present, and future.”30 Like the intergenerational apprentice-
ship system that initiated Bewick into the world of engraving, his
ornithological project is characterized by this communal, collective
mentality. His engravings derived from birds others collected for
him and the descriptions included the anecdotes from neighbors
and friends.
“Subtenants of the cultivated world”: The homologous

life of birds
Bewick’s constructed identity as a “son of nature” strolling the banks

of the Tyne was therefore only one small part of the way he collected
information for the project, yet he signals the project’s local, circum-
scribed character with the engraving on the title page to Land Birds,
“The Newcastle Arms on a Boundary Stone” (see Figure 3.1).31 The
engraving features the Newcastle arms on a boundary stone behind
which ten boats transporting coal float on the River Tyne. In the
background, a colliery pipes out black smoke that rises ominously
behind the scene of human work on the Tyne. High above all this
human activity rises a tree, a typical feature of a Bewick engraving; as
Uglow points out, “Trees, rather than spires, are Bewick’s verticals.”32
In the tree sits a lone blackbird that appears to be calmly observ-
ing the human labor around it. The depiction of a bird observing
humans on the title page of a book about the observation of birds
announces the relational aspect of the project: birds are not just
specimens or objects of study, they return the gaze and observe the
observer. The engraving suggests the limitations of human observa-
tion, and reverses the subject and the object, the animal and the
human. It thus reveals a counter-perspective – the birds-eye-view
that cannot be known by humans – to the one presented in the book.
The scene of the bird observing human activity also echoes what
Pratt terms “reciprocal vision” in travel writing: the traveler narrates
his own perspective of his encounter with native people, and then
attempts to record their responses to his intrusive presence. The
trope of reciprocal vision arises, according to Pratt, from “the desire
Figure 3.1 “The Newcastle Arms on a Boundary Stone,” engraving for the
title page of the History of British Birds: Land Birds (1797). Courtesy of the Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
to achieve reciprocity, to establish equilibrium through exchange,”

and while Pratt sees this as the travel writer’s effort sentimentally
“to confirm his position as anti-conqueror” even as he asserts his
superiority, Bewick’s reciprocal vision between humans and birds
resounds with a sense of reciprocity based on mutual coexistence.33
Bewick argues that birds are “the constant neighbours, or attend-
ants on the habitations of men. They are the subtenants of the
cultivated world” (BB2 vi). The knowledge presented in British Birds
is grounded in the specific area of Newcastle, evincing a place-based
nostalgia, yet Bewick is interested in memorializing the practice of
being a tenant, or in Burke’s terms, a “life-renter” – nest-building,
dwelling, feeding – in a world that is not owned but shared with
other life.
While the title page depicts a bird watching humans working as
boats ship coal for manufacturing, the engraving that follows depicts
the result of birds’ “work,” a snug nest with two eggs balanced on a
leafy tree bough. In the introduction to Land Birds, birds are called
“aerial architects” and their nests are described as being:
constructed with such exquisite art, as to exceed the utmost exer-

tion of human ingenuity to imitate them. Their mode of building,
the materials they make use of, as well as the situations they select,
are as various as the different kinds of birds, and are all admirably
adapted to their several wants and necessities. (BB1 xviii–xix)
Bewick asks the reader to admire the birds’ ability to adapt organi-
cally to their environments and create dwelling spaces within them.
Wonder at the building of nests also permeates the reflections of
Bachelard, who suggests, “A nest-house is never young. [. . . ] we
might say that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting.
For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back
to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold.”34
The politics of bird dwellings reveal further that the “materials they
make use of” and the “situations they select” are drawn from a world
without boundaries and enclosures.
Bird nests become examples, moreover, of the kind of bricolage that
characterizes Bewick’s project. Nests are a found art, and the ability
to borrow and collate common resources becomes a microcosm of
the human idea of home. The nest provokes at once this “return” to
a fully embodied habitation of animal life, yet Bewick marvels even
more at birds’ dependence on the common bounty of the world
for existence. Wonder at the birds’ stubborn fidelity to nesting is
reflected in the anecdotes that pepper British Birds: after one pair of
rooks found “their half-built nests torn in pieces” and themselves
harassed at every turn, they “took refuge of the spire of that build-
ing,” and “built their nest on top of the vane, and brought forth their
young, undisturbed by the noise of the populace below them; the
nest and its inhabitants were consequently turned about with every
change of wind.” In spite of the precarious location, they never-
theless “returned and built their nest every year on the same place”
(BB1 72).35 Similarly, Bewick records a bald coot’s nest that was loosened
from the rushes so that “the nest was driven about, and floated on
the surface of the water, in every direction; notwithstanding which, the
female continued to sit as usual, and brought out her young upon her
moveable habitation” (BB2 135). The nest thus becomes a practice,
even on a “movable habitation,” asserting a place to be and to thrive.
Birds are therefore not just described in their habitat, but as embody-
ing a habitus; they inhabit not so much a place but rather a role, a
role of acting out “natural” common rights.
The textual narration of bird tactics for survival must be read in tan-
dem with Bewick’s illustrations of human habitation. The illustration
for the introduction to Land Birds, “Winnowing Corn in a Farmyard,”

features three humans sifting piles of wheat in a bounteous autumn
scene (see Figure 3.2, BB1 vii). This engraving is a good example of
what Uglow terms Bewick’s “miniature intensity”: more than 40
birds and animals populate the detailed engraving, a sow and her
piglets roam a farmyard that is shared with chickens, ducks, geese,
and turkeys. Three game birds hang on the outside of the house.
Overhead, a large, uncountable flock migrates south for the winter over
several buildings with thatched roofs that are nestled into the trees in
a way that makes them look like nests. All this life appears to dwell
together in quiet harmony. Engravings like this have earned Bewick
the reputation of being a nostalgic cataloguer of a lost rustic Eden.
Taken individually and out of context, the engravings that include
humans indeed appear to reflect what Svetlana Boym has called
“restorative nostalgia” that “signifies a return to original stasis, to
the prelapsarian moment” so the “the past is not a duration but a
perfect snapshot.”36 Another well-known engraving appears as a per-
fect snapshot: “A Countryman Drinking at a Spring” features a man
Figure 3.2 “Winnowing Corn in a Farmyard,” engraving from the introduc-

tion to History of British Birds: Land Birds (1797). Courtesy of the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
drinking freshly gathered spring water out of a hat.37 The spring runs
over a large boulder on which the words “Grata Sume,” thanks to the
highest, are engraved (BB1 xxx). Bewick’s restorative nostalgic scenes,
when read as a series of engravings that inform each other, become
snapshots of human life lived collectively in idealized harmony, yet
they also reflect an overt dependence on a common good figured as
customary rights, which assert the right to gather water or game from
common sources.
Bewick is perhaps most well known to Romanticists because his
Romantic irony: the cover of Ann Mellor’s English Romantic Irony uses
Bewick’s engraving of a fingerprint over one of his miniature, idyllic
rural scenes as a visual model of Romantic irony. Years before they
were used for identification purposes, Bewick recognized the intricacy
of fingerprints and in later books he used it as “his mark.” Bewick’s
attention to the detail and uniqueness of fingerprints is widely con-
sidered to be one of the most important milestones in the history
of fingerprints, predating fingerprint classification.38 For Mellor, the
irony of fingerprint engraving irony is found in the way “Bewick
subtly creates and de-creates his idyllic English landscape.”39 The fin-
gerprint over the scene may suggest that a single human life can blot
out an entire landscape in just an instant, or it may call attention to
the creator of such an idyllic scene, thus foregrounding its artificial-
ity. The ironic fingerprint over the rural scene should be read, I argue,
with a similar engraving that depicts a leaf superimposed over a
rural scene (BB1 157). Both the leaf and the fingerprint blot out the
miniature, idyllic scene behind it, so in both these engravings there
is a shift in perspective, or rather Bewick draws attention to the shift
in perspective required by observation of the miniature. The minute
lines on the individual fingerprint or the intricate veining of the leaf
are brought into the foreground, highlighting the complicated and
original designs that one can find in the smallest parts of life. As the
enlarged minutiae of life are superimposed onto the miniature of a
landscape scene, the vast landscape is profoundly shrunken while
the miniature is enlarged.
Bewick’s penchant for observing and valuing the small, minute
details of human habits and behaviors within local, communal space
leads to the representational choice of the miniature in Bewick’s
engravings. The spatial closure of the miniature, as Susan Stewart
notes, “opens up the vocality of the signs it displays,” and the
observation of all the small details provides a larger narrative about

the habitus of human life as well as the ecological niche of bird
life.40 At the same time, Bewick’s engravings shrink the wide world
of human activity and landscape into the smallest miniature. Such
a reversal of perspective is particularly striking in his bird engravings
because the bird – which is normally seen by humans as something
small and distant – is at the center of the engraving and full of
detail. Bewick collapses the distance between the human reader and
the bird and, upon more careful observation, the reader notices that
human dwellings and activities – a hunter on his horse or walking
with his rifle and his dog, a farmer plowing a field with a team of
oxen, a sheep that has fallen off a cliff and lies dead, large fields and a
scarecrow, and peasant cottages – sprawl across the background
in detailed miniature, again giving the reader an ironic, imagined
bird’s-eye-view of human life.41 The world of human activity, which
looms so large in everyday life, is shrunken into Bewick’s mini-
ature vignettes interspersed through both volumes. These miniature
engravings of village country life not only ground new information
in known, lived experience, but the miniature itself, as Stewart
points out, amounts to a conservative mode of representation:
“We cannot separate the function of the miniature from nostalgia
for preindustrial labor, a nostalgia for craft.”42 Bewick’s woodcut
miniature engravings then, both in form and content, contribute to
the conservative ideological thrust of his project and complement the
communal aspect of gathering knowledge. Painstakingly handmade
and mass-produced, the engravings walk a fine line between craft and
commodity image, just as Bewick balances common right and pri-
vate property.
These nostalgic vignettes also contrast sharply with other, less well-
known, engravings. On the title page of British Birds, as mentioned
earlier, colliery smoke pours out ominously behind the beautiful
rural scene in the foreground. Four additional engravings in the
second volume illustrate coal being loaded onto massive colliery
ships sailing on the Tyne.43 Depicting modern resource extraction
and transport for manufacturing, these engravings often have no
birds or vegetation present, thus illustrating the disappearance of an
entire rural ecology. The odd and even unsettling juxtaposition of
scenes of modernity next to snapshots of a nostalgic past, refuses to
reconcile modernity with tradition. These engravings, then, like the
Lyrical Ballads, present modernity as a threatening disjunction with

the past.
Bewick’s British Birds finally tries to imagine possibilities for non-
teleological development because he was concerned about the nega-
tive effects of the loss of common rights on the poor. In his Memoir
he argues that the commons were “the Poor man’s heritage for Ages
past,” and he believed that the enclosure of the commons degraded
the independent spirit of England’s poor. He further argued that the
French Revolution began because the aristocracy “contributed little
or nothing, to support the state, & they quite forgot, that instead of
their being the natural guardians, or depositories of the honour &
virtue to the nation – they were chiefly known only as its oppressors”
(M 23, 135). Many of Bewick’s vignettes depict and perhaps even
warn that the same situation is occurring in England. For example,
“The Beggar and his Dog at the Rich Man’s Gate,” depicts a one-
legged former soldier gnawing on a bone like an animal while his
starving dog looks on (see Figure 3.3, BB2 27). While the soldier
has been reduced to animal existence, first through war and then
through homelessness and starvation after the war, he sits outside of
the grand gates of an estate where a well-fed peacock looks on. When
read in relation to the entry on the peacock, which is ominously
described as “a part of the luxurious entertainments of the Roman
voluptuaries,” an overindulgence that signals cultural decline, the
vignette seems to point to abdication of the gentry’s responsibility
to the poor (BB1 292). In his text for the egret, Bewick remarks, “if
it be the same bird as that mentioned by Leland, in the list or bill of
fare prepared for the famous feast of Archbishop Nevil, in which one
thousand of these birds were served up. No wonder the species has
become nearly extinct in this country!”(BB2 46). Similarly, about the
pheasant, he writes, “It is much to be regretted that this beautiful
breed is likely soon to be destroyed by those who pursue every
species of game with an avaricious and indiscriminating rapacity”
(BB1 284).
According to Bewick, the “indiscriminating rapacity” of the gentry
coincides with their abdication from a moral economy. In addition,
he rails against enclosure and criticizes the newly wealthy farmers
and their overblown “aristocratic pomposity” (M 138). Bewick sug-
gests that the dominant culture of the landed interest and the emer-
gent culture of the newly propertied monied interest form a terrible
Figure 3.3 “The Beggar and his Dog at the Rich Man’s Gate,” tailpiece engrav-
ing from History of British Birds: Water Birds (1804). Courtesy of the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
greedy collusion for money and property. Thus Bewick returns to

a residual habitus of birds: enclosure fences cannot restrain them
from finding a place to live and from taking what materials might
be necessary for their nests. In this way, his natural history estab-
lishes a space for negotiating propertylessness, anticipating, perhaps,
Michel de Certeau, who suggests “poaching in countless ways on the
property of others” as a tactic for negotiating the grid of workplace
discipline.44
Engravings like the “Beggar and his Dog at the Rich Man’s Gate”
depict the limitations of human life, kept outside the walls of enclo-
sure and wandering in roadways. John Brewer writes, “Many of
Bewick’s vignettes suggest that enclosure and emparkment, the build-
ing of walls and hedges, are acts of separation. […] Walls separate the
park from the open country as surely as they separate the aristocrat
from those to whom he is obliged.”45 These walls, symbols of enclo-
sure and privatization, divide people from others, and from other
forms of life, for which they are responsible. In contradistinction, the
observation of nature, and of birds in particular, would instruct others
in the ethos of “commoning” and the human obligation to mimic the
abundance of nature in a gift economy. Brewer concludes his analysis
of Bewick’s engravings by stating, “Bewick contrasts natural liberty
with the shackling, man-made proscriptions of the aristocracy and

church.”46 While Bewick indeed critiques enclosure, Brewer simpli-
fies Bewick’s politics into Painite liberalism. Unlike Paine, however,
Bewick was wary of the extension of private property rights. His birds
are not a model of liberal freedom but rather an extended metaphor
for the second nature of customary rights.
Bewick’s celebration of common right through the figure of the
birds is nowhere clearer than in his numerous defenses of birds
widely considered to be vermin and destroyed in great numbers.
Bewick’s compassion for animals is obvious. He is mentioned in dis-
cussions of early animal rights because Quadrupeds rails against dock-
ing the tails and cropping the ears of domestic animals, and against
training bears to perform unnatural acts for an audience. Water Birds
attacks the practice of force-feeding geese. While Bewick denounced
those practices as cruel and inhumane, he goes on to mount an
ecological defense of “pests,” such as rooks, crows, tomtits, jays, and
sparrows, on the basis of their contribution to ecological order. On
this point, he goes so far as to disagree with Buffon, whom he quotes
admiringly in most instances. The counter-argument Bewick makes
in defense of sparrows contains an implicit argument for limiting the
concept of personal property. He writes,
It is surely saying too much of this poor proscribed species to

sum up its character in the words of Count de Buffon:– “It [the
sparrow] is extremely destructive, its plumage is entirely useless,
its flesh indifferent food, its notes are grating to the ear, and its
familiarity and petulance disgusting.” But let us not condemn a
whole species, because in some instances, we have found them
troublesome or inconvenient. Of this we are sufficiently sen-
sible; but the uses to which they are subservient, in the grand
economical distribution of nature, we cannot so easily ascertain.
We have already observed, that, in the destruction of caterpil-
lars, they are eminently serviceable to vegetation, and in this
respect alone, there is reason to suppose, sufficiently repay the
trivial damage they may make either in the garden or the field.
The great table of nature is spread out alike to all, and is amply
stored with every thing necessary for the support of the various
families of the earth; it is owing to the superior industry of man,
that he is enabled to appropriate so large a portion of the best
gifts of Providence to his own subsistence and comfort; let him

not then grudge their pittance, nor think it waste, that, in some
instances, creatures inferior in rank are permitted to partake
with him, nor let him grudge them their scanty pittance; but,
considering them only as the tasters of his full meal, let him
endeavour to imitate their chearfulness, and lift up his heart in
grateful effusions to HIM ‘who filleth all things living with plen-
teousness.’ (BB1 155–6)
While Buffon dismisses the sparrow as destructive and parasitical,

Bewick admonishes us to take a closer look at the work that spar-
rows do in destroying harmful insects in the garden. The politics of
the miniature – of close, careful, and sustained observation of the
shrunken yet parallel world of birds – reveals that sparrows may take
or destroy some part of the crops, but they should be allowed access
to that common bounty because of their use and service to the entire
natural economy. Bewick perceived that the old practice of custom,
which according to Thompson was the “interface between the law
and agrarian practice,” was being slowly effaced by the newer ethos
of absolute property rights.47 Bewick’s ardent defense of sparrows
staged his argument between customary practices, wherein “the great
table of nature is spread out alike to all,” and private property, the
appropriation of “the best gifts of Providence.” Allowing the birds to
glean grain “as only the tasters of his full meal” is a reciprocal perqui-
site for their work. In Bewick’s careful choice of terms, birds become
an exemplar of commoners, those “creatures inferior in rank,” and
the common right to a “scanty pittance” through gleaning. Bewick’s
argument above then seeks to move from a narrowly morphological
epistemology to an entire ecological vision in which the niche of
these birds in their habitat is rendered analogous to the practice
of human culture in its habitus.
Bewick goes so far as to suggest that sparrows provide us with a
moral example by inspiring us to imitate their cheerfulness, as birds
do not sow or reap but rather live day to day off the natural bounty
of the earth or parasitically off the bounty of human labor. The
quotation from the Book of Common Prayer at the end of the entry
refers to a god “who filleth all things living with plenteousness”
and conceptualizes life as common abundance instead of scarcity.48
Bewick’s strange politics, hovering between radicalism and Burkean
conservatism, are illuminated by David Collings’ argument for

“traditionalist radicalism,” which requires one to “attend not only to
local and craft loyalties but also to their direct implication in tradi-
tions of gentry-plebeian reciprocity, symbolic or political inversion,
and ultimately the logic of reversibility.”49 Collings identifies tradi-
tionalist radicalism as stemming from early modern conceptions of
reciprocity and cites Thomas Spence as a representative of this move-
ment. Bewick was one of the plebeians who attempted to preserve
or recreate customary rights, but his moral economy stopped short
of the land nationalization schemes proffered by Spence.50 In fact,
Spence’s advocacy for land nationalization caused these friends to
come literally to blows with cudgels. After a Newcastle Philosophical
Society debate in which Bewick refused to defend Spence’s plan,
Spence called him “Sir Walter Blackett,” the enormously unpopular
noble who worked with new money to enclose the Newcastle Moor.
Bewick’s reaction was to beat Spence severely, and in the passion of
this incident we can locate Bewick’s politics. Local people fought the
enclosure of the Newcastle Moor and re-established the customary
right for every man to graze two cows.51 Bewick celebrated this victory,
and was inspired by the potential political efficacy of custom as “a
field of change and contest, an arena in which opposing interests
made conflicting claims.”52
Like William Blake, Bewick was an artisan disturbed by an emerging
economy shifting into mass production. Far from being a naïf on
the banks of the Tyne, Bewick lived in a world of rapidly shifting
politics. As a member of the Newcastle Philosophical Society he
was immersed in competing ideas about what kind of republic
England might become. His espousal of custom may seem con-
servative, but he championed a “rebellious traditional culture” that
agitated for customary rights for food, shelter, and warmth, regard-
less of who owned the land. Bewick, then, is not simply a nostalgic
cataloger of the loss of the commons; nor is he a proponent of
the liberal extension of rights.53 Through cataloging bird life, he
attempted to re-naturalize a moral economy of common goods
(in both senses of the term) in the face of rapid privatization and
improvement of land.
Birds are of further significance in relation to the commons because
prior to the game laws they served as a kind of common food source
for all people. The game laws, according to Bewick, were “carrying
the notions of the sacredness of property too far, for even this ought
to have its bounds” (M 170). Thus the project of documenting birds’
habits and appearances, along with their uses for hunting and eating,
became a project of documenting and memorializing what Bewick
believed was common bounty. Bewick located the freedom of birds
in their bodily habitus – not just abstracted flying and singing, but in
their more specific abilities to transcend fences in order to gather
food and supplies for building a home. At the same time, birds
became a common for the table of humanity: many of the plates
show hunting, and some of the descriptions provide hunting advice
and recipes. He included information about which birds were bit-
ter and which were good for weak stomachs, what time of year to
shoot them, and how to hunt them, whether through decoys, snares,
or dogs. He includes four pages of specific hunting instructions for
the Mallard alone.54
Bewick’s second, unfinished project, History of British Fishes, depicts
British fish as a similar kind of common. In his Memoir he declares,
“No reasonable plea can ever be set up, to shew that the fish of rivers
ought to be the private property of anyone” (M 172). Bewick believed
that fish, like birds, should be available as a common, and his natural
histories of fish and birds amount to political arguments against pri-
vatization of the commons. He writes,
I have always felt extremely disgusted, at what is called proscribed

Waters (except fish ponds) that is, that the fish, in these waters, as
claimed exclusively as all their own – the disposition which sets
up claims of this kind, is the same which wou’d if it could, sell the
Sea, & and the use of the Sun & the rain. (M 176)
Expressing a prescient fear that the enclosure of the commons ulti-

mately knew no boundaries, his natural histories attempted to natu-
ralize, memorialize, and re-inscribe habits that undermined absolute
conceptions of property rights. His Memoir describes with singular
admiration his childhood fascination with a neighbor, Anthony
Liddell, who after reading the Bible “with attention thro’ & through”
came to the conclusion that “The Fowls of the Air and the Fish of
the Sea were free for all Men” (M 25). Described as a John the Baptist
figure, Liddell wandered the fells and commons in animal skins
preaching the “Gospel of the Common,” and was so earnest in his
belief that even the judges could not sentence him for his numerous
poaching violations. Bewick’s folk taxonomy includes instructions
for hunting and eating birds while many engravings feature nostal-
gic depictions of men angling in order to conserve a memory of the
“tactics” of the rural poor.
A moral economy of reciprocity between all living things origi-
nates in an understanding of all life as subject to vulnerability. Many
engravings show humans and animals alike subject to snow, rain,
and wind. Interspersed with the nostalgic scenes are engravings
of humans in many animal-like, vulgar activities – drunkenness,
sleeping, urinating, defecating, and vomiting (one from too much
drink, the other from too much food) – which call the reader back
from abstractions and distances to the known world, not only from
the global to the local but also at the same time from the mind
to the animal body.55 Human animality simultaneously acknowledges
our vulnerability and unavoidable dependence on others, which
is contrary to an individualist conception of human existence.
Alasdair MacIntyre insists only by acknowledging the “fundamental
relationship between our animal condition and our vulnerabilities”
can we discover the “moral importance of acknowledging not only
such vulnerabilities and afflictions, but also our consequent depend-
ences”56 Like MacIntyre, Bewick seems to be arguing for “virtues
of acknowledged dependence,” which he naturalizes through his
construction of natural history.
Bewick tells us confidently that “a good naturalist cannot be a
bad man” because the naturalist must carefully observe the minute
workings of life (BB2 v). When miniature detail trumps the wide,
global world, that shift in perspective exposes Bewick’s politics of
the miniature, wherein the minute details of the economy of nature
disclose that every species naturally has reciprocal duties. It is up to
us to look for them and to assume them. In other words, the politics
of the miniature observes the work involved in gleaning and even
parasitical behavior in order to mark how it contributes to the com-
mon good. Bewick provides a number of examples in British Birds:
about water birds in general, he writes,
All contribute their services to man, by clearing the earth of the

seeds of noxious plants, as well as the trees of innumerable destruc-
tive insects, with which they feed their young, and claim for
themselves, meanwhile, but a small return of the produce of the

fields and gardens, which too often is ungratefully begrudged
them. (BB2 vi)
And specifically about the Tomtit he writes,
That active little bird, the Tomtit, which is generally supposed

hostile to the young and tender buds that appear in the spring,
when attentively observed, may be seen running up and down
among the branches, and picking the small worms that are con-
cealed in the blossoms, and which would effectually destroy the
fruit. (BB1 xxi)
He further rails against the efforts made to kill or drive off rooks:
in our estimation, the advantages derived from the destruction

which they make among grubs, earth-worms, and noxious insects
of various kinds, greatly overpay the injury done to the future har-
vest by the small quantity of corn they may destroy in searching
after their favorite food. (BB1 64)
These descriptions of the habits of birds that are considered to be

vermin reveal Bewick’s politics of the miniature: close observation
brings to light the way that all life forms have value within the
greater economy of nature. Thus, even life that might at first seem
unproductive or even parasitical should be allowed access to food
and shelter, and in this way, the habits of these unwanted birds
become models for poor to follow. Bewick’s natural history encodes
and naturalizes common rights.
The Romantic conservatism of British Birds is positioned outside
both Paine’s advocacy for a republic of property in the Rights of Man
and the republic of complete land nationalization in Spence’s the
“Real Rights of Man.” Yet the influences of Spence and the rebellious
culture of Newcastle clearly permeate Bewick’s representations of
birds, especially in making the argument that humans should pattern
their habitus on the habits of wild animal life. Spence’s tirade against
Paine’s Agrarian Justice, “The Rights of Infants,” asks: “Is this earth
not our common also, as well as it is the common of brutes? May
we not eat herbs, berries, or nuts as well as other creatures? Have we
not the right to hunt and prowl for prey with the she-wolves? Have
we not a right to fish with the otters?”57 These words could almost
be a caption to Bewick’s seemingly nostalgic, picturesque engraving
of the man fishing alongside a heron (see Figure 3.4). While such
an engraving could be read as an example of the picturesque, which
according to Bermingham, “represented an attempt to wipe out the
fact of enclosure and to minimize its consequences,” Bewick was
attempting to counter enclosure by instructing the poor and wealthy
by naturalizing customary rights through the habits of birds.58 Bewick’s
statement, “The great table of nature is spread out alike to all, and is
amply stored with every thing necessary for the support of the vari-
ous families of the earth,” resounds with Spence’s rhetoric. Yet while
Spence is interested in land nationalization, Bewick is invested more
pragmatically in retaining the practice of the custom as a tactic for
negotiating poverty.
To illustrate this position of reciprocity with animal life, one of the
last engravings in Water Birds depicts two men fishing, the subject
of many of Bewick’s engravings (see Figure 3.4). On the rock in the
Figure 3.4 Tailpiece engraving from History of British Birds: Water Birds (1804).
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
middle of the stream is the Virgilian motto: flumina amem sylvasque

inglorius, may I love the woods and streams (BB2 370). This georgic
ideal space demonstrates that the men are not fishing alone, for
on the left side a heron fishes alongside the men. The fishing bird on
the one side corresponds to the man fishing on the other side, again
suggesting parallel lives and parallel customary rights to fish for basic
sustenance. Thomas Bewick was not alone in turning to animals as
examples of common living. John Clare’s enclosure elegies likewise
depict an alliance between animals and the poor, but in his work,
the poor, birds, rabbits, animals, and even land all become displaced
victims of enclosure and improvement. For Bewick and for Clare, it
is not just the sensual life that we have in common with animals but
also a habitus in common: a habitus inscribed with political agitation
for residual customary rights. Bewick’s natural histories locate and
preserve the customary in the natural world.
While his training in engraving personal property made such
property even more private and personalized, his engraving also
does the reverse – to transform what might be private property
into public knowledge. Many of Bewick’s engravings depict other
engravings, whether mile markers, boundary stones, or memori-
als, and he demonstrates the potential of engraving to become
a memorial to the past and a guidepost to present and future, a
position that resonates with Wordsworth’s epitaphic mode. Bewick
believed in the social potential of engraving and inscription, and
even wished to begin engraving stones as public monuments
(M 185–6). In his Memoir he records that he would like to see beauti-
ful poetry “committed to the care of a Rock,” and in his final book
of engravings, for Aesop’s fables, he includes one that features an
enormous rock overhead with lines from Goldsmith’s “Deserted
Village” inscribed on it.59 Bewick’s entire project of British Birds is
a study of natural history and an engraved memorial to the com-
mons: the way the birds dwell on the common, and the way their
lives might become models and guides for human life. Unlike com-
moners, the fences of enclosure do not restrain birds. Whether land
is privatized or not, birds can always find a place to live and the
necessary materials for their nests and meals. While Bewick’s work
is embedded in a place on “the banks of the Tyne,” what he seeks
to memorialize is not so much a place, but a practice, a technique
of the body. Bewick’s commitment to a pre-modern order based
on reciprocal duties biases him toward a relational epistemology

that contrasts sharply with the liberal, enlightenment bias toward
first principles, atomism, and the free individual. Far from simple
nostalgia, the politics of the miniature, when read within the con-
text of the entirety of British Birds, encodes rebellious conservative
politics in the small and picturesque. Bewick’s natural histories
are encoded with residual practical tactics for the propertyless to
negotiate and even rebel against the emergent ideology of absolute
property rights that fueled enclosure of common land and the
extinction of customary perquisites.
4
Conservation or Catastrophe:
Reflexive Regionalism in Maria
Edgeworth’s Irish Tales
Offered to the public in 1800 as “a specimen of manners and charac-

teristics, which are perhaps unknown in England,” Castle Rackrent: An
Hibernian Tale Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires,
Before the Year 1782 represents itself as an ethnographic depiction of
Irish manners (CR 97). The history of the estate and its Anglo-Irish
owners is narrated in the voice of an Irish servant, Thady, who
recounts the landlords’ consumptive habits overshooting the estate’s
resources. Unlike the limited, individualistic vision of his Anglo-Irish
rulers, Thady’s continuing, interconnected history of four generations
evinces a Burkean, intergenerational view of property management
in which each individual heir is merely a “life-renter.” Due to their
continued lack of intergenerational imagination and responsibility,
the four inheritors of the Rackrent estate are constantly confronted
with the predicament: “When there’s no cash, what can a gentleman
do but go to the land?” (CR 75)1 The heirs thus illustrate Burke’s
argument that the failure to consider past and future generations
when making decisions about land use will render communities into
individuals who “commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying
at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazard-
ing to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an
habitation”(R 192). Like the other texts explored in this book, Castle
Rackrent espouses a traditionalist conservatism that is intrinsically
linked to environmental conservation. Instead of recommending
positive forms of conservation – such as Wordsworth’s advocacy for
public graves, Bewick’s focus on common rights, and Cobbett’s pro-
motion of a cottage economy – Castle Rackrent illustrates the social
91
and environmental erosion resulting from landowners whose posses-

sive individualism and excessive consumerism dictate the decisions
they make about their land.
Castle Rackrent has been described as the first regional novel writ-
ten in English; at the same time, unlike most regional novels, this
particular novel does not describe a specific landscape or identifiable
architectural features.2 Instead, Castle Rackrent’s location is identified
only by material practices. As K.D.M. Snell points out, we can ascertain
the region by:
her details of dialects, local agricultural terms (for example, a loy),

tenurial arrangements, characteristics of middlemen or ‘journey-
men gentlemen’; popular superstitions and folklore like the fairy
mount, or the right to be buried in certain churchyards; mention
of the regionality of Caoinans (funeral songs), and the burning of
death-bed straw and of funerary practices.3
In Castle Rackrent, the Irish region of County Longford is not identified

through landscape description but rather is evoked through detailing
the everyday practices and habits that contribute to a localized
domestic economy. Although the novel is almost entirely bereft of
landscape description, I argue that the management of the estate’s
land is central to the plot of this novel. The text’s emphasis on the
complexity and diversity of customs and habits on an Irish estate
reflects a particularly critical regionalism; critical regionalism endeavors
to “provide for the reader an experience of the imbricate intricacy
of social life, the patterned endlessness of meanings generated from
the constant rubbing against one another of objects, forms, ideas,
and experiences.”4 By staging the regionalist novel within an Anglo-
Irish big-house, Edgeworth foregrounds the contests and divisions
within the Irish estate. Vera Kreilkamp explains, “Ascendancy houses
signaled division, not community [. . .] such division reflected not
just the typical disparities of class and wealth between landlords
and tenants, but also differences of political allegiance, ethnicity,
religion and language.”5 Instead of indulging in an idealization of the
Anglo-Irish estate, Castle Rackrent reveals that the organic embedded-
ness in localized place is a site of contest for reciprocity between the
Anglo-Irish gentry and the Irish tenants, and between those living on
the estate and the resources of the estate itself.
Reflexive Regionalism in Edgeworth’s Irish Tales 93
Castle Rackrent, moreover, is narrated by an old Irish servant, Thady,

who like Edgeworth herself stands on the margins of that society,
part of the everyday life of the Anglo-Irish big house, but without
real power.6 As the keeper of her father’s accounts, Edgeworth was
acutely aware of just how vulnerable she and her father’s other
dependents were to the consequences of his decisions in the manage-
ment of the estate’s resources. This sense of vulnerability to those in
power engenders the uniquely reflexive critical regionalism in Castle
Rackrent. Castle Rackrent and her subsequent Irish tales, Ennui (1809),
The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817), reflexively acknowledge her
own class’s culpability in social discord and environmental decline.
Precisely because the inheritance of land – from which women were
largely excluded – is the focus of her Irish tales, these novels scruti-
nize and critique the development of masculinity in the Anglo-Irish.
The gender dimension of Edgeworth’s work arises in her repeated
attempt to show, in Marilyn Butler’s words, “that civilized man is,
morally speaking, a social animal rather than an isolated individual.”7
In other words, the novels emphasize the connection between the
Anglo-Irish landlord’s individual acts and the widening social and
ecological impact of his decisions. Edgeworth’s Irish tales, like the
other Romantic conservative texts in this book, efface the individual
into intergenerational, communal identities, and the results, as Anne
Mellor points out, are novels that “rhetorically mounted a more
scathing condemnation of contemporary Anglo-Irish absentee land-
lords than other writers on the subject.”8
Edgeworth’s extensive reflection on the development of masculin-
ity in the last three Irish tales, in which the male protagonists must
face educational trials before taking over their estates, intimates her
anxieties about the vulnerability of women, the Irish tenants, and
the land itself to the conduct of the men who inherited that land.
Even her authorship, Catherine Gallagher argues, was entangled with
her father’s imposing advice and ideas, yet Edgeworth’s imaginative
intergenerational partnership with her father allowed her some
unique critical insights about “the plural or ill-defined identities of
the Anglo-Irish as opportunities for self-creation,” because Anglo-Irish
men are “like women, who normally lack a continuous patrilineal sin-
gularity and must decide as adults what family they will belong to.”9
The lack of stable history and tradition for the Anglo-Irish emerges as
the opportunity to scrutinize the mistakes one has inherited and to
choose a different future. This is a choice Edgeworth made herself, to

remain with her father and manage his estate instead of marrying and
becoming a kind of “absentee” herself.10 Departing from Gallagher,
however, I argue that Edgeworth’s politics do not reflect the liberalism
of well-balanced accounts so much as a conservative ecology that she
hopes will conserve diversity and create long-term stability.
The first part of this chapter will explore how Edgeworth’s reflexive
regionalism is manifested in the narrative form of Castle Rackrent:
Thady’s narrative is supplemented and undermined by pages of
comparative, ethnographic editorial notes that provide an Anglo-
Irish perspective on the lower-class Irish. The tension between
Thady’s narrative and the editorial notes mimics what E.P. Thompson
has called “gentry-crowd reciprocity,” wherein “both parties of the
equation were, in some degree, the prisoners of each other.”11
The textual reciprocity of the form of Castle Rackrent amounts to a
way of thinking that engenders a way of living in the world, and the
reciprocity between the tenant narrator and Anglo-Irish editor further
points to the shared reciprocity between humans and the estate
on which they depend. The second part of the chapter argues that
Edgeworth’s reflexive regionalism reveals that the Anglo-Irish estate
can easily lapse into a dangerous social ecology whose default is
attritional catastrophe. In Castle Rackrent the health of the land, the
native Irish, and their Anglo-Irish landlords are all subject to a process
akin to what Rob Nixon defines as “slow violence,” environmental
and social erosion that emerges slowly over time from “threats that
never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene.”12
The overall narrative then proposes that only an intergenerational
imagination that spans several generations can apprehend the slow
violence being done to land that is used for profit. Such slow erosion
of social and environmental reciprocity continues to be explored in
Edgeworth’s subsequent Irish tales Ennui, The Absentee, and Ormond.
Taken together, Edgeworth’s four Irish tales repeatedly represent the
absentee owner and excessive consumer debts as immediate threats
to a stable social ecology. The absentee and/or indebted owner is
held up as a metonym for the unsustainable management of an
estate, which further articulates nascent ecological concerns about
the unintended consequences that arise when property is no longer
conserved as an inhabited estate but is understood as “real estate,” a
commodity untethered from intergenerational care.
Narrative reciprocity and reflexive regionalism
The narrative form of Castle Rackrent enacts and models customary

reciprocity in its palimpsest of authorities on Irish culture, including
local lore, scholarly sources, and comparative ethnographic texts.
In the preface, the narrator argues that local anecdotes are the best
method of recording provincial history. The first sentence argues that
the use of anecdote is “an incontestable proof of the good sense and
profoundly philosophic temper of the present times” (CR 1). Much
like Thomas Bewick’s provincial History of British Birds, which argues
“systems have been formed and exploded,” the preface to Castle
Rackrent questions the established method of recording history: “there
is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated antient or mod-
ern histories; and that love of truth, which in some minds is innate
and immutable, necessarily leads to a love of secret memoirs and
private anecdotes” (CR 1). The anecdotal style of Edgeworth’s work
contributes to her reflexive regionalism because anecdote insists
that historical truth is multiple and local; it is found in observing
many perspectives on various events within a circumscribed space.13
Although Seamus Deane has declared the novel “a work of startling
incoherence,” I argue Edgeworth’s anecdotal method amounts to
what Luke Gibbons calls an “alternative Enlightenment” perspective
that advocates for “associating cultural diversity with justice.”14
Edgeworth’s anecdotal history of the estate’s domestic economy
aims to destabilize overarching and general historical narratives that
stereotype the Irish.15 With the introduction of Thady, the poor
servant, as the narrative authority on Anglo-Irish Rackrent history,
she goes so far as to reverse the authority of the Anglo-Irish, at least
imaginatively. The pervasive irony in Castle Rackrent, Margot Gayle
Backus notes, is “generated in her reversal of the antiquarian novel’s
conventional power relations.”16 Thady’s narrative tells the primary
story, yet his narrative is mediated by an extensive glossary and
footnotes written by an Anglo-Irish editor. The preface states that the
notes are “joined for the ignorant English reader.” At the same time
the readers are told, “Thady’s idiom is incapable of translation, and
besides, the authenticity of this story would have been more exposed
to doubt if it were not told in his own characteristic manner” (CR 4).17
Thus the reader is introduced through the structure of the text to
reciprocity and even reversibility. Explanatory notes are provided
to clarify Thady’s regional idiom and culture, yet at the same time
readers are assured that Thady’s idiom is “incapable of translation,”
thereby casting doubt on the reader’s ability to understand the text,
even with the notes.
Although it has been argued that Edgeworth’s appropriation of
the voice of the Irish poor might be an attempt to contain their
energies, not unlike blackface minstrelsy, or that Thady’s narra-
tive is undercut by the editorial notes that reinforce a “theme of
surveillance” of the native Irish, I argue that Edgeworth’s attention
to the imagined perspective of an Irish servant gestures towards an
openness to imagining the experience of the other.18 Edgeworth’s
narration in the voice of Thady requires sustained attention to the
imagined perspective of her Irish tenants. The form of Castle Rackrent
then, like Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, is characterized by
what Mary Louise Pratt calls “reciprocal vision”: reciprocal vision in
travel writing occurs when the traveler narrates his own perspective
of his encounter with people from another culture, while at the same
time imagining and recording their responses to his intrusive pres-
ence.19 Likewise Castle Rackrent records the manners and language of
the Irish tenants while at the same time recording how they might
perceive the Anglo-Irish class and their foibles.
As the narrative jostles the reader back and forth between the nar-
rator and the editorial notes, Edgeworth inculcates an epistemology
of gentry-crowd reciprocity. Many of the glossary notes and foot-
notes are based on Edgeworth’s own close observation of domestic
customs, yet at the same time texts about Ireland and the larger
world are consulted in the layered comparative notes. Beginning
with the first note on Thady’s greatcoat, the editor acknowledges
previous knowledge that has been diffused about Ireland by Edmund
Spenser and Arthur Young. Different times, perspectives, and places
are brought together in anecdotal comparison, thus the novel may
best be described as a palimpsestic counter-history that reflects
current concepts of critical regionalism, which aims to reveal the
“cumulative, generative effect of the interplay among the various,
competing definitions of that region.”20 Castle Rackrent’s protracted
experiment with competing representations of Ireland, along with
its reciprocal imagination of how the Irish see the Anglo-Irish,
generates a particularly reflexive regionalism that demonstrates the
interconnectedness of their domestic economies. Unlike the theme
of inheritance in British Romantic conservative texts, Anglo-Irish

inheritance emerges as an uncomfortable and claustrophobic com-
plexity in which the entire system of the Anglo-Irish ruling class and
the lower class Irish are intimately tied together and always teetering
on the brink of catastrophe.
The text’s narrative form of reciprocity proceeds via anecdote and
the dueling perspectives of Thady and the editor’s notes. Such formal
reciprocity is reinforced by the book’s content, which further takes
up Romantic conservative reciprocity not only between landowners
and the poor but also an intergenerational reciprocity between the
past and future generations. The theme of reciprocity between
the lower and upper classes emerges in the first sentence of the
novel: Thady writes, “Having out of friendship for the family, upon
whose estate, praised be Heaven! I and mine have lived rent free
time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the Memoirs
of the Rackrent family” (CR 7). Thady’s mindset is characterized by
a cognizance of customary reciprocity: even though he is a servant,
from “time out of mind” his family has lived in the big house rent
free like the heirs. In return for these gifts, his “friendship” with the
family motivates him to record their history.
Thady emerges here as a figure like Wordsworth’s Old Cumberland
Beggar, who exists as a living memorial to a previous kind of economy,
because although Thady’s first sentence records an instance of cus-
tomary reciprocity, the rest of the book documents the loss of such
reciprocity between the landowners and the tenants. The novel
commences with the first Rackrent, who is originally an Irishman,
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin: Thady implies that Sir Patrick changes his
name and religion to take hold of the estate.21 In spite of his conver-
sion, Sir Patrick behaves much like the old Catholic Irish gentry in his
habits of generous hospitality and personal consumption. Although
his consumption of food and drink is excessive, Sir Patrick’s life is
nonetheless characterized by an intergenerational imagination: he
dies just after remembering the life of his father: “What would my
poor father say to me if he was to pop out of the grave, and see me
now?” (CR 10). Sir Patrick imagines his father’s gaze upon him in a
manner similar to Burke’s admonition that we should be “always
acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers” (R 121). Yet in
spite of his exemplary hospitality and influence, Sir Patrick fails to
manage his estate properly: he leaves his son an estate that is in a
considerable amount of debt. Debt on the property leads to a porten-

tous break between father and son, such as is seen in Wordsworth’s
“Michael.” Through incurring debt on the estate, Sir Patrick had
given up his own authority. Margot C. Finn explains, by “empower-
ing creditors such as tradesmen to seize and imprison the bodies of
their debtors without the benefit of jury trials,” such creditors were
viewed as having an “arbitrary authority” endowed by the rise of
consumerism and personal debt.22 Sir Patrick undermined his own
authority through incurring personal debt, and his model of practic-
ing old Irish hospitality is thus utterly rejected by his son Sir Murtagh
when he inherits the estate.
Although he claims he will honor his father’s name and clear the
estate of his father’s debt, Sir Murtagh denies any responsibility for
his father’s failings. Sir Murtagh enacts a sham seizure of his father’s
body to remove the debt from the estate. The scene of the seizure
of Sir Patrick’s body resonates with Burke’s concern that liberal
individualism might cause people to drag “the bodies of our ancient
sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs” (R 107) in order to disen-
gage themselves from the “manuscript authority of the dead” (TPR
204). After severing any loyalty to his father’s memory, Murtagh
moves towards manipulation of the law in order to end practices
of reciprocity between the poor and wealthy. As Thady puts it, “the
moment the law was taken of him, there was an end of honor to be
sure” (CR 12).
As he takes over the estate, Sir Murtagh morphs traditional custom-
ary relations between landlords and tenants into laws that enable a
rapacious exploitation of both the land and the tenants that live on
their estate. Gone is Sir Patrick’s generosity and hospitality, yet exces-
sive internal consumption within the estate itself continues. Instead
of upholding the spirit of the law, Murtagh and his wife “acted under
the disguise of law,” and their behavior marks a further shift away
from the reciprocity of custom. “Everything upon the face of the
earth furnished him with a good matter for a suit,” and Sir Murtagh
manipulates the customary law in order to gain control over the
shared commons on the estate, such as roads, lanes, bogs, and
wells. Peter Linebaugh argues that “common rights are embedded
in a particular ecology with its local husbandry,” and Sir Murtagh’s
performance of a landowner’s power is enacted through disregarding
just such local ecologies and customs.23 Sir Murtagh “was always
driving and driving, and pounding and pounding, and canting

and canting, and replevying and replevying” (CR 14). Driving,
pounding, canting, and replevying – constantly demanding rents,
impounding tenants’ livestock, selling tenants’ goods at auction,
repossessing leased land – are all legal actions that enforce private
property and end common rights. At the same time, Lady Murtagh
similarly exploits customary relations for her own benefit. She estab-
lishes a charity school for the poor children on her estate, yet the
children are chiefly learning how to spin cloth for her household.
Thady observes that her table is “kept for next to nothing – duty
fowls, and duty turkies, and duty geese, came as fast as we could eat
’em, for my lady kept a sharp look out, and knew to a tub of butter
everything the tenants had, all round” (CR 14).24 The accompanying
glossary note on this part of the text asserts that the custom of duty
work was “the height of absurd injustice.” Asserting “much petty
tyranny and oppression have resulted from this feudal custom,” the
editor then notes that Edgeworth’s father eliminated these practices
from his own estate (CR 103–4). The drama of the Murtaghs’ greed
amounts to another moment of reflexivity in which the author
reflects critically on her class’s practices in estate management.25
In contrast to her indictment of duty work, the editor favors cus-
tomary rights when they are a form of noblesse oblige towards the
Irish tenantry. One of Thady’s first observations about the Murtaghs,
as stated earlier, was that the tenants were sent away without “their
whiskey”: the editor’s note states:
It is usual with some landlords to give their inferior tenants a

glass of whiskey when they pay their rents. Thady calls it their
whiskey; not that the whiskey is actually the property of the ten-
ants, but that it becomes their right, after it has been often given
to them. In this general mode of reasoning respecting rights, the
lower Irish are not singular, but they are particularly tenacious in
claiming these rights. (CR 103)
The note presents a nuanced perspective on customary rights, seeking

to clarify first that the whiskey is not the property of the tenants, but
it becomes their right over time. The Irish are “particularly tenacious”
in claiming customary rights, which, in the eighteenth century, often
became “a highly vexed, even Gothic contest,” as David Collings
points out.26 In both the narrative form and the notes on customary
culture, reciprocity effaces the perceived boundaries of private prop-
erty in a regional domestic economy.
Losing money year after year in his many lawsuits, Murtagh “sold
some hundreds a year of the family estate” in order to maintain
his lifestyle, yet his final demise arises due to his disregard for Irish
cultural memory connected to the land. Sir Murtagh digs up a fairy-
mount in spite of being warned against doing so. Thady observes
that after digging it up Sir Murtagh “had no luck” (CR 16). The note
on the fairy-mount illustrates that Murtagh ignored both political
and folk history in his excavation of the fairy-mount. The mounts
were used to give signals during war, and moreover, local lore dictates
that the mounts are homes for fairies, who give hospitality for those
who are lost. Sir Murtagh’s destruction of the fairy-mount resonates
with his failure to cultivate any ethical and intercultural imagina-
tion as an estate owner. Ethnographic notes on the fairy-mount
compliment Thady’s narrative of the decisions of Sir Murtagh. Such
reflexive regionalism, which considers the perspectives and experi-
ences of the rich and the poor, the dead and the living, shares the
conservative conservationist ethos of Burke, who according to Luke
Gibbons, “affords the possibility of a more grounded, ethnographic
Enlightenment, sensitive to cultural differences, inherited loyalties,
and the contingencies of time and place.”27
Edgeworth’s reflexive regionalism champions local culture while
revealing its traumatic history and desperate present degradation.
Arguing that both texts are provincial “tales of the locale,” Marta
Adams Bohrer compares Castle Rackrent to Gilbert White’s The Natural
History and Antiquities of Selborne as texts that both “subordinate
romantic plot and psychological character development to the rep-
resentation of functional relations among a local assemblage of
specimens.” While Selborne and Castle Rackrent both “differentiate
places within nations,” the notes on the locale in Castle Rackrent
reveal a precipitous social and environmental decline that is wholly
absent from White’s Selborne.28 Such decline is momentarily reflected
in Thomas Bewick’s journals, when he reflects on the coal industry’s
impact on the salmon population in the Tyne, for example, but it is
unique in the Romantic period to have explored such an extended
ecological and domestic catastrophe effected through relentless
estate mismanagement over several generations. Castle Rackrent then
manifests a particularly gothic natural history, which demonstrates

the economy and ecology are linked in precipitous decline. The
gothic natural history in Castle Rackrent connects the destruction of
the family and estate to the manipulation and decline of an entire
set of customary relations. These genres of the gothic and natural
history work together to create a particularly uncomfortable reflex-
ive regionalism that bears much in common with Timothy Morton’s
dark ecology, in which “the narrator or protagonist is radically
involved with his or her world, and thus responsible for it.”29
Absentee ownership and estate ecology
Beginning with Castle Rackrent and then in all of Edgeworth’s subse-

quent Irish tales, her representation of the social ecology of an estate
focuses on the negative consequences of absentee land management
and excessive consumer debt. While Sir Murtagh made a fatal error
in his excavation of the sacred fairy mount, such environmental
damage is minor in comparison to the damage induced by his inheri-
tor, Sir Kit the absentee. Often in Irish novels, Kreilkamp argues,
“The trope of the absentee becomes, in part, a means of critiquing
colonial land policy that dispossessed an indigenous population
with an improvident class of wastrels living abroad.”30 Edgeworth
herself defines the absentee owner as someone who will “abandon
their tenantry to oppression, and their property to ruin” (A 156).
Under absentee ownership, the land is turned from an estate – land
tethered to an intergenerational imagination – to real estate, a com-
modity like any other. Edgeworth’s novels document the demands
of a changing economy on Irish culture and mark the shift from
caring for land intergenerationally to considering the estate as
merely a place of resource extraction. In all her novels, the absentee
domestic economy is by default heading towards both economic
and environmental catastrophe. Only the conscious conservation of
a regional, intergenerational imagination and ethos might stem the
slow erosion of Anglo-Irish estates.
Sir Kit, the third heir to the Rackrent estate, “valued a guinea as little
as any man – money to him was no more than dirt.” Indeed Sir Kit
must sell his dirt – his land – in order to support his lavish lifestyle in
Bath. Sir Kit’s character is introduced to the reader in terms of his dis-
connection from the estate: Thady claims Sir Kit inherited the estate
“knowing no more of the land than the child unborn, only having
once been out a grousing on it before he went to England” (CR 22).
Anxious to return to England as quickly as possible after securing his
inheritance, Sir Kit places the estate management in the hands of an
agent whose only interest is profit. The absentee form of ownership
severs any direct tangible ties to the oversight and management of
the estate’s resources. Sir Kit’s ethos is revealed moreover in his inter-
personal relationships: he locks his wife in the attic for seven years,
for example, because she will not give him her diamond cross so
he can sell it for cash. The consequence of Sir Kit’s short-term view
and abusive manipulation of his wife for money is a childless mar-
riage, contributing to the novel’s theme of “familial antiproduction,”
which represents “familial generationality as a process of attrition
rather than accumulation.”31
Sir Kit’s abuse of his wife for cash extends soon enough to exploita-
tion of the estate’s tenants. Leaving for London, Sir Kit puts his land
into the hands of an agent. Thady remarks that Sir Kit’s “agent was one
of your middle men, who grind the face of the poor, and can never
bear a man with a hat upon his head – he ferreted the tenants out of
their lives – not a week without a call for money” (CR 20–1). The meta-
phor of the agent grinding down the faces of the poor points vividly
to the way an absentee economy turns the ethical face-to-face relation
into a cash-nexus. In his role as loyal servant, Thady does not directly
condemn Sir Kit, yet his allusion to the judgment of God in Isaiah
3:15 – “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the
faces of the poor?” – hints of the imminent judgment looming for Kit’s
refusal to oversee directly the conditions of his tenants. In another
metaphor, the Irish tenants are described as being “ferreted out” by the
middle-men; the tenants are hunted and treated like vermin if they fail
to contribute to the absentee economy that feeds Sir Kit’s lavish con-
sumerist lifestyle. In addition to abusing his wife and his tenants, then,
Sir Kit finally degrades the estate itself. The agent begins to rack the rent:
No sooner was the lease out, but the land was advertised to the
highest bidder – all the old tenants turned out, when they had
spent their substance in the hope and trust of renewal from the
landlord. All now was set at the highest penny to a parcel of poor
wretches who meant to run away, and did so after two crops out
of the ground. (CR 21)
After tenants with intergenerational commitments to the land are

dispersed, new tenants arrive on the estate to make a quick profit
and depart before suffering the environmental consequences of
mismanaging the land. Due to the continued mismanagement and
abuse of his marriage, his tenants, and his estate, Sir Kit’s absentee-
ism enervates the entire region.
Edgeworth continues to explore the problem of absentee manage-
ment in later Irish novels. In The Absentee, a novel whose title attests
to Edgeworth’s conviction of the impact of absenteeism in Ireland:
an absentee is described as “one of those who, according to the clause
of distress in their leases, lead, drive, and carry away, but never enter
their lands; one of those enemies to Ireland – those cruel absentees”
(A 117). Even though they are not directly exploiting the poor,
the mind-set of the absentee – believing their estate’s resources are
merely ready cash – amounts to a dangerous economy whose default
is attritional catastrophe. Early in The Absentee, the narrator observes
that the owners of the Clonbrony estate became absentees because
the mother was infected with “Londonomania”; Lady Clonbrony’s
chief desire is to avoid her home in Ireland and to spend money opu-
lently in London in order to be accepted by London society (A 192).
In other words, Londonomania causes the family to exploit their
estate in Ireland because of their aversion to it. In Ennui: Memoirs of
the Earl of Glenthorn, Lord Glenthorn succumbs to the titular disease,
which is described as a harmful psychological condition in which
Lord Glenthorn forms “an aversion to the place I was in” (E 144).
The symptoms of Lord Glenthorn’s disease are revealed through his
declining gothic estate. The diseases of ennui and Londonomania
arise from a consumerist, possessive individualism that overrides
any intergenerational attachment to the land, and their contagious
nature is presented in a manner not unlike that which Priscilla Wald
identifies as an “outbreak narrative,” which tells “a contradictory
but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence”; such
recognition of human interdependence is intimately connected to
“ecological balance and impending disaster.”32
This connection of the absentee to ecological destruction is more
fully played out in The Absentee, in which the felling and selling of trees
that have the capacity to far outlive humans is depicted as particularly
rapacious. An epiphanic moment for Lord Colambre occurs while gaz-
ing at a clear-cut of the forest on his father’s estate: there is “nothing
to be seen but the white stumps of the trees, for it had been freshly
cut down, to make up the last remittances” (A 161). The sight of
this degradation prompts an epiphany of the conservative intergen-
erational imagination in Lord Colambre that counters the infection
of Londonomania. He reports to his father, “For a single season, the
last winter (I will go no further), at the expense of a great part of your
timber, the growth of a century – swallowed in the entertainments
of one winter in London! Our hills grow bare for another half of
century to come!” (A 193). As Lord Colambre surveys the extent
of degradation of his father’s estate, he begins to replace a way of
thinking that is prompted merely by the desire for ready cash with an
intergenerational ethos that imagines what he has inherited in light
of his duty to future generations that live on the estate.
The problematically paternalistic premise of Edgeworth’s conserva-
tive conservationist view, however, comes to light as Lord Colambre
surmises that the deforestation of his father’s estate “is the picture only
of that to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry may be degraded in
the absence of those whose duty and interest it is to reside in Ireland,
to uphold justice by example and authority; but who, neglecting this
duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts” (A 156). Edgeworth
places the blame squarely on the bad hands and hearts of the middle-
class managers, yet, as Kreilkamp argues, “by demonising the native
bailiff or agent who thwarts the owner’s more benevolent intentions,
absenteeism is as commonly deployed by Catholic as by Protestant
writers to avoid a more radical critique of existing arrangements.”33
Indeed, Edgeworth’s paternalism has little to do with liberal radical-
ism but rather with a conservative, pragmatic acknowledgment of the
material, pre-existing culture: Anglo-Irish men controlled the fate of
the entire social ecology of their estates. But that does not mean that
her ideas are not radical: they bear more in common with William
Cobbett’s notion of radical as “belonging to the root” of a localized
place through husbandry, tillage, and community.34 As Landry points
out, “Stewardship of land and animals, and paternalistic relations
with tenants and laborers, sometimes acted as a brake on the devotion
to agrarian improvement measured in market terms.”35 While on
the one hand Edgeworth espouses paternalism, on the other hand
such conservatism seeks to allow those subordinate to power the
legitimacy to demand an environmental ethos that allows the mutual
flourishing of all life on the estate.
The environmental and social consequences of absentee manage-

ment lead to the final catastrophe of the Rackrent estate. In terms
of conservatism, one might think that the final heir to the Rackrent
estate, Sir Condy, was the only one who followed the Burkean
prescription of looking back to and acknowledging the will of his
ancestors. Sir Condy is the only Rackrent to erect a monument to
his ancestors during his tenure.36 Like the first Rackrent, the final
Rackrent, Sir Condy, was a great huntsman who acquainted himself
with the poor. Thady remarks,
he became well acquainted and popular amongst the poor in the

neighborhood early, for there was not a cabin at which he had
not stopped some morning or other along with the huntsman,
to drink a glass of burnt whiskey out of an egg-shell, to do him
good, and warm his heart, and drive the cold out of his stomach. –
The people always told him he was a great likeness to Sir Patrick,
which made him first have an ambition to take after him, as far
as his fortune would allow. (CR 39-40)
Sir Condy had the ambition to be like Sir Patrick and even sought to
cultivate an imaginary relationship with him by erecting a memorial
and by drinking out of his horn. Michael Gamer argues that the
Rackrents take pride in ancestral irresponsibility, which leads to
“obstinancy, stupidity, and debilitating conservatism”37 Sir Condy’s
unthinking, unconsidered return to the old ways allows him to avoid
responsibility for assessing the damage that he has already inherited.
Assessing the damage done by ancestors becomes part of the devel-
opment of effective estate management. Lord Colambre’s epiphany
upon seeing the clear-cut on his father’s estate demonstrates that part
of conservation must be to recognize the damage that his own family
have done to the estate. Edgeworth’s reflexive regionalism argues that
respecting one’s ancestors often includes intense scrutiny and criti-
cism of their practices as well as amending their damage to the estate.
Sir Condy, on the other hand, thoughtlessly models himself on the
excessive consumption of Sir Patrick, failing to recognize the debt
and damage incurred by his predecessor. He inherits an estate already
in debt, and in order to have access to ready cash, immediately sells
off large parts of his land, turning the estate into a fragmented com-
modity.38 Soon immersed in debt and “torn” by “vultures of the law,”
Sir Condy’s lawyer Jason advises him, “when there’s no cash, what
can a gentleman do but go to the land?” (CR 62, 75). Jason, the son
of Thady the servant, through a series of contracts finally buys all of
the estate, so that Sir Condy can escape his creditors.
Jason’s possession of the estate sets father and son against each
other. Thady reprimands his son:
how will you stand to this in the face of the country, and all
who know you (says I); and what will people tink and say, when
they see you living here in Castle Rackrent, and the lawful owner
turned out of the seat of his ancestors, without a cabin to put his
head into, or so much as a potatoe to eat? (CR 77)
Thady’s protestations are belated, for the estate has already slowly
transitioned to tradable real estate, as each Rackrent heir went deeper
into debt. Thady performs a visible link to the old order, and he
finds sympathy in the estate’s children as he reacts to his son’s new
position:
I told them all, for it was a great relief to speak to these poor
childer, that seemed to have some natural feeling left in them:
when they were made sensible that Sir Condy was going to leave
Castle Rackrent for good and all, they sent up a whillalu that
could be heard to the farthest end of the street. (CR 78)
In contrast to the generational conflict between the current and

older generations often depicted in Gothic novels of the period, such
as in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), wherein the hero Vivaldi
must disentangle himself from his parents’ control and worldview,
in Castle Rackrent, the older generation, who are about to die, turn
to the youngest generation, those who have just been born for sym-
pathetic identification.39 The very old and very young come together
as residual and emergent generations protesting their fate at the
hands of the current, dominant generation.
Collaboration of the past and future, residual and emergent, leads
to a kind of consciousness-raising among the poor on the estate.
After the children send up their cry, “the people one and all gathered
in great anger against my son Jason, and terror at the notion of his
coming to be landlord over them” (CR 79). It is perhaps surprising
that the Irish tenants are reacting with such terror to Jason, one of
their own, taking ownership of the estate. Such an ascent could be a
revolutionary moment for the Irish, yet Jason is a representative of
the new, commercially minded class, with which the tenants are
already acquainted due to the estate managers who “grind the face of
the poor” as well as deforest, drain, and otherwise “improve” the
property for profit. The mob’s fear appears to be justified, perhaps,
for the reader knows that even Jason’s father, Thady, does not
profit from his son’s individualistic endeavors, as W.J. McCormack
observes: “The dejected state of Castle Rackrent’s narrator at the outset
of the novel (dressed in a ragged coat and annotations from Spenser)
is one measure of the extent to which social change involves the
ironic victimization of those whose sons succeed.”40
The form of the novel, through its dialogue between Thady’s
narrative and the editor’s notes, figuratively enacts gentry-crowd
reciprocity, and at this point in the plot there arises a drama of such
gentry-crowd reciprocity, “in which rulers and crowd needed each
other, watched each other, performed theatre and countertheatre to
each other’s auditorium, moderated each other’s political behavior.”41
As the mob gathers in protest, Jason fears their power. In contrast,
Sir Condy, generous to the end, sends whiskey out to the people in
order to calm them. At this moment, situated on the cusp of the
demise of customary rights, the tenants get “their whiskey” for one
last time. Given the editor’s emphasis on the custom of the landlord
sharing his whiskey with the tenants earlier in the text, this moment
is more important, perhaps, than other scholars have observed. The
mob gathers as a form of a demand to the owner of the estate, and
Sir Condy responds to that demand with the old custom of giving
the tenants “their whiskey,” thus eliding the boundaries of private
property. Whiskey pacifies, perhaps, but the public consumption of
customary whiskey here becomes a theatrical event that serves to
reinforce the collective memory of customary rights. As such, this
scene anticipates William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy, which insists
that the poor demand and consume the heritage foods of bread, beer,
and bacon. Customary memory can be a “great destabilizer,” accord-
ing to David Harvey, and as the people take in the whiskey, they are
bound to the old order of reciprocity through bodily experience.42
Even if they are not immediately able to stem Jason’s plans for
discipline and improvement, this final reinforcement of customary
reciprocity seems, in Benjamin’s words, “to seize hold of a memory

as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” thus holding the door open
for the possibility of future change.43
While the individual and anecdotal misfortunes of the Rackrent
family may appear to be amoral and comic,44 I argue that the health of
the land, the native Irish, and the Anglo-Irish landlords are all subject
to a process of “attritional catastrophe” that “is neither spectacular
nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calami-
tous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.”45
Individual incidents cannot register an attritional catastrophe: only
an intergenerational Burkean “long view” can apprehend the gradual
degradation of people and land. Castle Rackrent demonstrates that a
precipitous, downward spiral of debt and decline is already in place by
the time Sir Condy takes over. The catastrophe of Castle Rackrent then
becomes the negative foundation for Edgeworth’s later Irish tales,
which are far more moralistic, predictable, and less experimental
than Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth’s later Irish fiction contains plots
marked by the Anglo-Irish making choices to stem the slow violence
being done to their estates. The collapse of an estate is averted by
the Anglo-Irish choice to return to and manage that estate. Katie
Trumpener points out that such paternalism “ignore[s] the possibil-
ity that resident landowners might continue to drain profits as well
as stagnant waters from their lands, that agricultural reforms might
increase estate incomes and raise tenant rents without effecting
general prosperity at all.”46 Such a possibility may be the reason that,
in Edgeworth’s later Irish tales, the return to estate management can
only happen after the heir goes through developmental, educational
experiences that lead to a realization of his intergenerational respon-
sibility to the estate. In Ennui, after finding he was switched at birth,
Lord Glenthorn works to re-earn and manage his estate properly
while at the same time finding that through such work he has been
delivered from the scourge of ennui. At the end of The Absentee, we
are told that the estate now “takes no duty fowl, nor glove, nor seal-
ing money; nor asks duty work nor duty turf” (A 253).
Edgeworth’s last Irish tale, Ormond: A Tale, dramatically emphasizes
the need for landowner education and responsibility in order to avert the
ecological and social catastrophe that is the default of consumer debt and
absentee management. Alternately raised by two men who are broth-
ers and landowners in Ireland, the titular character eventually must
choose between the two in deciding which example he will follow.

Esther Wohlgemut observes that a major theme of the later novels
is that “in the practice of fostering, kinship becomes a matter of
culture rather than blood (heredity).”47 The characters of the two
guardians are then developed in striking contrast to each other: Sir
Ulick, the first guardian, was “one living in the world, and mixing con-
tinually with men of all ranks and character, had, by bending easily,
and being all things to all men, won his courtier-way onwards and
upwards to the possession of a seat in parliament, and the prospect
of a peerage.” The second guardian, King Corny, was “inhabiting
a remote island, secluded from all men but those over whom he
reigned” (O 45). Sir Ulick’s estate is near a city, so he was “continu-
ally mixing” with the speculative economy as a “jobber” who had
invested much in mining, whereas King Corny inhabits a Gaelic
culture in the fictional Black Islands that are primarily invested in
plowing (O 49–52). The novel emphasizes the different characters
of the men in part by their two modes of estate management, one
that is based on ancient agrarian practices and another that seeks to
gain as much as possible from the emerging speculative economy.
With these characters – one who follows residual culture and one
who is part of the emergent industrial culture – Edgeworth draws a
moral line between a landowner who is industrious and one who is
rapacious.
The men are not only described by their financial activities, but
they are also contrasted by their funerals. King Corny’s wake was a
community-building event attended by everyone in the kingdom,
both high and low; Sir Ulick’s funeral was attended by a few servants
who were hiding from debt collectors. After these deaths, Ormond
comes into a fortune and is put into the position in which he can
buy and thus “inherit” either Sir Ulick’s estate and mines or King
Corny’s Black Islands. Ormond chooses the Black Islands, and the
narrator provides his reasoning:
For the Black Islands he had a fondness – they were associated

with all the tender recollections of his generous benefactor. He
should hurt no one’s feelings by the purchase – and he might do
a great deal of good, by carrying on his old friend’s improvements,
and by further civilizing the people of the Islands, all of whom
were warmly attached to him. They considered prince Harry as
the lawful representative of their dear King Corny, and actually

offered up prayers for his coming again to reign over them. (O 297)
The welcoming response of the tenants of the Black Islands stands

in sharp contrast to the absolute terror the tenants exhibited after
Jason purchased the Rackrent estate. The tenants of the Black Islands
pray for and then welcome Ormond as their landlord. In Maria
Edgeworth’s later novels, as Claire Connolly points out, “it is as if the
binding force of history can be celebrated only on certain conditions,
that it must first be comprehensively rewritten as a tale of willing
choice rather than compulsory obedience.”48 This is true in every
instance of the landlords and the tenants. The choice of paternalism
further amounts to, in Edgeworth’s view, a choice of conservation
rather than catastrophe.
Through the negative critique of Castle Rackrent and her positive
examples in Ennui, The Absentee, and Ormond, Edgeworth attempts to
make a case for the protections of paternalism. While it does not allow
for social mobility, it at least insists on the responsibility of those
in power to conserve the unique social ecology of a given region,
whereas with a new capitalist owner, such as Jason, there is no sense
of responsibility to anything except the cash-nexus. Admittedly, at
this point, Edgeworth’s combination of political conservatism and
environmental conservation reflects idealistic and even utopian
thinking. The harmonious Gaelic world of the Black Islands does
not even exist, and certainly there are no longer Irish regional kings.
Although pushed to the limit of the utopian within a so-called realist
novel, Ormond can be read as complementing the negative critique of
Castle Rackrent. Ormond’s final utopian, domestic, regional economy
of the Black Islands emerges as “romantic alternative” that critiques
the oppressive hegemony of agricultural capitalism and consumer
culture. It bears political similarity to Wordsworth’s poetry, in which,
as Gary Harrison argues, “the agrarian idyll posits a romantic alterna-
tive to the capitalization of agriculture which challenges the assump-
tions of industrial ideology and the new habits of work discipline.”49
The Romantic conservatism of Maria Edgeworth’s Irish tales man-
ifests a reflexive regionalism, in which organic embeddedness and
domestic economy materializes as a site of contest for reciproc-
ity between the Anglo-Irish landlords and their Irish tenants and
between those living on the estate and the estate itself. Although
they point to the need for an affirmative responsibility from those

in power, the novels do not merely champion direct inheritance. In
these novels, the men must face educational trials before taking over
an estate, which suggests Edgeworth’s anxieties about the vulner-
ability of women, the Irish tenants, and the land itself to whims
of the men who inherited that land. This insight does not fully
address the gender dimension in Romantic conservatism as a whole,
but Edgeworth’s novels do call attention to the gender dimension,
which manifests itself in a uniquely critical and reflexive regional-
ism. The moral traced through the later tales is particular to the
Anglo-Irish given that they are not indigenous to Ireland: if one
is not native to a particular place, one should become native, to use
Wes Jackson’s phrase.50 Sara L. Maurer argues that this is part of
Edgeworth’s strategy of “disowning to own,” so in her novels “Anglo-
Irish Union is an arrangement they cannot defend, legitimate, or
condemn.”51 “Disowning to own,” however, also resonates with the
Burkean view of understanding one’s place on the earth as that of a
“life-renter.” Only the intergenerational “long view” can apprehend
and perhaps finally attend to the past violence and present exploi-
tation on Irish estates. In Edgeworth’s Irish Tales, this view also
illustrates the value of a gradualist position in the “improvement”
of land, in which decisions about land use are mitigated through
an intergenerational ethos. The reflexive regionalism in Edgeworth’s
Irish tales advocates an ethos of cultural and environmental conser-
vation that seeks to address the continuing attritional catastrophes
of social discord and environmental mismanagement on estates in
Ireland.
5
Subsistence as Resistance
William Cobbett’s Food Politics
Initially published as a series of seven pamphlets for the rural poor

in 1821, William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy aimed to conserve and
promote knowledge of basic farming and subsistence practices, such
as brewing beer, baking bread, keeping livestock, and kitchen garden-
ing. G.K. Chesterton admired the book, writing, “A cookery book can
scarcely be the basis of controversy, though it may be of combat; and
the proof of the pudding is in the eating. This is merely the commis-
sariat of his revolutionary army; and, like a good general, he paid a
great deal of attention to it.”1 As Chesterton suggests, at first glance,
Cottage Economy appears to be little more than a book of cookery,
yet its genre is difficult to define: it combines cooking, gardening,
and animal husbandry instructions with personal anecdotes and
overt political commentary. Directed to a restless and discontent
laboring class, Cottage Economy advocates for developing a subsistence
economy that might provide independence from the vicissitudes and
exploitation of the wage-labor economy. Extending Chesterton’s
military metaphor for Cottage Economy, I argue Cobbett encourages
using plowshare – the independent production of food – as a political
maneuver that is, potentially, no less powerful than arming the poor.
While Cobbett wrote Cottage Economy he was conducting his rural
rides across agricultural southern England (1821–1826), during which
he observes with dismay and rage the consequences of enclosure and
improvement for the rural poor. Donna Landry argues that Rural Rides
reflects a strident social ecology in which “Cobbett’s attention to the
health of agricultural land, but also to woods, commons, heaths and
their wild inhabitants – his concern for what we would now call the
113
ecosystem – was inseparable from his concern for the people who
lived in a place, especially the poorest classes.”2 For the most part, his
observations reveal that the evolving commercial economy was erod-
ing the measure of independence afforded by traditional subsistence
practices. Yet a notable exception to these melancholy observations
occurs on an early ride to Bollitree on November 12, 1821, when
Cobbett approvingly observes a small farm that has managed to flour-
ish by employing a “radical system of husbandry.” The term “radical,”
in this case, Cobbett explains, “means, belonging to the root; going
to the root.” The radicalism that emerges from returning to the roots
of traditional agriculture is “happily illustrative of our system of
politics,” Cobbett argues, and such radical husbandry illustrates the
system of politics for which he advocated strenuously in the second
half of his career. The farming practice of deep tillage and the food it
produces become an extended metaphor for a just political system:
We destroy all weeds, which, like tax-eaters [the clergy], do nothing

but devour the sustenance that ought to feed the valuable plants.
Our plants are well fed; and our nations of Swedes [rutabagas] and of
cabbages present a happy uniformity of enjoyments and bulk, and
not, as in the broad-cast system of Corruption, here and there one
of enormous size, surrounded by thousands of poor little starveling
things, scarcely distinguishable by the keenest eye, or, if seen only
inspire a contempt of the husbandman.3
By comparing Jethro Tull’s seed-drill method of sowing to broadcast

sowing, Cobbett revises the parable of the sower to practical and
political ends. Elizabeth Helsinger notes that this passage “turns cul-
tivators into crops”: the drilled, or rooted, system of farming leads
to the care of all seeds, which blossom into the “happy uniformity
of enjoyments and bulk,” while the broadcast system, wherein most
seeds fall on hard ground because they are not deeply planted in the
earth, become “poor little starveling things.”4 Addressed to the rural
poor, who have been scattered by the enclosure of the commons
and wastes, Cobbett’s Cottage Economy likewise insists that the rural,
propertyless poor must seek to become radically rooted in a small
parcel of land by whatever means necessary.
Cottage Economy is a food manifesto that aims to reduce the public’s
dependency on agricultural capitalism and processed manufactured
Subsistence as Resistance: Cobbett’s Food Politics 115
foods by going “back to the root” in a conservative, organic vein, in

which the everyday practices of subsistence cooking, gardening, and
animal husbandry are tangible connections to the past. By conserv-
ing a food heritage that synecdochally stands for a prior economy
of abundance and reciprocity, Cottage Economy further reasserts
the notion of a “moral economy” as opposed to the encroaching
utilitarian, laissez faire economy.5 In scholarship, Cobbett has been
notoriously difficult to place politically because his early, virulent
anti-Jacobinism under the pseudonym “Peter Porcupine” in America
in the 1790s transitions to radical advocacy for the poor in the
Political Register in the nineteenth century. The transition from
young conservative to elderly liberal runs the reverse of the politi-
cal trajectory attributed to Wordsworth, whose early radicalism is
difficult to reconcile with his later conservatism. Yet in both cases,
the confusion over these ostensible reversals of politics may be tied
to the superimposition of contemporary notions of liberalism and
conservatism onto the Romantic period. Thus Cobbett’s early con-
servative advocacy for maintaining established order in face of the
French Revolution bears some continuity with his later project of
seeking to provide intergenerational order and stability for the poor
through established subsistence methods of living. As Olivia Smith
points out: “Although he altered his opinions, Cobbett’s direction did
not deviate. The language with which he describes his intentions as a
radical in 1818 echoes that of his earlier promise as a Tory in 1800.”6
Cobbett’s agrarianism is often considered to be idealistic, function-
ing principally as idealistic nostalgia for Merry Old England that pro-
vides an imaginary respite from the growing commercial economy.
For example, John Whale argues, “His deployment of an idealised
version of rural England – whether it be pre-Reformation, or the
England of his childhood – is founded upon a fiction of England
as a beautiful imagined paradise.” Leonara Nattrass suggests that
Cobbett’s “mixture of symbolism and specificity” in Rural Rides “is
concerned to resist the disappearance of the agricultural past and
to recreate the mythic golden age.”7 These scholars, as well as the
majority of scholarly work on Cobbett, focus on his most famous
work, Rural Rides and its relationship to landscape aesthetics. Cottage
Economy and other agricultural texts have been neglected, perhaps
because the quotidian and domestic practices they detail lack explicit,
recognizable connections to urban, cosmopolitan, political issues.
As Ian Dyck productively suggests, “It is the neglect of Cobbett’s rural

and cultural associations that accounts for much of the indiscipline
in Cobbett studies.”8
An analysis of Cottage Economy’s food politics, I argue, will inform
our understanding of his more popular works such as Rural Rides
by demonstrating how central the production and consumption
of food was to Cobbett’s politics. Cobbett’s championing of a food
heritage indeed exhibits elements of the nostalgia that Nattrass and
Whale analyze; for example, he writes, “Far indeed is the situation
of the Labouring Classes from what it ought to be; far are they from
living as their forefathers lived; far are they from having meat for
their dinners, and a barrel of beer in their cellars.”9 Cobbett’s “radical
husbandry” in Cottage Economy argues for conserving the forefathers’
farming and food practices as a cultural heritage, and consump-
tion of these foods becomes a political performance of fidelity to
the moral economy as well as a demand to return to it.10 Attention
to the patterns and practices of working class food production and
consumption adds a dimension of pragmatic complexity to Cobbett’s
nostalgia as well as to Romantic conservatism’s elegiac, negative cri-
tique of modernity.
With an impressive tone of energetic optimism, Cobbett’s Cottage
Economy records precise gardening, cooking, and brewing techniques
in order to make them available and affordable to the public at large.
As he insists that the laboring poor maintain a diet of homemade
beer, bread, and bacon, Cobbett champions the symbolic and social
importance of food consumption in the formation of communal
subjectivity. Although E.P. Thompson argues that Cobbett “helped to
create and nourish the anti-intellectualism” within the British labor
movement, I will argue that Cottage Economy exhibits a working-class
praxis – the political and theoretical made flesh.11 Like Mary Douglas,
Cobbett recognizes that foods are encoded with messages about class
and political agency, and thus Cobbett resists any dietary changes that
might code workers as merely powerless consumers or as animals who
eat fodder.12 Sidney W. Mintz argues, “eating particular foods serves
not only as a fulfilling experience, but also a liberating one – an added
way of making some kind of declaration. Consumption, then, is at
the same time a form of self-identification and communication.”13
Cobbett’s Cottage Economy promotes just such a food-based self-
representation and liberation by freeing the working-class from the
ever-encroaching need to buy consumer goods through what today

would be called “food sovereignty.”14 Producing and consuming one’s
own food becomes site of self-identification and communal identity
for the working poor. As an organic intellectual offering pragmatic
tactics for negotiating the rise of absolute notions property rights
that exclude customary perquisites, Cobbett argues that the practices
of everyday subsistence such as baking bread or brewing beer can be
utilized to resist the rapidly globalizing food economy and to retain a
sense of the worker’s dignity. This first part of this chapter will discuss
the political premises of Cobbett’s argument for a cottage economy,
and the second part will analyze his rhetorical argument for a heritage
diet of the three Bs: beer, bread, and bacon.
Against scarcity: Premises for a cottage economy
Cobbett’s plan for Cottage Economy develops in conversation with a

number of debates about the apparent scarcity of food for the poor in
the period, and the impetus for the project is to counter both evangel-
ical and Malthusian representations of poor. In the Political Register,
Cobbett tells the story of finding a tract that a wealthy woman left
behind in a coach called “Happy Poverty, or the Lancashire Cottager.”
After reading the evangelical tract, he responds: “The gist of the
whole of Tracts is, to inculcate content in state of misery! To teach
people to starve without making a noise! To teach them to die quietly!”15
In addition to rejecting its didactic message, Cobbett also points out
that the need for these tracts points to a fundamental vulnerability
within the current political system: “What does all this show? Why,
a consciousness on the part of the rich, that the poor have not fair
play; and that the former wish to obtain security against the latter by
coaxing.”16 The proliferation of evangelical tracts that coax the poor
into patience and tractability in the face of starvation motivated
Cobbett to write alternative tracts that recommend reclaiming a right
to adequate food, clothing, and shelter.
Two weeks after reading this pamphlet, Cobbett announces in the
Political Register the forthcoming project of Cottage Economy:
I will publish, for the use of the Labouring Classes, a little thing, which
I have long had in my mind, to be entitled, “Cottage Economy;” for,
here, after all, is the foundation of a happy community. The fashion,
now-a-days, is to stuff the heads of the people with wild stuff about
inward light. Inquiries enough are made after the “state of their
souls;” but nothing about the state of their bodies; and let canters say
what they will, starvation is not necessary to salvation.17
Ever skeptical of religious platitudes that teach submission instead of

providing practical assistance, Cobbett rejects any split between the
spirit and body and attends to the body and culture of the working
person. Even though he wants laborers’ bodies to be strengthened
individually through a “belly-full,” the satisfaction is not meant to
reinforce a sense of liberal individualism, but rather to reinforce the
idea that the communal and local production of food is “the founda-
tion of a happy community.”18
In this way, as Cobbett directly addresses the working class in his
pamphlets about the health of their bodies and communities, he for-
tifies their sense of collectivity as a class. Jon P. Klancher argues that
radical writers “confront their readers as collectives and representatives
of collectives – ‘an inseparable part’ of the social order, undetachable
members of an audience contesting its position in social and cultural
space.”19 Cobbett seeks to build a collective sense of independence
and dignity in the production of food, which provides a counter-
narrative to both Evangelical and Malthusian discourse about the
poor. Much of Cobbett’s writing throughout his life directly counters
Malthus’s politics of scarcity. Addressing Malthus derogatively as “the
Parson” throughout his work, he repeatedly suggests that Malthusian
scarcity – the idea that population will always outstrip food supply,
which leads to starvation, disease, and violence that “naturally” con-
trols population – serves as a justification for neglecting the collective
social responsibility for a just distribution of food. The introduction to
A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn for example, states,
The great study, of late years, appears to have been, to discover the
meaning of reducing the most numerous and useful class of
the people to exist on the smallest possible quantity of food; and,
failing here, PARSON MALTHUS has suggested the means [. . .] of
checking the course of nature in the producing of children. The
PARSON and his worthy coadjutors never seem to have thought,
for a single moment, of a more just distribution of the food already
raised, and still less of any means of adding to the quantity.20
As the laboring poor are redefined as “the industrious classes” who

produce food for the nation, the fact that they often cannot afford
food for their families stands out as a stark injustice. Cobbett also
wrote an open “Letter to Malthus,” of which he is “more proud
than of any thing else I ever did or can do.”21 In this letter, Cobbett
argues that Malthus’s “natural laws” are not natural at all, but rather
stem from the current political economy. In refutation, he appeals to
pre-Reformation history: “the Poor had a right to demand a mainte-
nance, from which they received it too, until the robbery of the poor
(which has been called a robbery of the church) took place under the
reign of King Henry the Eighth.”22 While Cobbett still insists that
the poor, and not the parson’s family, have an ancient right to be
maintained through tithes, in the absence of that protection, he sug-
gests the poor demand maintenance by reclaiming marginal land for
subsistence farming, thereby attenuating absolute forms of private
property and gaining independence from the global food system.
Although Cobbett agrees with the idea of private property, in his
letter to Malthus, he goes on to outline his idea that property entails
responsibility: “But still the property, in land especially, can never be
so complete and absolute as to give the proprietors the right of withhold-
ing the means of existence, or of animal enjoyment, from any portion
of the people.”23 While Cobbett did not go as far as Thomas Spence
to propose a land nationalization scheme, Cobbett believed that, as
Malcolm Chase points out, “obligations adhered to private property.”24
In Cobbett’s mind, a return to moral reciprocity between the landed
and the landless was still possible, so in Cottage Economy he extols
the example of Lord Winchelsea and Lord Stanhope, who gave each
of their laborers a plot for keeping a cow. He also relates the tale of
petitioning the Bishop of Winchester to allow the poor the common
rights usage of land for food and fuel and even “to grant titles to all
the numerous persons called trespassers on the wastes” (CE, para. 144).
Absolute notions of property rights that fail to include a sense of inter-
generational responsibility for the social ecology of that land is a lament
shared by Burke, Wordsworth, Bewick, Edgeworth, and Clare; all of
these conservative conservationists believe that small, local farms and
local attachments manifest a common good that facilitates social
and environmental health. Local habits, moreover, for Cobbett, become
an intergenerational commons from which people can not only extract
a sense of community but also gain a sense of class-consciousness.
Political debates about the poor arise in this period partly due to
changes in land use: the enclosure of the commons and the decline of
customary perquisites. Cobbett’s ideal of cooperative partnerships
of small, cottage farmers is repeatedly set against the rise of what
we today call agribusiness.25 Thus another related premise of Cottage
Economy is to contest the encroachment of absolute notions of private
property by middle-class “bull-frog farmers” who are buying and
consolidating small farms and common lands for productive, utili-
tarian improvement.26 Cobbett’s political writings repeatedly pit the
agriculturalist (big farmer) against the husbandman (small farmer),
even going so far to spell agriculturalist as “Agriculture-ass.” Cobbett
argues that the new farmers, who have no established hereditary
connection to the land, are simply profiting and creating something
monstrous of England’s agriculture: “To suppose that the raising of
the food, and of the raw materials for the raiment, of all mankind
can be a sort of dashing, speculating concern is monstrous.”27 The
monstrous nature of agribusiness, which recalls Burke’s language
about the seizure of church lands in France as “unnatural and mon-
strous activity” (R 308), emerges from the way that the economy
of reciprocity is discarded while some farmers grow disproportion-
ately wealthy (such as in the radical husbandry quote earlier) while
degrading the working class and the environment.
Elisabeth Helsinger argues that Cottage Economy is directed against
Arthur Young’s well-known guidebook for the gentleman farmer,
Rural Oeconomy (1770), which includes tips for making large farms
more productive and for disciplining laborers. While Cobbett holds in
common with Young the idea that the laboring poor adhere to a strict
work ethic, for Cobbett work should lead to “marginal independ-
ence,” which Helsinger defines as “participation that resists complete
assimilation, appropriating for its own ends.”28 Cobbett seeks to
facilitate such appropriation in his book, The English Gardener (1829),
which is directed to a middle class audience. He directly admonishes
middle class-farmers to allow the poor to have some access to their
property:
For gardeners may scold as long and as vehemently as they please,

and law-makers may enact as long as they please, mankind never
will look upon taking fruit in an orchard, or a garden, as felony,
nor even as a serious trespass. Besides, there are such things as boys,
and every considerate man will recollect, that he himself was once
a boy. So that, if you have a mind to have for your own exclusive
use what you grow in your garden, you must do one of two things;
resort to terrors and punishments, that will make you detested
by your neighbours [. . .] Resolve, therefore, to share the produce
of your garden with the boys of the whole neighbourhood.29
Cobbett attempts to persuade middle-class farmers that the only

effectual security is sharing the bounty from one’s property. Such a
position clearly attenuates private property rights, especially when
one considers that his contemporary J.C. Loudon, in his Encyclopaedia
of Gardening (1822), advocated the use of spring traps and spring
guns to prevent pilfering by the poor.30 Cobbett was indeed aware of
this practice of setting traps for trespassers. On one of his rural rides,
Cobbett recalls seeing a sign: “PARADISE PLACE. Spring guns and steel
traps are set here.” He observes, “This is doubtless some stock-jobber’s
place; [. . .] whenever any of them go to country, they look upon it
that they are to begin a sort of warfare against everything around
them.”31
Cottage Economy not only responds to the local consolidation of
many small farms into a few large farms, but it also directly opposes
the not unrelated growing commercial, global economy. In the intro-
duction, Cobbett laments, “misers and close-fisted men disguise their
propensity and conduct under the name of economy.” In order to
counter the emergent notion of economy as that of a global network
of punctual individuals who make, spend, or save their own money
without regard for the common good, Cobbett returns to a residual
definition of economy: “Economy means management, and nothing
more; and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family”
(CE, para. 3). In contrast to an abstracted, global economy and the
fluctuating value of paper money, the home and family in a cottage
economy are intrinsically and securely connected to a particular
topos: the soil, plants, and animals that reside around the cottage.
Cobbett writes, “I purpose to show, that a large part of the food of
even a large family may be raised, without any diminution of the
labourer’s earnings abroad, from forty rod, or a quarter of an acre,
of ground” (CE, para. 35). Cobbett’s use of the term “economy” in
Cottage Economy then deals with the tactical ways that families and
communities choose to dwell in their environments. As strategies of
power are continually redefining the space of the country, Cobbett’s

radical husbandry proposes overt and clandestine, legal and illegal,
suggestions for negotiating those changes in land use.
The local, social, and moral economy that Cobbett outlines in
opposition to the global economy has a broadly inclusive notion of
the land as a household that accommodates human and non-human
life. Cottage Economy deploys a social ecology that resonates with the
eighteenth-century concept of “nature’s economy,” a term used by
regional naturalists such as Gilbert White and Thomas Bewick. An early
conception of ecology, “nature’s economy” in the Romantic period des-
ignates a “study of the earth’s household of life,” according to Donald
Worster.32 In other words, Cobbett’s agricultural writings explicitly situ-
ate the social within the ecological; they manifest a cyclical, sustainable
social ecology in which cottage gardens feed both livestock and people,
whose waste is then efficiently returned to the garden. In Cottage
Economy, the natural environment, similarly to Wordsworth’s view, is
always a “second nature”: it is a place of customs and practices that are
sustainable and cyclic instead of progressive. Instead of finding stability
in Wordsworth’s ancient ancestors buried in graveyards or in the forag-
ing habits of birds documented by Bewick, in Cottage Economy, custom,
habit, and environmental stability are attributed to cottager life.
In his idealization of the second-nature of pre-capitalist cottage life,
Cobbett may appear to be taking up a trope that is commonplace in
Romanticism, such as the cottages in the poetry of the Lake school or
the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough and George Morland. “While
all these genre paintings depict the old order of small farms, cottage
industries, and yeoman charity,” Ann Bermingham argues, “they
embody a new industrial ethics of hard work, thrift, and sobriety.”33
Cobbett’s work indeed reflects nostalgia for pre-capitalist life along-
side of an ethos of hard work and thrift, yet rather than idealizing
cottage life through picturesque views, Cottage Economy provides
practical advice about how to manifest “abundant living amongst the
people at large” (CE, para. 8). Abundant living is not only achieved
by hard work but also through a demand on the landowners for
space that is designed to thwart absolute notions of private property.
The independent cottage economy may be necessarily a hybrid, tran-
sitional tactic that channels the new, capitalist values of hard work
into an older order of subsistence farming. Yet the cottage economy
does not manifest an idealistic, cornucopian view of the land, but
rather Cobbett, as a practiced farmer familiar with the frustrations

and hardships of country life, proposes a subsistence economy that
strikes an obstinate resistance to both cornucopian and Malthusian
conceptions of the natural world.
The championing of a social ecology in which environmental and
social health are inseparable underlies Cobbett’s intense resistance
to enclosure at home and a globalizing economy. His social ecology
of second nature is evident when he describes the enclosure of a
particular place as a degradation of an entire organic community of
people, animals, plants, and land:
They drove them from the skirts of the commons, downs, and for-
ests. They took away their cows, pigs, geese, fowls, bees, and
gardens. They crowded them into miserable outskirts of towns
and villages, for their children to become rickety and diseased,
confined amongst filth and vermin. They took from them their
best inheritance; sweet air, health, and the little liberty they had
left. Downs, most beautiful and valuable too, have been broken
up by the paper-system; and, after three or four crops to beggar
them, have been left to be planted with docks and thistles, and
never again to present that perpetual verdure, which formerly
covered their surface, and which, while it fed innumerable flocks,
enriched the neighboring fields.34
The utilitarian enclosure of land by the “paper-system” leads to the

declining health of an entire community. As the children become
“diseased” and “confined” with animals, the confined, enclosed
land is similarly “beggared,” overused and left in rags and weeds.
Livestock can no longer feed on this land because its natural flora
has been stripped away. This critique implies that, instead, the com-
mon and traditional use of land itself should be the poor’s “best
inheritance” – the foundation of a thriving community – because it
provides the abundance and liberty that accompanies cooperative
flourishing.
While they may not inherit titled property, the working poor, in
Cobbett’s view, deserve to inherit food sovereignty, which entails
access to fertile land and clean air and water. Cottage Economy then
critiques liberal rights because, for Cobbett, freedom for the laboring
classes must be removed from its abstraction in order to be tied to
food security, and such food security can only be found in an abil-
ity to produce, store, and prepare that food. Cobbett argues, “there
is nothing like having a store of meat in the house. The running to
the butcher’s daily is a ridiculous thing. The very idea of being fed,
of a family being fed, by daily supplies, has something in it perfectly
tormenting” (CE, para. 157). Cobbett proposes that the working class
resist commercial, mass-produced foodstuffs because without the
ability to produce and store their own food, the poor become depend-
ent on the paucity of relief programs. For example, in reaction to a
proposed poor law bill that recommended poor relief in the amount of
a gallon loaf and three pence a week, Cobbett writes, “Talk of security;
talk of freedom; talk of rights and liberties; talk of glorious constitution to
a people in this state! It is the grossest mockery, the basest insult, that
ever was offered to the mind of man.”35 Cobbett repeatedly registers
a deep skepticism about the abstract concept of liberal, individualist
rights when it is not accompanied by practical freedom to grow
and flourish. Therefore, in Cottage Economy, Cobbett insists, “I am
for depriving the labourer of none of his rights; I would have him
oppressed in no manner or shape; I would have him bold and free;
but to have him as such, he must have bread in his house, sufficient
for all his family” (CE, para. 84). Although Cobbett, unlike John Clare,
does not engage in a sustained critique of the destructive, competitive
individuality fostered by liberal rights, he claims liberal rights are irrel-
evant to the status of a laboring class individual who cannot afford
enough bread to feed himself, much less his family.
Cottage Economy argues explicitly that in the absence common
lands, communal, common practices can still be cultivated. Instead
of telling workers to claim their rights, he teaches practical independ-
ence that is a form of demand for space and materials for dwelling.
Instead of Sunday Schools that teach servility, Cobbett argues, “is
it not much more rational for parents to be employed in teaching
their children how to cultivate a garden, to feed and rear animals,
to make bread, beer, bacon, butter, and cheese, and to be able to do
these things for themselves, or for others?” (CE, para.16).36 Rather
than giving children an education that teaches submission to the sta-
tus quo, Cobbett hoped to restore the intergenerational knowledge
of self-sufficient subsistence farming. In the beginning of Cobbett’s
Corn he writes, “some of them have actually prided themselves upon
the their ignorance of everything relating to agriculture, that first
and greatest employment of man.”37 Cobbett seeks to return to the

dignity of culture in agriculture, locating culture and community in
its most ancient sense, in agriculture. In other words, in order for
people to be free, families must have the independent ability to feed
themselves.
Cobbett’s premises for Cottage Economy are to fight against evan-
gelical and Malthusian representations of the poor as helpless and
submissive. He harkens back to a subsistence model of living that was
disappearing, and he locates liberty within the ability to live outside of
the commercial economy. Cobbett’s rural cottage with its subsistence
economy, then, like Wordsworth’s gravesite, becomes a point of not
simply of conservation but also (and more literally) of cultivation for
a future community independent from the larger economic “system.”
Cottage gardens situated, even hidden, on private property hold open
a space for a more equitable subsistence community in the face of
hegemonic agricultural capitalism. As a middle-class tourist himself,
Wordsworth was almost incapable of imagining ways of “making do”
in a transitional economy; thus in Cobbett’s Cottage Economy we find
a transition from Wordsworth’s notion of conservation as the preser-
vation of a region through tourism to a notion of conservation as a
practice of commoning through maintaining a heritage diet.
Conserving a diet of bread, beer, and bacon
In Cottage Economy, Cobbett insists that laborers should and can sub-
sist on a diet of the three Bs – bread, beer, and bacon – because these
traditional foods not only have nutritional value but also are social
markers endowed with the dignity of a working-class cultural herit-
age unique to southern, agricultural England.38 As Olivia Smith has
observed about Cobbett’s “Address to the Journeymen and Labourers of
England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland” (1816), “He writes the swinish
multitude into a dignified and traditional, particularly Burkean, social
fabric.”39 A pragmatic extension of that argument, Cottage Economy
stridently argues that the poor maintain dignity and food sovereignty
through conserving traditional food practices such as baking bread,
brewing beer, and keeping a cow or pig. Due to the enclosure of the
commons and the extinction of customary perquisites, laborers are los-
ing the ability to produce these foods for themselves, and, moreover,
the consumption of these foods is on the wane due to the shift from a
local to a national and global food network. Homemade beer, Cobbett

complains, is being replaced with beer that was brewed in a tavern,
and bread is now being bought from a baker at variable and often
unaffordable prices. Even worse, in Cobbett’s mind, the working class
have begun to replace beer with imported tea, while at the same time
reformers, such as William Wilberforce, are attempting to introduce
potatoes as substitute for bread for the working poor. Meat in a laborer’s
diet is also declining, so if the poor do not raise livestock themselves,
they will go without meat due to its expense.
Deploring the decline of a subsistence living in response to a con-
sumer culture, Cobbett claims (in 1821) that 40 years previously brew-
ing beer used to be a habit as natural as breathing, but due to paper
money and the malt tax, the farm workers in Southern England now
buy their beer from public-houses: “the common brewers have become
the owners, and have thus, by the aid of paper-money, obtained a
monopoly in the supplying of the great body of people with one of
those things which, to the hard-working man, is almost a necessary
of life” (CE, para. 20). The decline of the practice of brewing one’s
own beer then is represented as a threat to personal health, since beer
is an essential part of the laborer’s diet. Moreover, by naturalizing the
brewing of beer as a bodily process like breathing, Cobbett establishes
a “second nature” of working class food heritage. Beer is ubiquitous in
working class British culture; William Hogarth’s engraving Beer Street
famously illustrates workers who are strong and happy, and they labor
faithfully with constant beer consumption. Hogarth writes that he
made the print to recommend the “invigorating liquor” and in order
to show “Industry and jollity go hand in hand.”40 Similarly associating
beer drinking with both hard work and happiness Cobbett insists that
laborers need beer to maintain dignity and health.
Likewise, the art of baking bread at home is in danger of being lost.
Cobbett writes, “Servant women in abundance appear to think that
loaves are made by the baker, as knights are made by the king; things
of their pure creation, a creation too in which no one else can par-
ticipate. Now is not this an enormous evil?” (CE, para. 86). Perhaps
it is hyperbole to call the loss of knowledge about the production
and preparation of food “an enormous evil,” but Cobbett believes
that this loss of knowledge on the part of the laboring class is also
a loss of power (analogous to the power of a king to create a knight)
that erodes tangible, practical forms of independence. If the laborer
becomes a “mere consumer of food,” she becomes utterly depend-

ent on the same system that exploits her labor while at the same
time being subject to the vicissitudes of market prices (CE, para. 32).
Cobbett attributes this problem to the attrition of intergenerational
knowledge: “they would all know how to make bread, and know
well how to make it too, if they had been fed on bread of their own
mothers’ and their own making” (CE, para. 86). So in the absence of
the intergenerational knowledge of the home arts of brewing beer
and baking bread, Cottage Economy attempts to stem the erosion of
traditional subsistence skills by providing step-by-step instructions
for obtaining the basic materials and recipes for brewing and baking.
Cobbett motivates his readers to return to cottage industry by
repeatedly casting doubt about the wholesomeness of commercial,
mass-produced versions of bread and beer. Commercially produced
foods require that the consumer trust both the merchant and pro-
ducer of the food; Cobbett strategically attempts to undermine that
trust. In fact, his advertisement for the first installment of Cottage
Economy in the Political Register was followed by a report on adulter-
ated beer from the court of excise in which a publican was charged
with “having feloniously compounded six gallons of liquor with
grains of Paradise, quassia, and other pernicious ingredients.” Cobbett
then adds that approximately 90 publicans are implicated in similar
practices, thus implying that the adulteration of beer by brewers is a
ubiquitous practice.41 Yet Cobbett does not rail against the brewers
so much as he ends the advertisement by arguing, “This is horribly
wicked work, to be sure; but, then, whose fault is it, after all? If a man
will drink public-house beer at four times the expence of home-brewed
beer, to be a little matter poisoned really seems to be a very proper
punishment.”42 Cobbett’s audience then is induced to read Cottage
Economy through a fear appeal that directly undermines their trust
in commercially produced foods.
Cottage Economy insists brewers in London increase their profit
margins by cutting back on the amount of malt and hops used
in brewing, and even more disturbing, the brewer then resorts to
remedying the taste by adulterating the beer with dangerous drugs
and flavorings. The text even goes so far to compare the work of the
brewer to that of the “rat-killer” and the “bug-man” because of their
common knowledge about harmful drugs (CE, para. 72).43 Cobbett
similarly seeks to create distrust of store-bought bread: “pray think
a little of the materials of which the baker’s loaf is composed. The alum,
the ground potatoes, and other materials” (CE, para. 81). By arguing
that store-bought bread is artificially whitened with alum and the
expensive wheat is replaced in part with cheap potatoes (and he will
go on to assert that potatoes are poisonous), Cobbett suggests that an
encroaching commercial economy requires an unprecedented amount
of trust in profit-minded merchants and producers. According to
Anthony Giddens, the abstraction of trust is a defining characteristic of
modernity: “Trust in systems takes the form of faceless commitments,
in which faith is sustained in the workings of knowledge of which
the lay person is largely ignorant.”44 Cobbett emphasizes the risk
involved in the facelessness and lack of accountability in the grow-
ing global food system in order to convince workers to maintain
experiential knowledge of basic subsistence practices. Cobbett also
relates colorful stories that seek to create disgust for mass produced
food. For example, he writes, “I have never quite liked baker’s bread
since I saw a great heavy fellow in a bakehouse in France, knead-
ing bread with his naked feet! His feet looked very white to be sure;
whether they were of that colour before he got into the trough I could
not tell” (CE, para.102). The image of a heavy man using his feet to
knead dough produces disgust for food products of unknown origin.
Moreover, Cobbett elicits mistrust for this system: the consumer has
no way of knowing whether his food is prepared with clean or dirty
feet, which illustrates that public health is directly imperiled when
the formerly direct relationship between the producer and consumer
is attenuated by a growing commercial economy.
However colorful his warnings about the dangers of commercial
foods, they can be read as part of a larger proliferation of discourse
concerning the lack of regulation of store-bought, processed foods.
Frederick Accum, a renowned chemist, warned in the widely read
A Treatise on Adulterations of Food (1820): “To such perfection of inge-
nuity has the system of counterfeiting and adulterating various com-
modities of life arrived in this country, that spurious articles are every
where to be found in the market, made up so skillfully, as to elude
the discrimination of the most experienced judges.”45 Like Cobbett,
Accum believes the laissez faire economy endangers the health of the
consumer. However, Accum’s text did not propose that consumers
should return to making their own food, but rather it was directed
to the middle-class consumer; Accum outlines numerous chemical
experiments for detecting additives in bread, beer, mustard, and

other processed food to determine their purity. He also suggests that
the alum put into baker’s bread was harmful, and moreover, alum
was chiefly used as a bleach to disguise decayed flour.46 While Accum
recommends that consumers learn methods of chemical testing to
detect food adulteration, the medical journal The Lancet, through-
out 1820s and 1830s, falls more in line with Cobbett’s argument
about the inherent healthiness and safety of food prepared at home.
According to Drummand and Wilbraham, “Many doctors wrote to
say that country people who enjoyed perfect health on home-baked
bread and home-brewed beer were afflicted with chronic dyspepsia
when they came to the towns and lived on alum-whitened bread
and adulterated beer.”47 Thus Cobbett’s Cottage Economy reflects a
larger cultural concern in the period about the impact of commercial
foods on public health, yet the text uniquely draws on this cultural
concern to connect the risks of a global food economy to an accom-
panying decline in health of local economies and cultures.
In other words, Cobbett attempts to make his readers feel disgust
for commercial foods in order to provoke them to invest energy and
time in flagging local and cottage economies. Cobbett uses a com-
plementary rhetorical strategy when he assigns beauty to the hard
labor involved in the production of homemade foods. He writes,
“Give me for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating
her oven and setting her bread! And if the bustle does make the
sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not
kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duch-
ess?” (CE, para. 106). Combining sensuality and eating, Cobbett
attributes beauty to the usefulness of a wife with the ability to bake
bread while at the same time he cultivates disgust for an aristocrat
whose powdered white face recalls the alum used to artificially
bleach spoiled flour. The beauty and health of labor employed in
self-sufficiency is compared strikingly to the sickliness and artificiality
of luxury. John Whale points out, “Cobbett’s designation of a place
as beautiful in Rural Rides is an affirmation of its productiveness.”48
Similarly, in Cottage Economy, Cobbett invokes the beautiful in con-
nection with the hard work employed in making one’s own food.
Moreover, as health and stability is attributed to the working class
while aristocrats are depicted as sickly, the image above also is an
example of Tim Fulford’s argument that Cobbett relocates Burkean
values in “the ‘lower orders’ who themselves embody the values

their lords only claim to uphold.”49
If the working poor embody and conserve pre-capitalist values, it
follows then that they must not give up their bread as part of their
daily diet. E.P. Thompson points out that bread riots in the eighteenth
century were an attempt by the working classes to assert a moral
economy as a balance to inequality. The moral economy was one of
reciprocity in which the laboring class asserted that employers should
be held to the Biblical mandate: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that
treadeth out the corn.”50 Working people asserted a moral right to
grain and its products of bread and beer because they produced it.
Moreover, these bread riots were also about the delocalization of food
use in which their agricultural periphery was not the “center” towards
which their produce was intentioned: “Indignation might also be
inflamed against a dealer whose commitment to an outside market
disrupted the customary supplies of the local community.”51 Cobbett
thus wished to retain the primacy of a local economy and a diet of
bread for the working poor, in part because of its symbolic acknowl-
edgment of a history of moral reciprocity. In Cottage Economy, bread
symbolizes the older moral economy of reciprocity and the replace-
ment of potatoes for bread is symptomatic of the utilitarian, global
political economy.
Rather than turn to a diet of potatoes, which Cobbett associated
with the feeding of work animals, he suggested that the working
poor be willing to bake and eat coarse or household bread, which was
more affordable since part of its content was cheaper barley or rye. In
the eighteenth century, numerous historians have pointed out, the
working class developed a fondness for commercial white bread that
served as a token of class distinction and purity.52 However, much of
the white bread was artificially whitened like the duchess’s face, and
Cobbett takes up the issue of the cultural status of white bread
and insists instead that bread – dark or light – conserves an older
moral, symbolic, and natural economy that supports the dignity of
the worker. Since wheat is so expensive in England, Cobbett sug-
gests that cottagers might consider using barley or rye to make their
bread. Drawing on his experience in America, Cobbett writes, “Few
people upon the face of the earth live better than the Long Islanders.
Yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten bread. Rye is the
flour they principally make use of.” Then two paragraphs later, he
concludes the argument by stating brown, coarse bread “was good

enough for his forefathers, who were too proud to be paupers, that
is to say, abject and willing slaves” (CE, para. 82, 84). His argument
elides bread as symbol of English heritage with the bread associated
with American independence. Cobbett wants workers to maintain
the social and symbolic dignity of eating bread, and he associates
having bread with freedom. At a time when necessity and luxury
are being confused, Cobbett maintains that coarse, brown bread is
a political and physical necessity, whereas white bread is a luxury.
It follows then that ample bread is symbolic of a laborer’s overall
bodily health and human dignity; Cobbett writes, “Without bread,
all is misery. The Scripture truly calls it the staff of life; and it may
be called too, the pledge of peace and happiness in the labourer’s
dwelling” (CE, para. 85). The woman making bread is beautiful
because she feeds and brings peace to the family though her work.
Cottage Economy provides instructions for milling wheat and baking
bread at home so that the working poor might reduce their depend-
ency on the miller or the baker, who might adulterate the grain or
bread in addition to overcharging them. Cobbett deplores the com-
modification of bread-baking because it furthers the division and
specialization of labor within an economy, replacing the intergen-
erational knowledge that would be passed down from generation to
generation: “but would there be any harm if less alum were imported
into England, and if some of those youths were left at the plough,
who are now bound in apprenticeships to learn the art and mystery
of doing that which every girl in the kingdom ought to be taught
to do by her mother?” (CE, para. 91). The production of one’s own
food cultivates intergenerational, communal independence from the
larger political economy; workers can produce bread in their own
families, reducing their dependence on the baker. Thus Cobbett
attempts to convince laborers to bake their own coarse bread so to
avoid schemes to replace bread with potatoes or beer with tea, so that
they will hold on to a collective class identity that insists on some
degree of reciprocity from the upper classes.
By describing the way beer and bread can be adulterated in the
commercial process, Cobbett convinces his readers to produce these
products at home, thereby avoiding inflated market prices and
attaining a degree of independence from wage labor. Cobbett at
the same time vilifies the imported products that are replacing beer
and bread in the laborer’s diet: tea and potatoes. These replacement
products are also represented as adulterated or unhealthy. Reformers
such as William Wilberforce advocated teaching the laboring class
how to grow and eat potatoes because they were cheaper, easier to
grow, and did not require as much preparation as wheat bread. While
potatoes were being advocated as a cheap food alternative for the
poor, in Cottage Economy, Cobbett is alarmed by “the modern custom
of using potatoes to supply the place of bread” (CE, para. 77) and
provides pages of calculations in order to prove that baking brown
bread at home is cheaper than potatoes, especially after calculating
that potatoes have to be boiled several times daily and bread can be
baked weekly.
In addition to documenting the wasteful expense of lighting
fires and boiling water several times a day for potatoes, Cobbett
associates the potato with dirt and poverty, warning, “It is the
root also of slovenliness, filth, misery, and slavery; its cultivation
has increased in England with the increase of paupers” (CE, para.
80). Cobbett was not alone in his distrust of potatoes: Catherine
Gallagher analyzes the “potato debates” of the nineteenth century,
and she explains, “The potato threatens the physical life of the poor
as humans because it is only food, mere subsistence, unorganized
into a reciprocal economy of rights and duties, expectations and
negotiations.”53 In comparison to bread, which has a rich history
of symbolizing reciprocity between workers and owners, the potato
threatened to dissolve that reciprocity. If they shift to the potato as
the main food staple, workers in the South would then grow wheat
with no opportunity to share in the fruits of their own labor.
In the Political Register, Cobbett induces disgust for potatoes by
linking them to their history as animal fodder. He calls a diet of
potatoes a “cart-load diet,” and asks his audience to scrutinize a cart
of potatoes going to the market: “Look at the heap; think of its
actually going into the stomachs of you and your family during the
course of a fortnight, and you will be frightened at the idea; you will
be disgusted; you will recoil from so huge a mass of provender.”54 The
consumption of potatoes, moreover, might inculcate “slovenly and
beastly habits” in the laboring class “by constantly lifting their prin-
cipal food at once out of the earth to their mouths, by eating without
the necessity of any implements other than the hands and teeth.”55
In other words, if the laboring classes abandon a whole cultural way
of life that includes milling grains and baking bread, they endanger
their status as humans and become no better than animals. Mary
Douglas contends that the foods a particular culture believes to be
edible or inedible are linked to social distinctions.56 In this case, the
substitution of the potatoes for bread elides the boundary between
animals and humans by transforming fodder for working animals in
to food for the working class. As an example, Cobbett holds out the
status of the Irish, whom he claims have been reduced to the status
of animals through the use of hunger and a potato diet. Potato con-
sumption “has a tendency to bring English labourers down to the state
of the Irish, whose mode of living, as to food, is but one remove from
that of the pig, and of the ill-fed pig too” (CE, para. 77). While it may
seem that he is simply evoking anti-Irish sentiments here, Cobbett’s
concern is that through eating potatoes the condition of the agricul-
tural workers in Southern England might be lowered to that of the
Irish workers, whom Cobbett claims have been subject to Malthusian
doctrines, and he wishes to stem that decline.
Cobbett similarly deplores the replacement of tea for beer; in this
case, however, the substitution of tea for beer signals a contagion of
luxury from the upper class, rather than a contagion from animals
or the Irish poor. By taking up this position against tea-drinking,
Cobbett is writing against an already established change in the work-
er’s diet. Mintz has documented how tea replaced beer in the laborer’s
diet in the late eighteenth century.57 Nevertheless, Cobbett seeks to
motivate his audience to return to brewing beer, because he “view[s]
tea drinking as a destroyer of health, and enfeebler of the frame, an
engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a
maker of misery for old age” (CE, para. 29). Such effeminacy, laziness,
and debauchery are symptoms of a contagion of luxury from the
upper classes. In Cottage Economy tea is associated with the excesses
of consumer society, because tea was expensive and, moreover, the
preparation of tea also required china and other apparatus, what
Cobbett calls “the clattering tea-tackle” (CE, para. 23).58 Furthermore,
while beer is brewed once a month or so, tea must be made daily,
causing additional expense in lighting daily fires and thus taking time
that could be employed in useful, productive labor.
Tea requires, moreover, the addition of “red dirty sugar” for it
to be palatable (CE, para 24). For Cobbett, the use of sugar was not
just economically but also morally expensive. When discussing the
use of sugar, Cobbett makes use of what Timothy Morton calls “the
blood sugar topos,” which “highlights the artificiality of certain
wants, underscoring how acts of consumption can be complicit
with the forces of colonialism and exploitation”59 Cobbett uses the
blood-sugar topos repeatedly to vilify tea-drinking. In Cobbett’s Corn,
he asks, “Will our labouring people, then, still insist upon lapping
up tea-water, expensive villainous tea-water, sweetened with the not
less expensive result of the sweating bodies, the aching limbs, and
the bleeding backs of Africans?”60 The blood-sugar topos explicitly
critiques the lack of control that consumers have over the produc-
tion of their food when they participate in the global economy.
Unlike many other reformers of the time, Cobbett does not recom-
mend boycotting sugar; instead, in the spirit of independence from
the global food economy, Cobbett suggests producing an alternative
sweetener in traditional, cottage-grown honey (CE, para. 165).
Tea-drinking, like the luxury associated with the use of sugar,
moreover, is linked to effeminate and even immoral behavior.
Cobbett argues,
Hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fire-side,

a lurking in the bed [. . .] The tea-drinking fills the public-house,
and made the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as
they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls,
to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for
the brothel. (CE, para. 32)
Cobbett’s masculinist views deplore excessive femininity even in

women; the moral of this story, in which tea is represented as school-
ing for a life of prostitution, resounds with other moral, cautionary
literature for the poor, such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts.
More’s tracts, however, were based in an ideology of food scarcity
and deference to property. For example, her character Jack concludes
in “The Riot,” “I’ll e’en wait a little till cheaper the bread,” because
“I’d rather be hungry than hanged.”61 Although they both recom-
mend frugality, the difference between More and Cobbett’s food
politics is that More recommends patient passivity within the larger
system while Cobbett recommends activity – the cultivation of prac-
tical tangible skills – that refuses the criminalization of customary
rights for subsistence.
In order to prove “the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers”

of tea, Cobbett moves beyond moral stories to suggest the following
experiment:
Put it to the test with a lean hog: give him the fifteen bushels of
malt, and he will repay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts.
But give him the 730 tea messes, or rather begin to give them to
him, and give him nothing else, and he is dead with hunger, and
bequeaths you his skeleton at the end of about seven days. (CE,
para. 30)
By connecting animal life with human life, Cobbett argues that the
plants used to brew beer are more nutritious than the plants used
to brew tea. This model is also an ecological one: beer is a healthier
drink because it has the advantage of the grains being then fed to
pigs or cows. For Cobbett, the best household or cottage economy
is inseparable from nature’s economy because waste becomes useful
and part of the cycle of production. In other words, beer brewing is a
practice that is inseparable from assuring the laborer will have access
to the third “B,” bacon.
With the rise of a global, commercial food economy, the laboring
poor had stopped brewing beer and baking their own bread, and
likewise, due to the enclosure acts and the decline of open grazing
land, the poor were no longer raising their own meat. In the sections
on keeping a cow, pig, or other animals, Cobbett does not rail against
the health of commercially butchered meat, nor is there a substitute
for meat, such as the substitute of potatoes for bread, because if the
laborer did not graze his own cow, pigs, or poultry, then he and his
family went without meat altogether. In his many attempts to define
the difference between necessity and luxury for the working class,
meat falls squarely on the side of indisputable necessity. Cobbett
most forcefully brings up the topic of religion when discussing meat:
Cobbett’s profane materialism emerges most radically in the sections
on keeping pigs and cows because it is the eating of animal flesh that
forms a communion for a symbolically and physically edified labor-
ing class. He compares the ability to graze a cow, keep a pig, or raise
some poultry to religious salvation: “A couple of flitches of bacon are
worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts” (CE,
para. 139).62 The space and skill to raise animals for consumption,
Cobbett repeatedly argues, are far better than the faith in the world
to come, which renders the laborer tractable and powerless. Cobbett’s
distrust of the clergy as an unproductive class runs throughout his
work, and his invective against the church and its unwillingness to
tend to the earthly needs of the poor is nowhere clearer than in a
paragraph on the basics of hog-butchering, of all places: “Can any
reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, God requires us
to give up the food necessary to sustain the body?” (CE, para. 148).
Cobbett asserts, “Meat in the house is a great source of harmony”
(CE, para. 153), and that harmony is not simply within the family
but also within the social order itself. The ability to graze an animal
for consumption is one of the declining perquisites for laborers. Yet
Cobbett insists laborers should demand this customary right and its
symbolic reciprocity. In Cottage Economy, Cobbett suggests, “there-
fore, on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may
be kept, if the family be considerable; and especially if the cottager
brew his own beer, which will give him grains to assist the wash”
(CE, para. 143). Thus with the keeping of animals, Cobbett recom-
mends two ways in which “waste” is reincorporated into the system:
first, Cobbett argues for the consumption of beer rather than tea
in part because the leftover grain from beer-brewing can be used
again to fatten livestock. Second, the unused periphery of private
land held by wealthy landowners can be put to use by the labor-
ers in providing for themselves. By maintaining “bacon” as part
of the working class diet, not only is the laborer asserting ancient
customary rights, but the entire cottage economy becomes a closed
ecological cycle.
This ecological dimension of Cobbett’s Cottage Economy has been
overlooked by critics. Leonora Nattrass, for example, argues, “He
cleverly assumes that the tea-drinker’s bread will be ‘dry,’ as though
beer automatically entails bacon and tea automatically rules it out.”63
Nattrass argues that Cobbett’s repeated assertion that a tea drinker’s
bread will be dry – which means without milk or meat to wet it – is a
clever rhetorical argument for effect. Yet in Cottage Economy tea is
represented as wasteful indulgence because the tea leaves that are
leftover after brewing tea cannot be fed to a laborer’s animal. For
Cobbett, then, in his ecological view of a cottage economy, beer
automatically entails bacon because the leftover grains can be reused
as feed for the pig. For Burke and Wordsworth, the dead need to be
symbolically reincorporated into the living, while for Cobbett the

dead literally sustain the living, through meat and manure:
Everything of animal or vegetable substance that comes into a

house, must go out of it again, in one shape or another. The very
emptying of vessels of various kinds, on a heap of common earth,
makes it a heap of the best manure. Thus goes on in the work of
reproduction; and thus is verified in the words of the Scripture,
“Flesh is grass,” and there is “Nothing new under the sun.”
(CE, para. 132)
The cottage economy is one without waste, where the laborer not
only enjoys the fruit of his labor, but even the household waste is a
form of abundance.
A flourishing cottage economy of the three Bs is a sustainable cot-
tage ecology, in which energy and waste is continually recycled in
an organic, intergenerational system. Cottage Economy criticizes the
poor for being swept up in the wage-labor economy and the quest
for an increasing consumption of commodity goods, many of which
cause waste that cannot be recycled into cottage wealth. Cobbett
deplores the “tea-tackle” due to its delicacy and expense, and he
recommends that any purchased durable goods be sturdy enough
that they can be reused intergenerationally. Choosing metal cook-
ware and utensils instead of china or glass, he argues, will ensure
that these objects “last several lifetimes.” A cottage economy then
requires an intergenerational ethos when making even mundane
household purchases, because, “A labourer ought to inherit from
his great-grandfather something beside his toil” (CE, para. 200). The
laborer is to think beyond his or her own generation and to use land
and make purchases that will allow the following generation that
“best inheritance” of healthy, flourishing social and natural ecology.
While this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach might
seem to excuse implicitly the government’s social responsibility for
the poor, he was “Not intending the book to be read by employers or
Whig educators,” as Ian Dyck points out, so Cottage Economy “dealt
frankly with domestic inefficiencies, calling upon rural workers to
make the best use of their raw materials.”64 In fact, much of Cottage
Economy proposes another system or way of making-do that exists,
as much as possible, outside of the wage-labor economy: “The more
of their money that is retained in the hands of their own people, the
better it is for them altogether,” and “Every farmer will understand
me when I say, that he ought to pay for nothing in money, which he
can pay for in anything but money” (CE, para. 91, 97). The economy
discussed here is an older one of bartering and bricolage, and it aims
to restore the “community of interests and feelings” that was driven
away by paper money and a commodity-based culture.
The directions in Cottage Economy provide detailed advice for
manipulating the various legal barriers that have been erected to mini-
mize the cottagers’ self-sufficiency by encouraging laborers to reassert
traditional grazing rights or, alternatively, clandestinely hiding the
animals in a marginal place. The directions call to mind de Certeau’s
“ways of using,” in which a subject’s agency is acted out through one’s
style of consumption. “Ways of using,” according to de Certeau,
emerge from “an intellectual creativity as persistent as it is subtle,
tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the
dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by
a rationality founded on established rights and property.”65 In other
words, objects can be used in a way that undermines the system
that produced them. Cobbett’s instructions for a cottage economy
persistently and creatively undermine established property rights
and individualism through cooperative uses of land for the common
good. For example, instead of each individual family buying beer
brewing utensils, a community might cooperatively buy just one
set of beer brewing utensils and share them to minimize the initial
costs of home-brewing beer. Even though it was illegal to share
brewing instruments, Cobbett, using tactical rhetoric to keep him-
self from prosecution, gives instructions on how such a cooperative
might be organized if it were legal. He also provides detailed instruc-
tions on how cottagers might make their own malt (which was
also illegal) so that they don’t have to buy malt and pay the malt
tax. Cobbett asserts, “How easy would every family and especially
every farmer, do this, if it were not for the punishment attached to
it” (CE, para. 110). Here liberty is found not in merely flouting the
law but in refusing to follow laws that undermine communal efforts
towards independent subsistence.
For Cobbett then, freedom and independence always emerge from
communal cooperation between humans, animals, and the land. The
social ecology of the cottage economy includes crop diversity and
intergenerational care rather than the quick and undistributed prof-

its associated with monoculture. In a letter in the Political Register,
“To Mr. Coke: On the question of Large Farms and Small Farms, and
on the fall of the System out of which they have arisen,” Cobbett
describes Horton Heath before enclosure, and to measure its worth,
I took down the names of all the cottagers, the number and ages
of their children, the number of their cows, heifers, calves, sows,
pigs, geese, ducks, fowls, and stalls of bees; the extent of their little
bits of grounds, the worth of what was growing (it was at, or
near Michaelmas), the number of apple-trees, and of their black
cherry trees ...
Cobbett makes all these calculations in order to conclude that when

the farmers used the common cooperatively: “the cottages produced
from their little bits, in food, for themselves, and in things to be sold
at market, more than any neighboring farm of 200 acres! The cottages
consisted, fathers, mothers, and children, and grand fathers, grand
mothers, and grand children, of more than two hundred persons.”66
Cottager life as it is described here is not one of rugged, individual self-
sufficiency but rather points to a whole, intergenerational system of
life and health. Cobbett relates this story of the ecological and social
diversity of the commons to ask the pointed rhetorical question:
“Was it a waste?” He answers, “No: but, it would have been a waste,
if it had been improved.”67 As these common lands are in decline
then, Cottage Economy recommends a form of what Peter Linebaugh
calls “the practice of commoning,” which aims to “provide mutual
aid, neighborliness, fellowship, and family with their obligations of
trust and expectations of security” through maintaining practices
that seek to conserve cultural space from unrelenting privatization
and commodification.68
E.P. Thompson contends that Cobbett “nourished the culture of a
class, whose wrongs he felt, but whose remedies he could not under-
stand.”69 Many critics after Thompson have agreed that the organic
agrarian ideal is idealistic and functions principally as an imaginary
respite from the growing commercial economy. However, in Cottage
Economy, the recommended modes of production and practices of
consumption form communal solidarity. The argument that Kevin
Gilmartin suggests about Cobbett’s political writings can also be applied
to the cottage economy: “he was prepared to follow the logic of organic
connection to its natural conclusion: the entire system would collapse
if key components were sufficiently debilitated.”70 In other words, if
enough laborers partially opted out of the global economy through
commoning – developing local and subsistence economies – these
practices might counter and even collapse agricultural capitalism and
the growing worldwide food trade. Cobbett’s Cottage Economy insists
that subsistence is a form of resistance: the conservation of everyday
practices of subsistence cooking, gardening, and husbandry cultivates
a residual moral economy for the rural poor.
6
Anthropomorphism and the
Critique of Liberal Rights in
John Clare’s Enclosure Elegies
Marketed as a “peasant poet,” John Clare’s poetic identity is marked

by his relationship to the natural world. His poems detail the van-
ishing topos of his childhood spent on common land; enclosure
interrupts his walking paths with fences, cuts down beloved trees,
and radically alters the visible landscape. “All my favourite places
have met with misfortunes,” Clare laments in his “Autobiographical
Fragments” (BH 41). Describing the fate of particular, beloved places
altered by enclosure, Clare uses the word “misfortune,” a word that
hints at his penchant for anthropomorphism, since “misfortune”
is almost always used in connection with human social existence.
Clare’s middle period poetry records his native Helpston’s natural
and social history through a “language that is ever green,” which
has been described by James McKusick as a unique “ecolect” that
attempts to conserve what is left of his native Helpston.1
Although scholars tend to agree that Clare’s political views are
inextricably tied to his lamentations over the enclosure of the
commons, which eroded both land and cottager communities, in
recent Clare scholarship there has been an extraordinary range of
interpretations of Clare’s politics: Clare has been described as a
radical, a common-sense liberal, a monarchistic conservative, an
advocate of the manorial system, and politically disengaged. Clare’s
politics are difficult to decipher because he eschewed affiliation with
political parties, wrote for both the conservative and radical local
newspapers, and his poetry was edited and influenced by patrons
who expected deference to their own political views.2 A close read-
ing of Clare’s middle period poetry, moreover, reveals that he is at
141
once recognizably conservative, championing the intergenerational

imagination as he takes the “Monarchy of Nature” as a social model
and evokes nostalgia for Merry Old England, yet at the same time he
celebrates the gypsies’ avoidance of paying taxes, defends the rights
of poachers, and deplores the mistreatment of animals and the poor.
In his autobiographical “Sketches” Clare remarks, “In politics
I never dabbled to understand them thoroughly with the old dish
that was served to my forefathers I am content” (BH 30). Like
Cobbett, Clare longs for his ancestor’s dish, a metonym about food,
survival, and a whole organic way of life, and his initial response
to progressive change is to call for a return to an older order, which
resonates with Burke’s anxiety about progress. Burke contends,
“Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined
by too confident a security” (R 92). Clare, however, no longer has
the luxury of “anxious apprehension,” and he can no longer wish
to slow progress with tradition, even though he hints at it on occa-
sion, because enclosure and improvement have already irreversibly
changed the commons of his childhood. Clare’s enclosure elegies
record a desire to return to the world of his forefathers but, unlike the
other texts explored in this book, tangible remnants of communal
social ecology have been erased from the landscape and social
memory.3 Clare’s enclosure elegies, I argue, mark the end stage of
Romantic conservatism, in which intergenerational stability can be
found only in nature’s “wildness.” Unable to build on a communal
social ecology, Clare’s conservationist view shifts into a negative
critique of liberal rights.
John Clare’s passionate, proto-ecological elegies on the enclosure
of the commons have attracted the attention of ecocritics, who tend
to argue that Clare’s green poetry espouses the extension of liberal
rights to non-human life. Jonathan Bate argues that Clare “views
the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘rights of nature’ as co-extensive and
co-dependent,” and more recently, Oerlemans contends that the
sensitivity expressed in Clare’s badger poems demonstrates that
“animals were beginning to be seen as independent, conscious, and
capable of possessing rights.”4 The evidence amassed in studies like
David Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights or Jonathan Bate’s
The Song of the Earth demonstrates that Romantic era arguments
for the “rights of man” were at times radically extended to concern
for rights for women and animals.5 The liberal discourse of rights,
Anthropomorphism in Clare’s Enclosure Elegies 143
however, was and continues to be progressive, cosmopolitan, and

universal, whereas John Clare’s politics and poetic vision were stub-
bornly local; he repeatedly views his relationship to the environment
in terms of community, local customs, and common rights as opposed
to the individualist rights of man. Although the way Clare links the
abject status of the rural poor to the decimation of their environment
through enclosure and improvement may seem like radicalism, it also
resonates with a conservative resistance to the new monied interest
and the utilitarian logic of improvement. The politics of Clare’s writ-
ing then can best be described as a conservative, conservationist point
of view that laments the loss of intergenerational memory through the
combined erosion of local ecology and community.
John Clare’s enclosure elegies state that the enclosure of the
commons is facilitated by men who “wrong another by the name of
right,” and his notes show that he was extremely suspicious of “the
unlawful cupidity of their notions of right and freedom.”6 Although
it may seem counterintuitive to today’s understanding of environ-
mental advocacy, I argue that Clare’s enclosure elegies claim that
“the name of right,” or liberal, individualist conceptions of rights
allow humans to “wrong another” in the predatory exploitation of
the land, animals, and the poor. Clare’s resistance to enclosure then
does not call for the inclusion of the poor, and by extension animals
and the environment, in the regime of liberal rights but rather
engenders a critique of the liberal subject position understood as an
autonomous, rational, and individualized self. The first part of this
chapter explores how Clare challenges the notion of autonomous lib-
eral subjectivity through the repeated use of anthropomorphism as a
residual, representational strategy; for example, trees are “beheaded,”
the landscape is bereft with “scarce a rag to wear,” moles become
“homeless little miners” that are hanged “for traitors,” and rabbits
“dread a workhouse like the poor.”7 As Clare effaces the perceived
boundary between human and non-human life, at the same time
he poetically establishes a common ground among forms of life that
are being appropriated into property (land, trees, animals, the poor).
The second part of this chapter explores how Clare’s intergen-
erational and bioegalitarian literary tropes ethically bind humans
to other forms of life in order to illuminate a profoundly humble
and conservative view of freedom while at the same time illustrat-
ing the tragic hubris of liberal, individualist conceptions of freedom.
Finally, I argue that Clare’s various identifications with non-human

life transform the conservative vision of returning to the past into an
environmental ethics of “neglect” (a word used repeatedly by Clare)
that imagines, in Bridget Keegan’s terms, “a world without us” that
opposes the privatization and improvement of common life.8
They “worked me till I couldnt stand”:

Anthropomorphism as habitus
Clare’s enclosure elegy, “The Lament of Swordy Well,” has been

lauded because its use of prosopopoeia uniquely gives a voice to the
land, thus allowing it “the room to speak” of its enclosure and trans-
formation into plowed fields and a gravel quarry (44).9 “The Lament
of Swordy Well,” James McKusick argues, is “one of the first and still
one of the very few poems to speak for the Earth in such a direct
and immediate way, adapting the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia
(attributing voice to inanimate objects) to a contemporary crisis
of ecological awareness.”10 As McKusick suggests, Clare’s rhetorical
practice expresses a proto-ecological awareness of interdependence
that is inextricably linked to his ethico-political views, yet reading
the “The Lament of Swordy Well” through the figure of prosopo-
poeia does not fully account for the uniqueness of the poem. David
Simpson marvels at “Clare’s extraordinary originality in giving
voice to an unbounded place, thereby inventing a form of per-
sonification unrecorded in rhetorical theory.”11 Clare’s radically
inventive form of personification might be more aptly characterized
as anthropomorphism, for in the early lines of “The Lament of
Swordy Well,” the land emerges not only as a face and voice, but
also as an entirely anthropomorphized laboring body. Swordy Well
initially introduces itself as an impoverished, homeless person who
has refused the temptation to beg by holding out a hat or “limping
leg” to induce pity and alms. The poem describes environmental
degradation through the figure of a working class human body
that has toiled to exhaustion: they “worked me till I couldnt
stand / & crush me now Im down” (23–4). Reading the rhetoric of
Swordy Well as anthropomorphism rather than prosopopoeia reveals
that instead of privileging the human face, voice, and intellect, the
poem instead foregrounds the biological, laboring body as the site
of identification and alliance between human and non-human life.
Later in the poem, Swordy Well remembers its former state as a

common, and insists that its natural processes even then were labor
that contributed to the local economy: “I kept my horses cows &
sheep / & built the town below” (69–70). Land is consistently rep-
resented as a laboring body, even when it was a common, but the
laboring body of the common is strong and productive instead of
one that is enervated by overuse.
“The habitual reading of passion, life, and physiognomy into
the landscape is one of the few salient attributes common to most
of the major romantic poets,” M.H. Abrams pointed out long
ago.12 Although personification is a common rhetorical move for a
Romantic writer, this imagined anthropomorphism of non-human
life as a laboring body characterizes Clare’s unique working-class
romanticism. In “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” another
enclosure elegy, the anthropomorphized stream recognizes an affin-
ity with the “Shun’d Son of Poverty”13 and sympathizes:
Unequall’d tho thy sorrows seem

And great indeed they are
O hear my sorrows for my stream
You’ll find an equal there (41–4)
In an explicit identification, the stream asserts equality with the

poor; the propertyless poor suffer and wane as the land is stripped
and becomes unrecognizable. Humanized land is time and again
depicted as irrevocably changed, stripped naked, and bereft of
native dignity: Swordy Well complains, “They strip my coat from off
my back / & scarcely leave a rag” (203–4), and Round-Oak Waters
laments, “All naked are thy native plains” (123). In the face of a
localized landscape that has been stripped of its intergenerational
social ecology, such anthropomorphism establishes a new topos, an
alliance between the environment and the poor, thus drawing the
lines of an emergent more-than-human community that anticipates
both post-humanism and today’s environmental justice concerns.
Literary anthropomorphism recalls, as Onno Oerlemans reminds
us, the naïveté of children’s literature and fables, and thus is often
seen as “a sign of charming delusion”; at its worst, according to
John Simons, anthropomorphism “aims to entirely obliterate the
non-human experience and to replace it entirely by the human.”14
Clare’s use of anthropomorphism, however, manifests the intellec-

tual complexity of an identification with non-human life that maps
out a collective topography based on shared exposure to suffering
and exploitation by the liberal, utilitarian policies of improvement.
Paul de Man’s crucial distinction between anthropomorphism and
prosopopoeia can be of assistance here; prosopopoeia is making
or giving a face for the non-human other, whereas anthropomor-
phism is “not just a trope but an identification on the level of
substance.”15 Anthropomorphism moves beyond literary trope to
a partial transposition of identity that, instead of creating a face,
effaces the difference between non-human and human entities, thus
positing a shared substance between human and non-human life.
This definition of anthropomorphism illuminates Clare’s political
position vis-à-vis non-human life, for rather than simply giving the
land and animals a voice or face, which has commonly been argued,
his anthropomorphisms wear away (sur)face differences to expose a
shared bodily substance that is subject to suffering and exploitation.
The implied common substance stands in the absence of a physical or
cultural commons and becomes the stance from which he questions
the ontological and ethical dimensions of liberal interpretations of
human freedom.
Even though he has been described as a self-taught “peasant poet,”
Clare’s politically motivated use of anthropomorphism surpasses de
Man’s criticisms of it for freezing “the infinite chain of tropological
transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence
which, as such, excludes all others.” Cynthia Chase explains
de Man’s concern, that by “Taking the natural as human, it takes the
human as given,” and thus humans anthropocentrically become
the measure of all living things.16 In other words, de Man insists
that as anthropomorphism posits a shared substance, it goes beyond
trope to substantialization, casting a spell that makes humanity the
stable and unquestionable measure of all things. De Man is cer-
tainly right to be skeptical of essentialism, both linguistically and
politically, yet Clare’s anthropomorphism affirms that the shared
essence between humans and animals, rather than freezing language
and ideas, amounts to the substantialization, lyrically at least, of
an organic community of marginalized life whose very existence
counters optimistic Enlightenment views of human freedom and
progressive improvement. Thus Clare’s anthropomorphism, rather
than making humans the measure of all things, also effects an ani-
malization of humans as well.
The anthropomorphized, embodied land of Swordy Well, for
example, sympathetically narrates how its degradation includes the
destruction of native plants and animals, which in turn mirrors
the suffering of the poor:
The bees flye round in feeble rings

& find no blossom bye
Then thrum their almost weary wings
Upon the moss & die
Rabbits that find my hills turned oer
Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor
& nibble on the road (81–8)
The ecological vision of these lines patiently documents the effects

of habitat loss on all levels of life: as Swordy Well is transformed
from a common into a gravel pit and plowed fields, native plant
life, insects, and small mammals all find themselves displaced and
dying. By depicting non-human life as having human conscious-
ness — the rabbits “dread the workhouse like the poor” — the poem
anthropomorphizes the entire topos — soil, plants, animals, the
poor — as enervated, fearful inmates in a workhouse. Clare finished
this poem in 1837 after the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) that
discouraged any outdoor relief and required that parishes have indi-
vidual workhouses, and in describing this movement from a subsist-
ence economy of the commons to a wage labor economy, “Swordy
Well” asserts that human and non-human life are alike subject to
the biopolitical discipline employed in the progressive utilitarian
improvement of the commons.
In Clare’s poetry, the anthropomorphic identification with non-
human life on the basis of the laboring body then bears structural
similarities with Jeremy Bentham’s now famous deconstruction of
the boundary between humans and animals: “the question is not,
Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”17 Bentham
challenges the way humanist thought conceptualizes biological
inequality as justification for the exclusion of animals from moral
and legal consideration. While humanism distinguishes animals from
humans based on human abilities that animals appear to lack (reason,

language, use of tools, etc.), Bentham highlights the commonality
that humans share with non-human life: the inability to free one-
self entirely from susceptibility to suffering, or in Derrida’s words,
the shared “anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of
this anguish.”18 In a similar vein, human identification with plants
and animals that have lost their habitat just as the poor have been
displaced from the commons exposes a similar shared vulnerability
to suffering and pain. As rabbits, bees, trees, and land are anthropo-
morphized into inmates in a workhouse, “Swordy Well” exposes the
utilitarian biopower that “brought life and its mechanisms into the
realm of explicit calculations.”19 Beyond its ostensible goal of pro-
ducing the “greatest happiness” for a calculated, modernized society,
those at the margins of this social order – the land, animals, and the
rural poor – are subject to intrusive management and optimization
tactics that create wealth for the middle class. As Swordy Well states,
the “workhouse is a place that yields / From poverty its gains” (77–8).
Round-Oak Waters similarly explains that the laborers who
stripped its riparian buffer are not enemies of the land but rather are
subject to the same system of exploitation:
Altho their aching hands did wield

The axe that gave the blow
Yet ’t’was not them who own’d the field
Nor plan’d its overthrow
No no the foes that hurt my field

Hurts these poor moilers too
And thy own bosom knows & feels
Enough to prove it true (169–76)
In a remarkably clear vision of environmental justice avant la lettre,

Round-Oak Waters proclaims that the speculative owners who are
improving the commons into productive fields are the ones at fault
for the its state of decline, not the poor who need employment
and thus have no choice but to cut down the trees. The anthropo-
morphism of Round-Oak Waters then suggests a possible alliance
between the environment and the poor on the basis of their “hurt” or
suffering caused by progressive land privatization and improvement.
The human identification with non-human life in Clare’s poetry

then differs from the nostalgic sympathy for animal suffering which, as
Perkins notes, is the subject of much Romantic period literature about
animals; for example, Clare’s sonnet about Isaac Walton criticizes
the “mock sentimental man of moods” who deplores fishing and
would “deem / Thy pastime cruel” (7, 1–2).20 Rather than emerging
from middle-class nostalgic sympathy, Clare’s identification with ani-
mals arises from having animal identity ascribed to him as a member
of the working class. In his “Apology for the Poor,” for example, he
argues “the poor man will not find the refuse [malt tax relief] of any
more use to him than a dry bone to a hungry dog – excuse the simile
reader for the poor have been likened unto dogs before now.”21 The
animalization of the working class has been documented extensively:
based on a plethora of textual evidence, Thomas concludes, “the
common people were repeatedly portrayed as animals who needed to
be forcibly restrained if they were not to break out and become dan-
gerous,” and Perkins summarizes, “The habitual associative linking
of domestic and work animals with servants persisted well into the
Romantic epoch and beyond.”22 Even Jeremy Bentham’s aforemen-
tioned advocacy for animals is based on the French affirmation of the
rights of human slaves. The animalization of subjugated classes of
humans – women, children, the working class, colonized or enslaved
non-Europeans – is controversial, and has been called the “dreaded
comparison,” by Marjorie Spiegel, yet she argues: “To deny our
similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power.”23
Anthropomorphic identification also serves to jettison any desire on
Clare’s part for identification with the middle class who own and
exploit the land and animals, and the way he imagines the suffering
of an entire organic, ecological community becomes a particularly
rich stance from which he can critique the enclosure of the commons
and its accompanying ideology of improvement.
Although animal life is ascribed to the working poor in order to
denigrate them, Clare’s poetry transforms this animalization into a
poetic and political representational strategy. Clare’s observations of
local life, moreover, seem to bear out the accuracy of the association
between human and animal life in lived experience. For example, in
“The Mole Catcher,” the eponymous protagonist must steal turnips
from the sheep in order to eat, and Clare’s satiric poem “Going to
the Fair,” dramatizes the misadventures of Simon, a servant, and a
horse named Dobbins, who manifest parallel desires for freedom and
both find that freedom thwarted by the master.24 Representational
strategies like these bear similarities to what Neel Ahuja defines as
the “animal mask”: it “appropriates the rhetoric of animalization
to reveal its ongoing racial, neocolonial, or ecological legacies.”25
However, Clare’s animalization of the poor, beyond a mask (which
would be an emphasis on the face such as is implied by the trope
of prosopopoeia) amounts to a zoomorphism that complements his
anthropomorphisms, since both tend toward a full material, bodily
identification based on physical suffering, like the hunger that moti-
vates the Mole Catcher to steal turnips.
Clare’s repeated rhetoric of anthropomorphism alternating with
zoomorphism becomes the basis of a political stance. Although his
approach is circumscribed and regional, it broadens into an inter-
generational and interspecies communal imagination that functions
in place of Clare’s lost native topography. Even though he is not dis-
cussing anthropomorphism as a representative technique, Timothy
Morton suggests, “An ecological approach would surely identify
with the losers, with the ‘subhuman; rather than the superman. To
think the political animal, then, is to think ‘lower’ and ‘less than,’
to shrink in vulnerability and hide in introversion, to dig holes
and hibernate.”26 Clare’s version of what Morton calls “the politi-
cal animal” imagines anthropomorphic identification with insects,
scavengers, and beaten down working animals, yet he moves beyond
the political animal to include fallen trees, ravaged landscape, and
even “poor persecuted weeds.”27 The enclosure elegies thus effect a
radical shift to identifying not just with an individual animal but
with a collective of bare life that is vulnerable to suffering. Clare’s
anthropomorphic representative strategy thus evinces a profound
humility rather than child-like naïveté.
“Nature turns at freedoms will”: Positive freedom and

the ecological ethic of neglect
Instead of being a quaint literary trope, then, Clare’s anthropomor-

phisms unite land, humans, and animals in order to demonstrate
that the liberal conception of freedom as an ideology of individual
rights erodes another kind of freedom, freedom as a communal,
biologically driven practice lived out on the commons. Prior to
enclosure, Swordy Well offered a free home to wild animals and out-
cast domesticated life:
There was a time my bit of ground

Made freemen of the slave
The ass no pindard dare to pound
When I his supper gave
The gipseys camp was not affraid
I made his dwelling free
Till vile enclosure came & made
A parish slave of me (225–32)
When Swordy Well was free to offer its hospitality, a roaming donkey
was not impounded by the animal catcher, and the gypsies were
free from the workhouse and from prosecution by the magistrate.
Nomadic gypsies in Clare’s poetry sympathetically assert, according
to Philip W. Martin, the “right to dwell.”28 Dwelling on a common
serves as a literal common ground of practiced, lived freedom for
humans and animals that might otherwise be disciplined into effi-
cient, utilitarian productivity. As the enclosed land is turned into a
farm and gravel quarry, it is owned and as such is enslaved; as a slave,
the land can no longer offer its hospitable freedom. This vision of
freedom, as unfolding mutually dependent life, is at once local and
circumscribed, yet full of boundless potential for freedom within
those limits. Thus rather than asserting that the liberal rights of
man should be progressively extended to non-human life, this poem
represents human freedom as far more limited and constrained, akin
to that of animals. In this way, Clare’s anthropomorphism manifests
what Rosi Braidotti calls “bioegalitarianism,” in which “Freedom is
expressed as the ability to sustain connections to others as the expan-
sion, acceleration, or intensification of interrelation.”29
Several times in the poem, Swordy Well directs its appeal for
assistance to the aristocracy in order to slow the speed of enclosure
and improvement, and the final stanza of the poem concludes with
an appeal to “save his Lordships woods” (249). In order to call for
restraint on the exploitation of the land, Swordy Well appeals to the
aristocracy, thus revealing that Clare, like Burke, believes inheritance,
rather than the free market, leads to ethical land use. As John Barrell
points out, “the farming interest was different from the landed
interest, and the best improvers were men accustomed to handling

money, the new bourgeoisie, not the gentry.”30 At the same time the
poem acknowledges that changes in the land are no longer cycli-
cal and organic, but rather a portent of the decline of the localized,
rural way of life. While Clare hints at Burkean conservatism in this
poem, the conservative appeal to the landed class to slow the speed
of progress is brief and quickly abandoned with the observation that
Swordy Well has already been irrevocably transformed into a gravel
and sand quarry. In other poems from his middle period, Clare
replaces his appeals to the aristocracy with an appeal to an even
more ancient “neglect,” wild spaces where freedom is represented as
unfolding, mutually dependent life.
Although throughout his poetry Clare repeatedly critiques progres-
sive, liberal conceptions of freedom, Clare does speak of freedom
favorably in many poems, and perhaps this is why critics conclude that
Clare would like to extend the liberal “rights of man” to non-human
life. However, when Clare’s poetry depicts freedom favorably, it
tends to be affiliated with an intergenerational, inhuman wildness
that transpires without any human interference: horses break free
from their owners, an uncaged bird seeks the highest tree, sheep are
unfolded, a wild bull roams unexpectedly, and fields are left in “wild
& beautiful neglect.”31 In opposition to rights conceived of as the
rational deliberation of individual interest and entitlement to private
property, Clare asserts that freedom is wild, unfolding life, as he puts
it, “nature’s freedom spread the flowery green.”32 Such freedom is
attributed to various groups of otherwise disenfranchised, nomadic
groups of humans – he extols “gipsey liberty,” “pastoral liberty,”
and “mountain liberty” – whose liberty is associated with common
land that allows their transient mobility according to season and
need.33 After effacing the differences between humans and non-
humans, Clare introduces the idea that freedom is an inhuman blind
dynamic impulse. “For the most part without explicitly moralising,”
Simon Kövesi points out, “Clare manages to dehumanise nature: in
Clare’s world ecosystems work without the presence of man.”34 This
impersonal chaotic version of nature’s “freedom” deepens Clare’s
ethical identification with the non-human world.
The tension between the two competing versions of freedom – the
negative liberty of individual rights versus the positive freedom to
dwell and thrive – is unmistakably expressed in “The Fallen Elm,”
another enclosure elegy. The poem begins with an affirmation of the

speaker’s bioegalitarian interrelation with the elm: “We felt thy pro-
tection like a friend.”35 The speaker then further anthropomorphizes
the elm by asserting its capacity for language:
Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred

Deeper then by a feeling cloathed in words
& speakest now whats known of every tongue
Language of pity & the force of wrong
What cant assumes what hypocrites will dare
Speaks home to truth & shows it what they are (31–6)
The language of the elm is capable of both arousing sympathy, “by

which hearts are stirred,” and producing social critique in identifying
the “force of wrong.” At the same time human language is denigrated
to something deceptive, “cant,” as words “clothe” and cover rather
than reveal feelings. Human language obfuscates truth whereas the
elm’s language is “whats known of every tongue,” an interspecies
dialect within its singular locality.
In one of his letters, Clare describes his walks in the fields, where
“Birds bees trees flowers all talked to me incessantly louder than
the busy hum of men” (BH 277). Similarly, in “Wild Bees,” the bees
become “sweet poets of the summer field / Me much delighting as I stroll
along” (20–1), and in “The Meadow Hay,” “I walk / & hear the very
weeds to sing & talk / Of their delights.”36 As Clare imagines the
language of the fallen elm, the vocalized suffering of Swordy Well,
or a conversation with Round-Oak Waters, he is not merely reiterat-
ing an established literary trope, but rather goes so far to state that
non-human entities speak more influentially and consistently than
other humans, who in Clare’s mind do no more than hum like bees
while distractedly busy with life’s affairs. This pattern of turning bees
and trees into partners in dialogue while human language and activ-
ity becomes an inarticulate hum further effaces the Enlightenment
line between human and non-human life, because the capacity for
language has been a primary marker of that difference.
Although walks such as the ones Clare recalls above may seem
Romantic, particularly when Clare’s individual solitude is coupled
with what Abrams identifies as “the attempt to revitalize the mate-
rial and mechanical universe,”37 in many ways Clare’s solitary walks
in communion with an imaginatively revitalized non-human world

contrast starkly to the ideal of Romantic solitary autonomy, which
might be best represented by that self-proclaimed solitary walker,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Described in the Second Discourse, the ideal
human existence adopts “the simple, uniform, and solitary way of
life prescribed to us by nature”; the ideal of the solitary male wan-
dering outdoors is adopted by many British Romantic writers. Clare’s
foregrounding of human animality in solitude bears some similarities
with Rousseau’s “savage man living dispersed among other animals,”
who primarily identifies with his body, “the only instrument that
savage man is acquainted with.”38 Yet as Rousseau imagines “natural
man” as an “imaginary animal,” Nancy Yousef argues, “What is
emphatically, repetitively stressed as common to the life of animals
(as imagined in the Discourse) and the life of natural man is solitude,
radical asociality, and self-sufficiency.”39 Rousseauvian human ani-
mality then bears remarkable similarities to the liberal conception
of human freedom characterized by autonomy and independence,
unbound from social constraints and responsibilities. Clare’s solitary
walks in the fields, in contradistinction to Rousseau’s idealization of
solitary autonomy, culminate in the imagination of mutual interspe-
cies sociality. In addition to conversing with non-human life forms,
Clare describes his solitary walks as “seeking the religion of the
fields,” thus eliding the customary (church) with the natural (fields)
in a fundamentally communal point of view (BH 78).
As Rousseau’s idealized, autonomous human resonates with lib-
eral views of human subjectivity, Clare’s anthropomorphism of the
natural world serves as the basis for a much more constrained and
humble view of human freedom. Anthropomorphism attempts to be
an antidote to the rapacious greed that Clare clearly asserts is facili-
tated by negative, liberal conceptions of freedom. Clare’s positive
version of freedom in his enclosure elegies emerges from a will to
live and flourish shared by all life. To return to the elegy, “The Fallen
Elm,” since even elegiac language cannot recapture a place already
irrevocably altered, the destruction of the anthropomorphized elm
becomes a case study that illustrates the hypocrisy and danger of
individualist conceptions of rights:
I see a picture which thy fate displays

& learn a lesson from thy destiny
Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways

So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud & then opress the free (37–42)
By equating liberal rights with environmentally and socially destruc-

tive self-interest, the poem reveals that the liberal opposition to
political authority is superficial and only barely masks its competi-
tive self-interest. These lines satirize the self-congratulatory fight for
freedom from “tyranny”: through the lens of individualist rights,
the old elm tree becomes the tyrant that now must be hewn down
like the monarchy or aristocracy. “The Fallen Elm” directly critiques
liberal discourses of rights, such as Paine’s argument for the “rights
of the living.” As the land owners “Bawl freedom loud & then
opress the free,” the poem points out (before Giorgio Agamben) that
the new discourse of rights is drawn by the exclusion of the poor,
animals, and the land itself.40
Clare’s poetry further critiques the way that abstract notions of
liberal rights erode a practice of freedom on the commons by repre-
senting the improvers of land as irrational, predatory animals that
victimize the land, plants, animals, and the poor alike. By poetically
anthropomorphizing non-human life while zoomorphizing human
life, these poems undermine the humanistic tendencies of anthropo-
morphism while at the same time effecting a critique of the ostensi-
ble rationality of enclosure and improvement. After figuring Swordy
Well as a human body and voice, for example, the improvers of its
land are zoomorphized into “mongrel men” and a “greedy pack”
that “rend & delve & tear / The very grass from off my back” (246,
137–9). In “The Fallen Elm,” the improvers “felled thee to the ground /
& barked of freedom – O I hate the sound” (49–50). By morphing
the improvers into dogs, these poems illustrate how the “rights of
freedom” sanction ruin and serve to injure others in a competitive
scramble for ownership, and this representational strategy concludes
“The Fallen Elm”:
The rights of freedom was to injure thine

As thou wert served so would they overwhelm
In freedoms name the little that is mine
& there are knaves that bawl for better laws
& cant of tyranny in stronger powers

Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
& freedoms birthright from the weak devours (68–74)
Exposing the cause of freedom against tyranny as “cant” that barely

obscures the drive to appropriate the weak and vulnerable, the poem
then depicts the improvers as predatory animals that devour the
natural world and the poor. Since the poor are devoured at the end of
this poem, Tim Fulford argues that this poem is characterized by “an
aesthetics of weakness – an intimation of loss, dismemberment and
oblivion rather than immortality.”41 As Fulford points out, Clare’s
poetry about the natural world draws upon but then repeatedly
diverges from Wordsworth’s romantic view that human identifica-
tion with the natural world leads to organic wholeness and glimpses
of immortality. Instead, at the end of the “The Fallen Elm,” the nos-
talgia for childhood is resigned to the dismembered landscape. Yet
what Fulford calls Clare’s “aesthetics of weakness” actually implies a
politically viable, pessimistic, ecological view in which the human
poor collectively identify with the non-human victims in the scramble
to privatize the commons.
When anthropomorphized trees that speak a language are hewn
down by people who “bark” like dogs, such anthropomorphism
and zoomorphism, instead of positing a comforting underlying
substance or narcissistic fantasy of wholeness, uncannily exposes
the irrational underside of claims to property and other individual-
ist rights. Timothy Morton suggests that Clare’s poetry manifests
a “dark ecology,” through which “the very feelings of loneliness
and separation, rather than narcissistic fantasies of interconnected-
ness, put us in touch with a surrounding environment.”42 Morton
argues that Clare’s late poems of melancholy and madness are far
more ecological than the poems that are commonly used to identify
Clare as an early ecological thinker, like the enclosure elegies discussed
above. Yet I want to argue that even in the overtly ecological enclosure
elegies, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism create a collective of life
through shared suffering and displacement. In the enclosure elegies,
Clare’s dark ecology of non-human identification is not a matter of
separation, but of interconnectedness, and this interconnectedness is
not narcissistic but rather illustrates the tragic hubris of liberal concep-
tions of human freedom.
In the absence of any tokens of his childhood’s communal social

ecology, Clare posits a new commons in a shared will to unpre-
dictable, emergent life. His views resonate with those of Arthur
Schopenhauer, who, like Clare, is often cited as an early champion of
animals.43 Although it might seem strange to compare the views
of Clare, the self-taught “peasant poet,” with Schopenhauer, he and
Clare share a deep pessimism about liberal rights and freedoms.
Human and non-human life share an essence, Schopenhauer argues;
in his essay “On Religion,” he writes, “the animal is in essence
absolutely the same thing that we are, and that the difference lies
merely in the accident, the intellect, not in the substance, which is
the will.”44 Clare’s anthropomorphisms posit a similar kind of shared
substance between human and non-human life. Such a communal
vision of life connected by a more-than-human will strikes at the
very foundation of the liberal humanist conception of subjectivity,
recapitulated by Luc Ferry as “antinatural man,” in whom “the faculty
to separate oneself from the order of naturality is the sign of the
properly human.” Liberal humanism posits that human freedom is
exercised by rationality, according to Ferry; the supposed “ability to
break away from the animal in us” in order to bend the natural world
to our own purposes. This leads to his conclusion that, for humans,
“his essence is that he has no essence.”45 By asserting a shared sub-
stance between human and non-human life, Clare’s anthropomor-
phisms and Schopenhauer’s philosophy contest humanist liberalism
by circumscribing rather than enlarging notions of human freedom.
The ethical identification with animals is addressed in “The
Autumn Robin,” in which the robin is depicted as “an ancient
friend” who shares life with many humans, shepherds, woodmen,
milkmaids, but it is the most vulnerable group, the gypsies, with
whom the bird shares both vulnerability and bounty.46 The poem
depicts “The gipsey boy who seeks in glee / Blackberrys for his dainty
meal” (41–2). When he finds the blackberries, he decides to share
them with the bird: “& though his hunger ill can spare / The fruit he
will not pluck them all / But leaves some to thy share” (46–8). This
poem explicitly connects the vulnerability of birds to the vulnerability
of marginalized groups based on their shared dependence on the
commons for food and shelter. By extension, moreover, gyspies stand
in for the now almost extinct cottager; as Anne Janowitz points out,
“the Gypsy operates as a figure who, managing to live off the commons
and waste in an age of enclosure, returns as a quasi-fantastical double

to the English cottager.”47 Birds and marginalized groups of humans
have vulnerability and dependency in common, thus they are in a
special position to develop genuinely common goods, in this case,
shared resources for mutual flourishing. In this way, Clare’s particu-
larly poetic approach to representations of the natural world is meant
to inculcate a certain kind of customary consciousness that counters
individualism with intergenerational, interspecies community.
Instead of returning to traditions like Burke, Clare’s organicism
emerges from the shared more-than-human will. For example, in
“Walcott Hall & Surrounding Scenery,” Clare contrasts the ruins of a
hall that has been abandoned by the gentry with the parts of it that
are being slowly “improved” by the new monied interest:48
Tho industrys mad meddling toils

Thy wild seclusions yearly spoils
Yet there are nooks still left behind
As wild as taste coud wish to find
That toil has tryd & tryd in vain
& left neglect its own again
Which nature turns at freedoms will
More sweet more wild & varied still (51–8)
Whereas human industry interferes with unfolding life and therefore

spoils the wild earth, when the land is left in “neglect,” it demon-
strates a will to freedom manifested as an uninhibited unfolding
with a variation that is “more sweet more wild & varied still.” In
Clare’s poetry, the word “neglect” loses any negative connotation and
amounts to a willful refusal to mix one’s labor with the earth for utili-
tarian improvement, which is Locke’s view of the right to property.
This neglect then amounts to an unpredictable emergent process that
resists instrumental reason and improvement. Such a shared will is
limited as it is communal and circumscribed, yet free in its radically
contingent potential for singular variations within those limits. The
freedom that humans share with non-human life, for Clare, is “wild
and sweet” but it is also a chaotic process outside of human control.49
Even Clare’s more optimistic poems assert the primacy of an emer-
gent will. “The Eternity of Nature,” presents a daisy that is “trampled
under foot,” yet “The daisy lives & strikes its little root / Into the lap
of time” (3–5). The daisy then becomes a form of the intergenera-

tional imagination: centuries later, a child picks this daisy as it peren-
nially re-emerges from the ground because the “eternity of nature” is
“unchangeable as truth” (76).50 While this image is conservative in its
organic circularity – the natural world is always renewing itself and this
spurs hope that the historical past will continue to reemerge and bloom
into the present – at the same time, Clare asserts that “Strange nature’s
laws / Plays many freaks” (77–8). According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, “freak” implies capriciousness and the “product of irregu-
lar or sportive fancy” and is even linked to the monstrous “freak of
nature,” the “abnormally developed individual of any species.”51
Similarly “Walcott Hall” describes natural freedom as a wondrous
capacity for variation that only “neglect” can allow. Thus these
poems develop the idea of a “strange” and inhuman will to variation
that ranges from caprice to monstrosity. The enclosure elegies can
be read, then, as not only depicting an assault on the beauty of the
landscape, but also as lamenting the human trammeling, bending,
and manipulating of Nature’s intergenerational, more-than-human
will. P.M.S. Dawson hints at this view, without mentioning Clare’s
ecology, when he suggests that Clare’s “trust was not finally in the
human processes of political change but in the impersonal forces of
time and nature.”52
Clare’s identification with emergent non-human life enables, poeti-
cally at least, a stubborn fidelity to the wild, uncultivated spaces that
never meet “the rage of the blundering plough.”53 Keegan makes
the case that for Clare, the land’s value “paradoxically comes from
an absolute absence of agrarian productivity.”54 Clare’s denigration
of the use of “enslaving tools” and “cursed weapons [that] leveled half
the land” bears similarities to Georges Bataille’s suggestion, “The tool
changes nature and man at the same time: it subjugates nature to
man, who makes and uses it, but it ties man to subjugated nature.
Nature becomes man’s property but it ceases to be immanent to him.
It is his on the condition that it is closed to him.”55 Clare’s nomadic
wandering not only across the landscape but also into and out of
various identifications with non-human life allows him to preserve,
imaginatively at least, a sense of the natural world’s immanence;
such wandering further transforms the Romantic ideal of leisure into
a politicized “neglect” that opposes the appropriation of non-human
life. In “Pleasant Spots,” Clare insists:56
There is a wild & beautiful neglect

About the fields that so delights & cheers
Where nature her own feelings to effect
Is left at her own silent work for years (1–4)
Neglect allows the “silent work” of the natural world’s emergent will;
this “silent work” stands in opposition to the manual labor required
in enclosing and improving a common. Championing neglect resists
the logic of privatization and the combined discipline of landscape,
animals, and the poor into efficient productivity by proposing
another way of dwelling in the land, one that reasserts the beauty of
“wastes” untouched by human improvement.
Clare’s poetry expresses delight in the “Sweet uncultivated blos-
som” of the wild rose, and Clare imagines himself a lucky “guest”
when rambling over a waste inhabited by moles; apostrophizing the
moles, he “hail[s] neglect thy patron who contrives / Waste spots
for the[e] on natures quiet breast.”57 Here and in other poems, the
phenomenon of “neglect” is anthropomorphized into a patron and
protector. As someone who was forced to mix his labor with the earth
and yet was propertyless, Clare had insight into the exploitation of
agricultural labor. Raymond Williams argues:
Locke produced a defence of private property based on the natural

right of a man to that with which he has mixed his own labour,
and many thousands of people believed and repeated this, in peri-
ods when it must have been obvious to everybody that those who
most often and most fully mixed their labour with the earth were
those who had no property, and when the very marks and stains
of the mixings were in effect a definition of being propertyless.58
Improving the earth, for the poor, then, was a sign of disconnection
from land whereas rambling on the wastes allowed reconnection. With
the old manorial system gone and aristocratic patrons in short supply,
Clare conceives of human neglect as the last patron of the wild natu-
ral world’s uninhibited unfolding life. At the end stage of Romantic
conservatism, the only patrons that can be found are in models of the
natural world.
This championing of neglect can be found in many of Clare’s
celebrated bird poems, which rejoice in the birds’ cunning ability to
place their nests out of the sight or reach of humans. In “The Robins
Nest,” Clare explains that the Robin’s nest is located in “each ancient
tree / With lickens deckt – times hoary pedigree / Becomes monitor
to teach and bless” (32–4).59 The bird’s residence is ancient, and the
old tree remains to teach intergenerational ethics. Clare celebrates
the robins’s wild, uncultivated beauty:
But spell bound to their homes within the wild

Where old neglect lives patron & befriends
Their homes with safetys wildness – where nought lends
A hand to injure – root up or disturb
The things of this old place (48–52)
Again neglect is personified as a patron and friend who protects the

robins from injury. Here the birds take on the figure of the com-
moner, and they are protected by neglect, by being in a place where
“rude men” of “mechanic impulse” have not sought to improve
the place. The birds are described as tenants – “there these feathered
heirs of solitude / Remain the tennants of this quiet wood” (88–9)
and “tennants of this wood land privacy” (101) – which resonates
with the quickly disappearing lives of cottagers and smallholders in
Northampton. Phrases such as “beautiful neglect” or “safetys wild-
ness” counter the logic of improvement; a progressive view cannot
associate neglect with beauty or wilderness with safety, so the champi-
oning of neglect moves against and resists the logic of progress while
at the same time reaffirming the dynamic, intergenerational will.
Even when he is not identifying with the suffering of marginalized
animals and plants that are destroyed by agricultural improvement,
Clare’s celebratory poems identify a kinship with life as profoundly
humble as weeds; in “The Robin’s Nest” not only are the birds left
in “safetys wildness,” but “The very weeds as patriarchs appear” (63).
“The Flitting” depicts the weeds that spring up in a neglected waste
as “an ancient neighbour”; this dynamic will to life also animates
Clare, who imagines “& still my thoughts like weedlings wild / Grow
up to blossom where they can.”60 Again Clare’s anthropomorphic
topos emerges, and it suggests that human claims to rights and enti-
tlements should be understood as limited to a more pessimistic view
of human freedom; a freedom found only in a collective, inhuman,
emergent will that ethically binds humans to non-humans.
In the absence of the traditions of his forefathers, Clare’s con-

servative intergenerational imagination must resort to visualizing a
radically bioegalitarian community without human authority and
tyranny. To understand Clare’s proto-ecological concern for the
local environment and animals in terms of rights discourse fails to
acknowledge the way his anthropomorphisms demonstrate a con-
servative pessimism about the negative freedoms derived from liberal
rights. Clare’s emphasis on wildness and neglect resonates with other
forms of Romantic conservatism that suggest that the discourse of
liberal rights and its competitive individual scramble for private
property is an insufficient basis for any animal or ecological ethics
because it reaffirms an exploitative approach to land, animals, and
the poor. To put it another way, the negative critique of liberal rights
found in Clare’s enclosure elegies points out the limitations of advo-
cating for environmental or animal ethics in terms of the extension
of liberal rights. Clare’s championing of neglect instead proposes
another kind of laissez faire, as he explains in his poem about a
nightingale’s nest: “We’ll leave it as we found it.”61 At the end stage
of British Romantic conservatism, Clare re-imagines conservation as
allowing the natural world to run its wild, inhuman, and radically
contingent course.
Epilogue
By revisiting the Burke/Paine debate through an ecocritical lens, this

book recovers a social ecology that resides within the conservative
and regionalist texts of the Romantic period. I have not attempted
to make arguments about Romanticism as a whole, or even the entire
political or literary careers of Burke or the other authors addressed in
this book, since those authors held remarkably protean political views
throughout their careers. Rather I have located texts from a number
of genres – political philosophy, poetry, regional novels, natural
history, and agricultural periodicals – that manifest a conservative,
conservationist reaction to modernity in order to establish a gene-
alogy of the conservative social ecology that transpires within the
Romantic period. E.P. Thompson argues: “We shall not ever return to
pre-capitalist human nature, yet a reminder of its alternative needs,
expectations and codes may renew our sense of our nature’s range of
possibilities.”1 While my exploration of Romantic conservatism may
not offer a road map for the future, one of the “alternative codes”
revealed by the conservative critique of liberal individualism can be
found in the way that it locates our everyday habits and practices
within a continuing, intergenerational narrative, one that begins in
the distant past and continues into the future.
The conservative view means to restore the sense of intergen-
erational responsibility and dependence that is severed by liberal
individualism, and this reading of Romantic conservatism suggests
the need for a reassessment of its critique in literary criticism. For
example, at the end of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams
warns that Romanticism “can easily be diverted into another rural
163
threnody” that focuses on the imagination instead of political

action.2 More recently, Morton has rephrased that critique, warning
that Burkean organicism manifests a deceptively “ambient” concept
of the natural world, arguing: “Presence and absence, past and future
events, discursive thoughts and memory traces, are contained within
this space. This ‘thick’ space is strictly impossible, but it is a compel-
ling fantasy.”3 The Burkean notion of habitation indeed suggests
thick spaces that mingle past and future events and identities, but
contrary to Williams and Morton’s assertions, habitation is not
simply about the creation of an ideal self or a compelling fantasy of
escape from the alienating conditions of modern existence. Romantic
conservatism inculcates a communal, moral imagination of the real
material existence of generations outside of the present one.
“Modernity relies on a handful of mutually reinforcing notions
(freedom, rights, individuality, productivity, utility, progress) all of
which implicitly presuppose a means/end rationality that, since the
seventeenth century, has been implemented largely without ques-
tioning (including in our professional, institutional, and disciplinary
pursuits),” Thomas Pfau argues.4 Romantic conservatism critiques the
mutually reinforcing conceptions of rights, individualism, and progress,
and a more serious consideration of its ecological upshot would address
a gap in environmental studies, which pays little scholarly attention
to conservatism. For example, David Pepper’s seminal exploration of
environmentalist political thought, Modern Environmentalism, uses an
explanatory table that outlines the spectrum of political philosophies;
the table claims “traditional conservatives” occupy a radical environ-
mental position since they recommend “human societies should
model themselves on natural ecosystems.” Despite being designated
as a type of radical environmentalism, less than two pages are given
to analyzing conservatism, while other positions such as a green
socialism and anarchism are given extensive analysis.5 The far-reaching
temporality of the conservative intergenerational imagination contrib-
utes to a more diverse understanding of environmental perspectives.
The liberal critique, like the progressive program that underlies it, is
essentially synchronic; Romantic conservatism, by its approach to
narrating an intergenerational view, returns to a diachronic approach
in understanding problems with the environment.
The field of environmental studies, Rob Nixon contends, has failed
to recognize the phenomenon of slow violence: “violence that is
Epilogue 165
neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and

accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales.” Such slow violence takes place over long periods
of time and its effects are thus difficult to detect, much less represent
in the limited attention span of the contemporary media. Nixon
asks, “How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into
stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiments and warrant
political intervention?”6 As a tool in current environmental think-
ing, the intergenerational imagination has the capacity to reveal the
environmental and social consequences of decisions about land use
that might otherwise remain invisible in a more limited temporal
view. Romantic conservatives anticipated that the rise of capitalist
modernity and liberal individualism would slowly erode embedded,
communal ecologies, and Edmund Burke’s stance against individual-
ism has never been more apropos:
As to the right of men to act any where according to their pleasure,

without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state
of total independence from each other. It is not the condition of
our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a consid-
erable cause or action without its having some effect upon others;
or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for
his conduct.7
That Romantic conservatism raises many of the questions that seem

so pressing now, and it is done so forcefully, the conservative reaction,
which has been dismissed for its hierarchical elements, might now be
excavated as a narrative strategy that provides a necessary corrective
to some dominant aspects of contemporary environmental advocacy:
in particular the short-sighted, individualistic dimensions of green-
washed capitalism and technological innovation, which ally us with
the same economic system that has eroded both local communities
and environments.
Burke’s rage against the geometric reorganization of France appre-
hends the erosion of established regional social ecologies as a slow,
attritional violence against people and places. A strong thread that
unites all the conservative, conservationist texts in this book is the
prescient warning about the unintended social and environmental
consequences that occur when a culture shifts from understanding
land as a gift inherited from previous generations to understanding

the land as a commodity for improvement and profit. Landry argues
for understanding “the ideological power of private property as more
than a legal concept – as the representation of an imaginary, yet
lived, relation to the world.”8 The intergenerational imagination can
then be read as an act of “commoning” that counters the developing
imagination and ethos of private property in the Romantic period.
Wordsworth’s concern about the marginalized and disappearing rural
poor, Bewick’s enumeration of survival strategies for the propertyless,
Edgeworth’s advocacy for reciprocity between Anglo-Irish landlords
and their Irish tenants, Cobbett’s conviction that the commodifica-
tion of food enslaves the poor to wage labor, and Clare’s depiction of
the shared enervation of the poor, animals, and land after enclosure
are all frantically trying to depict modernization as long, slow vio-
lence against the more-than-human world.
Acting locally has its benefits, but any contemporary engagement
with the intergenerational imagination will face the challenge of
the now global scope of environmental problems. Ursula Heise, for
example, challenges eco-critics “to envision how ecologically based
advocacy [. . .] might be formulated in terms that are premised no
longer primarily on ties to local places but to territories and systems
that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole.”9 Many of
the texts in this book already anticipate the global economy’s influence
on local economies: Wordsworth’s poetry examines the consequences
of foreign wars, Bewick’s ornithology challenges cosmopolitan natural
history, Edgeworth’s Irish tales question the premise of an absentee
economy, and Cobbett’s periodicals warn against reliance on a globaliz-
ing food system. So the current global reality has been foreshadowed
by Romantic texts, yet the absorption of local economies into global
ones has accelerated. Current eco-critical thought attempting to utilize
an intergenerational view must grapple with a local community’s ever
increasing connections to the global economy. We can no longer sim-
ply return to the habits of our ancestors. Yet environmental thinking
should not only construct spatial, global critiques but it should also
establish those that are temporal and intergenerational. In other words,
whereas Heise argues for geographical expansion, I suggest that we also
temporally expand our environmental inquiries.
At this point, environmental damage is so extensive that an inter-
generational imagination is necessary to begin to fathom a solution
Epilogue 167
to the profound degradation of our world and assert a collective

positive right to flourish in mutually constitutive communities that
includes all forms of life – soil, plants, animals, and humans. One
example can be found in the “intergenerational optimism” initiated
by the Kenyan environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai,
whose Green Belt Movement has planted over 4.2 million trees in
Kenya. Nixon explains, “To plant a tree is an act of intergenerational
optimism, a selfless act at once practical and utopian, an investment
in a communal future the planter will not see; to plant a tree is to
offer shade to unborn strangers.”10 The notion of “intergenerational
optimism” resonates with the Romantic conservative perspective
that advocates for a “long view” when making decisions about land
use. Such decisions must involve careful scrutiny of environmental
history – including cultural traditions and practices – in order to
inform possibilities for current action, and then acting in the present
with the goal of creating benefits for future generations.
“The touchy-feely organicism derived from Burkean ideologies of
class and tradition” has been warned against by Morton, and as an
alternative to Romantic conservatism, he promotes a melancholic ethic
that “sticks with” poisoned and ruined land instead of fantasizing that
it is otherwise. His example from the Romantic period is the novel
Frankenstein: “If a poisoned rainforest could speak, it would sound
like Frankenstein’s creature.”11 An ethical response, according to
Morton, would be to do what the characters in Frankenstein could
not do: love something that has been altered and made ugly by
human activity. Such melancholic environmental ethics then involve
radical responsibility, and his contemporary example is the Nuclear
Guardianship project, which campaigns for keeping radioactive waste
above ground for the public to monitor. Morton’s dark ecology dispar-
ages place-based narrative, yet how can we know if the rainforest is poi-
soned or what kind of waste poisoned it without an intergenerational
narrative? Taking radical responsibility for environmental degradation
must also require an intergenerational understanding of the history
and a vision for future of a particular place. Romantic conservatism,
far from being “touchy-feely,” suggests that only through an inter-
generational understanding of the customs and practices unique to a
place can communities begin to recognize and responsibly respond to
environmental damage. Lawrence Buell argues, “the environmental
crisis involves a crisis of imagination the amelioration of which depends
on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to

it” (italics added).12 The intergenerational imagination, I argue, might
allow us to excavate the inherited and internalized mistakes and ide-
ologies of our culture – those unknown knowns, to use Slavoj Žižek’s
term – in order to shift our own culture as a consequence.13
The Romantic conservative intergenerational imagination may be
a tool for resistance to the environmentally and socially destructive
aspects of global capitalism. In contrast to the actuarial ethos of
modernity, Ian Baucom argues, the Romantic type “implicitly resists
the exchange of life for death by seeking to return dead things to
life and insisting on the affective reality of the exemplary ghosts it
calls from the vasty deeps.”14 This book has mapped out many of the
“exemplary ghosts” – forefathers, country graveyards, bird life, indig-
enous cultures, subsistence gardening, and wilderness – championed
by Romantic conservative texts as an overt resistance to liberal
individualism and commodity culture. By re-evaluating the nascent
ecological insights of Romantic conservative texts, I hope to open
up the question of how intergenerational narrative strategies that
might still be located in traditional, indigenous, or conservationist
ecological commitments imagine resistance to the slow violence con-
tinually inflicted on ecological and cultural diversity by neoliberal
globalization. While the conservative intergenerational imagination
cannot provide a complete guide of how to proceed, it warns against
championing an unthinking progressivism that attempts to remedy
the consequences of global capitalism and possessive individualism
through the purchase of a “green” product or the implementation
of a new technology. Rather Romantic conservatism challenges us
to take a deep look at the mistakes of our ancestors and to shift
from understanding our lives as individuals to imagining ourselves
as part of a collective whose everyday habits consistently invest in a
common future.
Notes
Introduction: Conservatism and the

Intergenerational Imagination
1. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 269–87.
2. Pfau makes this statement in his re-evaluation of the conservative German
Romantic political theorist Adam Müller. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma,
and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 284.
3. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition
(London: Routledge, 1991), 33. James McKusick goes even further in link-
ing “green” Romanticism to the influence of liberal rights discourse: “If
humans are truly related to all living things, then all living things must be
entitled to a share in the ‘natural rights’ that will surely be vindicated in the
progress of human liberation. The Rights of Man are only a staging-point
along the road to the Rights of Animals, and this road in turn will lead
eventually to the total liberation of all living things.” “Introduction,” in
Romanticism and Ecology (Online: Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2001).
In contemporary environmental thinking, Roderick Nash’s influential
genealogy of the rights of nature reiterates this view; he maps out an
“Expanding Concept of Rights” that ascends from English natural rights,
to liberal rights, to the rights of nature. See The Rights of Nature: A History
of Environmental Ethics (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989). The argument
for extending rights to nonhumans is likewise championed in Christopher
D. Stone’s notorious argument that trees should have legal standing; see
Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Palo
Alto, CA: Tioga Publishing Co., 1988). From two different ethical perspec-
tives, Peter Singer and Tom Regan also argue for the extension of human
rights to animals. See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our
Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975) and Tom Regan,
The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983).
4. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1979), 18. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre go so far to
posit that Romanticism should be characterized as a traditionalist project;
they argue that Romanticism is “a critique of modernity, that is, of mod-
ern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from
the past (the pre-capitalist, pre-modern past).” While Löwy and Sayre
convincingly argue their case for Romanticism against modernity, they
do not acknowledge that a radically oppositional politics that draws on
ideals from the past might be understood as fundamentally conservative.
A Romanticism “against modernity” attempts to conserve deeply rooted
169
170 Notes
historical connections that are being threatened or annihilated by moder-

nity. See Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter
(Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 17.
5. The American conservative periodical the Weekly Standard declares
that Disraeli and not Burke should be considered the inventor of neo-
conservatism, because Disraeli began to attach sentiment and tradition to
the abstracted British nation and empire rather than local communities.
See David Gelernter, “The Inventor of Modern Conservatism,” The Weekly
Standard (7 February 2005): 16–24.
6. My argument is indebted to Isaac Kramnick’s suggestion that 1790s
radicalism should be more accurately called “bourgeois radicalism”: “On
the one hand, it sought to liberate men and women from all forms of
restraint, political, economic, and religious. On the other hand, bour-
geois radicalism preached order, discipline, and subordination, whether
in the workhouse, factory, prison or hospital.” Republicanism and Bourgeois
Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 34. Furthermore, in investigating the “impos-
sible history” of the 1790s, Saree Makdisi defines radical liberalism, such
as is espoused by Tom Paine, as “hegemonic radicalism.” He explains that
radicalism “emphasized highly regulated consumer and political choice
against both the despotism of the ancien régime [. . .] and the potentially
catastrophic excess of the ‘swinnish multitude.’” William Blake and the
Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 207.
7. The term “social ecology” was coined by Murray Bookchin, a socialist
in the mid-twentieth century. Social ecology contends that human and
environmental problems are intertwined. Bookchin argues, “The antiso-
cial principles that ‘rugged individualism’ is the primary motive for social
improvement and competition the engine for social progress stand sharply
at odds with all past eras that valued selflessness as the authentic trait
of human nobility and cooperation as the authentic evidence of social
virtue.” Likewise, Romantic conservative texts see capitalist modernity as
a threatening break with past cultural and environmental traditions. See
“What Is Social Ecology?,” in Environmental Ethics, ed. Michael Boylan
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 62–3.
8. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
9. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1989), 49.
10. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750–1830
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2008), 85.
11. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 162.
12. Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1984), 218–9.
13. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: U of
California P, 2008), 79.
Notes 171
14. Although Collings claims that traditionalist radicalism is exemplified by

Thomas Spence’s politics, I argue that traditionalism as a site of contesta-
tion against modernity can be extended to other regionalist revivals of
common culture. I should note, however, that Collings would disagree
with my choice to affiliate Burke with traditionalist radicalism. Collings
admits that Burke’s “body politics” bear much in common with plebian
radicalism, yet he also suggests, “Burke’s resort to these various bodily
genres, while rooted in familiar notions of the common body, reveals
a singular departure from the tradition; evoking the grotesque body in
one place and the corporate body in another, vilifying one beyond all
measure and sanctioning the other as unassailable, he demonstrates that
in the wake of the Revolution he can find no common ground between
them.” While I agree that Burke’s politics are less politically egalitarian
than Thomas Bewick’s or William Cobbett’s, I still argue that they hold
in common a unique strain of environmental and cultural conserva-
tion that contests laissez-faire capitalism. Monstrous Society: Reciprocity,
Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell UP, 2009), 19, 40, 60.
15. Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 122.
16. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50.
17. “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17.4 (1987): 9.
18. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English
Literature, 1671–1831 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 10.
19. The Magna Carta Manifesto, 44.
20. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 14.
21. Broglio argues, these “tools are emblems of a culture’s means of comput-
ing and representing the land.” Technologies of the Picturesque, 29.
22. For examples of the emphasis on place in Romantic literature, see
Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European
Romanticism (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004) or Jonathan Bate,
The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002).
23. Paine could not have possibly imagined, however, the environmen-
tal consequences of industrialism that began after his own lifetime.
According to David A. Wilson, both Cobbett and Paine “developed their
ideas in an eighteenth-century world of Anglo-American radical discourse
that preceded the emergence of the modern industrial class-based society.
Paine and Cobbett were not the first men of a new world; they were the
last men of a dying one.” Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection
(Georgetown, ON: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1988), 192.
24. Liberalism and Empire, 216.
25. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 56.
26. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York:
The New Press, 1993), 71.
27. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 2011), 7.
172 Notes
28. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environ-
mentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Charlottesville: U of Virginia
P, 2012), 23.
1 Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke’s

Reflections on the Revolution in France
1. The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 61–2.
2. The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative
Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber and Faber,
1978), 13. François-August-René vicomte de Chateaubriand coined the term
“la conservateur” in 1818 as the title for his short-lived royalist journal. In
English the first use of the term “conservative” in reference to a political
position is the British publication, the Quarterly Review in 1830; the anony-
mous statement reads “we now are, as we always have been, decidedly and
conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with
more propriety be called the Conservative, party.” See “Internal Policy.”
Quarterly Review (Jan. 1830): 276. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the
first use to John Wilson Croker, yet The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals
claims that the author is anonymous, and confirms that Croker was not
writing for the Quarterly Review at that time. The Wellesley Index to Victorian
Periodicals speculates that the author was either John Fullarton or John
Miller (700). Although Burke did not use the term “conservative” to describe
his political position, the Reflections is nevertheless widely considered to be
the founding text of modern conservatism. Frank O’Gorman points out,
“Burke’s ideas do represent the starting point for the continuous elabora-
tion of and development of a characteristically Conservative ideology.”
“Introduction,” in British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to
Thatcher (London: Longman, 1986), 12. Like O’Gorman, I take Burke as my
starting point for the history of conservatism, whereas Quinton argues the
tradition goes as far back as Richard Hooker and Lord Clarendon.
3. Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971), 206; Political
Representation (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 37.
4. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall
(New York: Continuum, 2000), 275.
5. “‘The Earth Belongs to the Living’: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of
Intergenerational Relations,” Environmental Politics 9 (2000): 73.
6. Sources of the Self, 172.
7. The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 105. Giddens
goes on to argue, “Tradition is routine. But it is routine which is intrinsi-
cally meaningful, rather than merely empty habit for habit’s sake.”
8. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
9. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to
Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 83.
Notes 173
10. “The Man of Feeling History: The Erotics of Historicism in Reflections on

the Revolution in France,” ELH 74.4 (2007): 850.
11. Ibid., 851.
12. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly
in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 197, 200.
13. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy
in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 230.
14. Burke’s contestation of the seizure of the French monastic lands is of
central importance to Reflections, as Derek Beales admonishes, “some
of his most notable and influential arguments and statements, commonly
treated as though they were put forward in reference to Britain or to
the Revolution as a whole, were originally located in the course of his
neglected vindication of the monasteries of France.” “Edmund Burke and
the Monasteries of France,” The Historical Journal 48.2 (2005): 436.
15. Fulford is discussing how Burke genders power in his treatise on the
sublime. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in
the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 32. A Philosophical Enquiry Into
the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 145–6.
In Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, Tom Furniss also argues that Burke’s
“aesthetic ideology” in the Reflections emerges from his earlier text on
the sublime.
16. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 262.
17. Gibbons goes on to state, “In its realignment of the inner life of the sub-
ject, the ‘impartial’ readily evolved into the ‘imperial’ spectator.” Edmund
Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2003), 97. Robert Mitchell points out that even though
Smith imagines human sympathy to begin with sympathy for the dead,
such sympathy must be supplemented with the impartial spectator and
state violence. See Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State
Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (London: Routledge, 2007), 82–9.
18. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 38.
19. Bearing the Dead, 84.
20. The Differentiation of Society (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 276.
21. According to Luke Gibbons, “tradition in an Irish context, the vola-
tile legacy of the recent as well as the remote past . . . was capable of
demolishing the Georgian facades of colonial civility.” Edmund Burke and
Ireland, 232.
22. The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 135.
23. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection, 17.
24. “Introduction,” 2.
25. This belief in the social embeddedness of natural law is best illustrated,
according to Peter Stanlis, by the following quote from Saint Thomas
Aquinas: “Laws are laid down for human acts dealing with singular and
174 Notes
contingent matters which have infinite variations. To make a rule fit

every case is impossible.” Quoted in Edmund Burke and the Natural Law
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 24.
26. Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 67.
27. Customs in Common, 15. Thompson discusses plebian customary culture;
I argue the same concept of customary consciousness can be applied
to Burke’s work. David Collings would disagree. He argues that Burke
instead attempts to undo customary consciousness: “the traditionalism he
inaugurates – a traditionalism characteristic of conservative modernity – is
thoroughly illegitimate, for it is based on the negation of the very customs
it attempts to invoke.” I argue, however, that Burke is still invoking a
customary consciousness, and it extends to common lands and the poor,
especially concerning monastic lands. See Monstrous Society, 61.
28. Scruton is a contemporary Burkean, conservative philosopher, or what is
sometimes referred to as a “paleoconservative,” a philosophy that holds
little in common with neo-conservatism. “Conservatism,” in Political
Theory and the Ecological Challenge, ed. Andrew Dobson and Robyn
Eckersley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 10.
29. Catherine Malabou, “Addiction and Grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of
Habit,” in Of Habit, by Félix Ravaisson (London: Continuum, 2009), xviii.
30. Of Habit, trans. Mark Sinclair and Clare Carlisle (London: Continuum,
2009), 25.
31. Ibid.
32. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). 56.
33. Giddens discusses two kinds of “disembedding mechanisms”: expert
systems and symbolic tokens (in particular, money). Both of these mecha-
nisms are railed against in the Reflections. The Consequences of Modernity, 28.
34. As Nigel Everett explains, in the Romantic period, “arguments about the
aesthetics of landscape were almost always arguments about politics. […]
In the Tory view, those who abandoned the landscape to the market were
also abandoning the order of civil society to fragmentation.” The Tory
View of Landscape (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 7.
35. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 63.
36. “Introduction,” 53.
37. Liberalism and Empire, 155.
38. The above is Makdisi’s reading of Burke’s speech opening the impeach-
ment of Warren Hastings: “If we undertake to govern the inhabitants of
such a country, we must govern them upon their own principles and
maxims, and not upon ours.” Quoted in Romantic Imperialism: Universal
Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998),
103. Luke Gibbons makes the similar argument that Burke is “bringing
the imaginative reach of sympathy to regions excluded from mainstream
Enlightenment thought.” Edmund Burke and Ireland, 113.
39. Introduction to Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought
from David Hume to the Present (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 10.
Notes 175
40. The Politics of Imperfection, 13. Burkean skepticism also bears similarities
to early modern skepticism, which is, according to Christian Thorne, “a
kind of authoritarian pragmatism, a means of defending established (but
increasingly contested) practices without claiming these practices to be
true. It offers an exhaustive critique of knowledge in order to discredit
the opponents of the state or church orthodoxy and then offers a utilitar-
ian rationale for continuing on with these customary forms of govern-
ment and social life.” The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2010), 10.
41. The Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), 15. Burke goes on to state: “I have
got more information upon a curious and interesting branch of hus-
bandry, in one short conversation with an old Carthusian monk, than
I have derived from all the Bank directors that I have ever conversed
with” (R 308).
42. The Human Condition, 134.
43. “The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s
Catastrophic Modernity,” MLN: Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 975.
2 “Their graves are green”: Conservation in

Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Ballads
1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 1.
2. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism
(Charlottesville: U of Virginia P), 53.
3. Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 8.
4. “We Are Seven” is a companion poem with “Anecdote for Fathers”
(since the poems are located next to each other in the Lyrical Ballads): in
these poems, both children have imagined communal connections that
create their reality. Moreover, the manner in which the adult males in
the poems attempt to coerce the children into rational dialogue illustrates
Mitchell Dean’s argument that capitalist modernity effects a shift in
ideological and political relations from paternal patriarchalism to fraternal
patriarchalism in late eighteenth-century. See The Constitution of Poverty:
Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1991), 217.
5. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 25.
6. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power (Detroit: Wayne State
UP, 1994), 16.
7. The Future of Nostalgia, 54.
8. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse, 54.
9. Mary Jacobus argues that Wordsworth’s self-reflective Lyrical Ballads fore-
grounds a tension between tradition and experiment, and between the
past and future. The “Advertisement” to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) admits
that the poems are new experiments, yet at the same time the tradition of
176 Notes
the ballad genre hearkens back to the pre-modern past. See Tradition and
Experiment in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Reflection on the cultural centrality of the ballad, moreover, amounts to
a kind of conservation, as Susan Stewart points out, “The utopian ballad
world is characterized by ‘survivals’ and thus by transcendence over past
and present.” Yet the use of the literary ballads, in a strange new way,
as “lyrical ballads,” forces readers to reflect on their disconnection with
the past. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation
10. Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales,
1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 458.
11. Frances Ferguson argues that Wordsworth’s epitaphic mode can be seen
most clearly in The Prelude, which “virtually constitutes a series of epitaphs
spoken upon former selves, ‘other Beings,’ who can be approached only
across vacancies almost as wide as those between the living and the dead.”
Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 155.
Likewise, Geoffrey Hartman has claimed that “the corpse is in the poet
himself, his consciousness of inner decay.” The Unremarkable Wordsworth
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 42. Paul de Man argues that
the Boy of Winander “is, in a curious sense, autobiographical, but it is the
autobiography of someone who no longer lives written by someone who
is speaking, in a sense, from beyond the grave.” “Time and History in
Wordsworth,” 9. More recently, Onno Oerlemans argued that meditation
on death informs Wordsworth’s view of the natural environment: “the poet
sees in meditating on death the overwhelming presence of the physical”
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004), 24.
12. Williams argues, “A new theory of socialism must now centrally involve
place.” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso,
1989), 242.
13. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 166.
14. The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 33–4.
15. Chandler goes on to argue, “Wordsworth proves to be even more of a
thoroughgoing traditionalist than Burke in some ways, since, unlike
Burke, he embraces ‘tradition’ with an explicit awareness of its roots
in illiterate forms of cultural life.” Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 32, 160.
Prior to Chandler, Michael H. Friedman made a developmental case that
Wordsworth began as a revolutionary but ended up a Tory humanist.
See The Making of a Tory Humanist: Wordsworth and the Idea of Community
(New York: Columbia UP, 1979).
16. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1998), 41.
17. Bate, The Song of the Earth, 245; Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 55.
18. Technologies of the Picturesque, 75.
19. I read the epitaphic poems similarly to Hess’s observation about the 1798
volume, “in which the narrator either interacts directly with the poor
or presents them through their own narratives, agencies, and voices.”
William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, 224, 51.
Notes 177
20. The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 193.
21. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Decomposing: Wordsworth’s Poetry of Epitaph
and English Burial Reform,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42, 4 (1988):
466. See also Mary Hotz’s chapter on burial reform literature in Literary
Remains: Representation of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2009).
22. Wordsworth created two prose arguments for the conservation of
regional identities in 1810: Essays upon Epitaphs and Guide Through the
District of the Lakes. They both link the fate of land with cultural prac-
tices. Guide Though the District of the Lakes links the Lake District’s natural
features with a genealogy of the cultural practices of the aboriginal Celtic
people. According to Wordsworth, the social ecology of the Lake District
is characterized by a period of long stability in subsistence farming; he
reads the history of subsistence farming into the way that houses that
have been built and used in the region. These homes display the qualities
of what Burke would call the “life-renter” (PW II. 202).
23. “The Brothers” was written during a period, as James A. Butler points out,
when Wordsworth was touring the Lake District before attempting to
relocate permanently to Grasmere, so he was testing his own identity by
“weighing the tourist against the native son.” After arguing how this ten-
sion between tourist and native identities dominates Wordsworth’s thoughts
from 1798–1800, he concludes, “Once Wordsworth felt in firm possession
of his surroundings – and developed the difference between himself and a
traveler – he passed to the stage of worrying about any further settlement
by tourists.” See “Tourist or Native Son: Wordsworth’s Homecomings of
1799–1800,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.1 (1996): 2, 14.
24. Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2004), 150.
25. Michele Turner Sharp points out that in Wordsworth’s Essays upon
Epitaphs, “a critical look at the persistent failure of the inhabitants of
rural spaces successfully to mediate death and the loss that it figures . . .
suggests a subtle complicity or indifference between the urban and
the rural.” “The Churchyard among the Wordsworthian Mountains:
Mapping the Common Ground of Death and the Reconfiguration of
Romantic Community,” English Literary History 62.2 (Summer 1995): 388.
26. “Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray,
Cowper, and Wordsworth,” English Literary History 62.2 (Summer 1995): 348.
27. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture
(Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010), 144.
28. Toby R. Benis argues that this poem illustrates community building
through the creation of an ostracizing narrative about Martha Ray. See
Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 111.
29. “Time and History in Wordsworth,” 10.
30. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1987), 24.
178 Notes
31. Bearing the Dead, 9.

32. The Country and the City, 131.
33. Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque, 108. The Leech Gatherer” from
“Resolution and Independence” would be another “living memorial”
examined by Wordsworth, but I do not analyze this poem because it was
written after the Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800).
34. The Tory View of Landscape, 76. In a letter to Sir George Beaumont, on
October 17, 1805, Wordsworth admonishes him: “your house will belong
to the country, and not the country be an appendage to your house.”
By house belonging to the country, Wordsworth means that Beaumont
should “do his utmost to be surrounded with tenants living comfort-
ably” instead ruthlessly improving the land for profit. Letters of William
Wordsworth, selected by Philip Wayne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954), 76–80.
Moreover, in his Guide Through the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth
records the way that the region in untouched by enclosure and thus bears
marks of intertwined intergenerational environmental and social stability
through subsistence farming “sufficient upon each estate to furnish bread
for each family and no more,” while “each family spun from its own
flock the wool with which it was clothed” (PW II.200).
35. Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–
1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 179. K.D.M. Snell also argues
that the social consequences of enclosure and the simultaneous shift to
wage labor had the most dire consequences for women (157–8).
36. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty, 120.
37. Written on the Water, 27.
38. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2007), 84, 186.
39. Wordsworth counters liberal political economy with what Dick labels
“romantic economics”: “Inviting shocking expenditures, not simply his
readers’ charity, but the condition of poverty, and the fractured condition
of the possibility of language, as, essentially, expenses without recompense,
Wordsworth points to Nancy’s suggestion that ‘‘loss’ [is] constitutive of
‘community’ itself.’” See “Poverty, Charity, Poetry: The Unproductive
Labors of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’” Studies in Romanticism 39.
3 (2000): 395. The embedded quote is from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative
Community (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), 12.
40. Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), 127.
41. Of Habit (London: Continuum, 2009), 65, 77.
42. The concept of “natural spontaneity” recalls the famous phrase from
Wordsworth’s “Preface” that poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings,” yet Lori Branch argues, Wordsworth’s poetry repeat-
edly depicts “intentional rituals of spontaneity” that are “emblematic
of Wordsworth’s resacralization of the everyday.” Rituals of Spontaneity:
Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco: Baylor UP,
2006), 13.
Notes 179
44. Collings further argues: “He is an example neither of a pharmakos nor of

institutionalized authority because he remains, in however attenuated a
form, a wandering ghost.” Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural
Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 111.
45. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York:
Methuen, 1987), 173.
46. Robert Mitchell argues that the focus on the beggar’s body should be
understood as “somapoiea”– giving a body that is not so much a person
but a figure of the parasite. Sympathy and the State, 134.
47. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 137.
48. The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 40.
49. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 196.
50. “The Mores” Poems of the Middle Period, vols. 1–5. Eds. Eric Robinson,
David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–2003),
II, 347–50.
51. “Time and History in Wordsworth,” 9.
52. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1983), 88.
53. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the
Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), 31.
54. “Of Other Spaces,” 26.
3 Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds and the

Politics of the Miniature
1. Alan Bewell, “Romanticism and Colonial Natural History,” Studies in
Romanticism 43.1 (Spring 2004): 30.
2. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,
1992), 29, 35.
3. Folk taxonomies, according to Scott Atran, focus on “determining and
grouping species according to morphological aspect and ecological pro-
clivity” as opposed to the “natural history after Cesalpino and Linnaeus
[which] gradually came to focus on determining species’ genealogical-
related affinities.” Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an
Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 80.
4. The Savage Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966), 240.
5. The Logic of Practice, 56. My argument here may seem to contradict the
best known reference to British Birds: Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous char-
acter Jane Eyre reads the text, and was fascinated with Bewick’s depictions
of arctic climes. See Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn. Norton Critical Edition
(New York: Norton, 2000), 6–7. These arctic engravings are, however, rare
in British Birds. Most of the vignettes depict fishing on the Tyne, and
only two vignettes in the first edition depict the arctic: an Eskimo canoe
180 Notes
(BB2 230) and an iceberg (BB2 188). Other engravings of shipwrecks and
stormy seas are still local, often depicting Marsden Rock off the coast of
Tyne and Wear, where many arctic birds would gather. The introduction
to Water Birds admits the sea fowl migrate to the arctic, but also states
that the frozen sea is a “barrier to further enquiry, beyond which the
prying eye of man must not look” (BB2 xii). Thus even though Bewick is
forced to acknowledge the foreign habitat of the some the birds; he still
accepts and foregrounds his limited, provincial knowledge.
6. Bewick’s decision to include foreign birds in an appendix is similar
to Walter Charleton’s early modern Onomasticon Zoicon (1668): Erwin
Stresemann suggests, “he could think of nothing better than to reserve
most of the exotics for the appendix.” Ornithology from Aristotle to the
Present (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), 41.
7. Thomas Bewick was, as Paul Lawrence Farber argues, “a major force
in popularizing the study of birds,” and “his honest wood engravings
made available to a wide public an inexpensive source of iconography
for British birds, and encouraged amateurs to partake in field studies.”
Discovering Birds: The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline,
1760–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 28–9.
8. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 100.
9. “But their miniature intensity is, paradoxically, part of their greatness.”
Jennifer Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2009), xvi.
10. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 65.
11. Ann Bermingham argues, “The picturesque embodied an early ideological
response to this decline of rural paternalism during the war years. Although
the picturesque celebrated the older order – by depicting a pastoral, pre-
enclosed landscape – some of its features – the class snobbery, the distanc-
ing of spectator from the picturesque object, and the aestheticization of
rural poverty – suggest that at a deeper level the picturesque endorsed the
results of agricultural industrialization.” Landscape and Ideology: The English
Rustic Tradition, 1760–1860 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 75.
12. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 502–3.
13. Here Simpson is discussing the style of Shaftsbury, which is later picked
up by Burke. However, such a style applies to a conservative response
to liberal rationalism more generally. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the
Revolt against Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 48.
14. In this choice of epistemology, the partners were most likely influenced
by Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale
et particulière (1749–88), which also eschewed systematic arrangement
except for ordering animals by putting the familiar first. Buffon “dealt
first with the animals most interesting and important to man, and
proceeded gradually outward to those entirely unfamiliar to him.”
Stresemann, Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present, 49.
Notes 181
15. See HQ 436, 456, 171, 134, 335, 218, 384, 269.
16. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), 68. John Brewer notes that the major-
ity of Bewick’s tail-pieces are linked to specific places: “But in every case
where we can recognize a source it is from Newcastle and its immediate
environs. There are no depictions of either London or Edinburgh, nor
of any countryside other than the Northumberland moors and valleys.”
John Brewer and Stella Tillyard, “The Moral Vision of Thomas Bewick,”
in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the
Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (London: The German
Historical Institute, 1990), 390.
17. Ritvo also points out that the cattle evoke a kind of “racial nostalgia.”
See “Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient
Britons,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 10, 2.
18. The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 72.
19. Illuminations, 132.
20. Audubon quoted in Thomas Bewick: Selected Work, ed. Robyn Marsack
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 135–6.
21. Peter Quinn, “‘Their strongest pine’: Thomas Bewick and regional identity
in the late Nineteenth Century,” in Bewick Studies, Essays in Celebration of
the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas Bewick, 1753–1828, ed. David
Gardner-Medwin (The British Library: Oak Knoll Press, 2004), 113.
22. Paradise Preserved: Recreations in Eden in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 113.
23. “Traveling in Place: Gilbert White’s Cosmopolitan Parochialism,”
Eighteenth-Century Life 28.3 (2004): 46.
24. Stresemann, Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present, 60.
25. Bewick describes his embarking on this project as one of intensive
research into previously published books of ornithology. Of all these
books Bewick read, including the recent translation of Buffon, Bewick
states Francis Willughby and John Ray’s Ornithologia (1678) had the most
influence on his methodology. They employed an empirical method of
inquiry. See M 116. According to Stresemann, “The English ornithologists
had become so accustomed to Ray’s classification that for a long time
they hesitated to give it up for a foreign one.” Stresemann, Ornithology
from Aristotle to the Present, 55.
26. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3. For more information about Blake’s
conservative cobbling together of various histories in his prophetic work,
see also my article, “‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’:
Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake’s Continental Prophecies,”
Papers on Language and Literature, 42.1 (February 2006) 3–24.
27. Noah Heringman outlines the “mutually constitutive nature of liter-
ary and scientific discourses in Britain during the later eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.” “Introduction: The Commerce of Literature
182 Notes
and Natural History,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural

History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 2.
28. Bewick records the communal nature of the project in his memoir, 121–6.
His biographer confirms the “local project, taken up with zest by the
gentry,” Uglow, Nature’s Engraver 244.
29. This copy is located in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University
of Pennsylvania.
30. “Artisan Natural History,” in Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardin,
J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 387.
31. The names for these engravings, in quotation marks here and elsewhere,
were created by Iain Bain. See his editorial notes and introduction to The
Watercolours and Drawings of Thomas Bewick and his Workshop Apprentices,
2 vols (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).
32. Nature’s Engraver, 117.
33. Imperial Eyes, 80, 82.
34. Poetics of Space, 99.
35. In J.F.M. Dovaston’s copy of the text, we find in his notes that Bewick’s
story of the rooks stubbornly nesting in the spire was one of lasting
importance to him. Dovaston writes next to the story, “See a print of this
spire at the end of the book” that was “given to me by Mr. Bewick 1825.”
The print is of the Newcastle exchange building from the Newcastle
Almanac, printed in 1786.
36. The Future of Nostalgia, 49.
37. Dovaston’s notes record that Bewick told him that this particular engrav-
ing is a self-portrait.
38. Davide Maltoni et al., Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 2009), 31.
39. English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP), ix.
40. On Longing, 48.
41. See BB1 “The Great Bustard,” 314, “The Pheasant,” 282, “The Golden
Plover,” 329, “The Yellow Wagtail,” 191, “The Magpie,” 75, “The Rook,”
71, and BB2 “The Tame Goose,” 297.
42. On Longing, 68.
43. See BB2, title page, 107, 136, 225.
44. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1984), xii. Donna Landry also notes the combination
of natural history with the assertion of common rights: “A certain social
radicalism combined with the knowledge of a naturalist has often distin-
guished the poacher.” Invention of the Countryside, 82.
45. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 526.
46. Ibid., 527.
47. Customs in Common, 97.
48. The quote is from Psalm 145.16 from the Psalter in the Book of Common
Prayer.
49. Monstrous Society, 228.
50. Bewick idealized a time when everyone observed “the reciprocal duties
between Master and servant.” See M 138, 148.
Notes 183
51. For Bewick’s story of his fight with Thomas Spence, see M 52–3. Uglow
recounts the fight as well as the struggle to retain customary rights on the
Newcastle Moor. See Nature’s Engraver 80–5.
52. Thompson, Customs in Common, 6.
53. Ibid., 9.
54. Hunting instructions for the mallard can be found in BB2 329–32. There
are 13 engravings of hunting activities (BB1 113, 147, 159, 186, 221, 313
and BB2 58, 82, 200, 202, 319, 332, 358), and there are 11 engravings of
fishing (BB1 216 and BB2 23, 41, 46 50, 52, 151, 265, 349, 370, supple-
ment 27).
55. See BB1 42, 47, 62, 285 and BB2 211, 282.
56. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago:
Open Court Press, 1999), 5, 8.
57. “The rights of infants; or, the imprescriptable right of mothers to such a
share of the elements as is sufficient to enable them to suckle and bring
up their young in a dialogue between the aristocracy and a mother of
children. To which are added, by way of preface and appendix, strictures
on Paine’s Agrarian justice” (London: printed for the author, at No. 9
Oxford-Street, 1797), 5.
58. Landscape and Ideology, 75.
59. In the foreground of the engraving, two children read the lines from
behind a broken enclosure fence. The rock is inscribed:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
The lines memorialize the decline of nature and a way of life rather than
the idyllic parts of that life. If Bewick wanted to record idyllic life, the lines
from the first part of “The Deserted Village” would do that. The Fables
of Aesop and Others, Memorial Edition of Thomas Bewick’s Works, vol. 4
(Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: R. Ward and Sons, 1885), 28.
4 Conservation or Catastrophe: Reflexive

Regionalism in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Tales
1. This quote is the lawyer Jason’s suggestion to Sir Condy regarding how he
should pay his mounting debts.
2. K.D.M. Snell defines the regional novel as: “fiction that is set in a recog-
nizable region, and which describes features distinguishing the life, social
relations, customs, language, dialect, or other aspects of the culture of that
area and its people.” “The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary
Research,” in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990,
ed. K.D.M. Snell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 1.
184 Notes
3. Snell argues that the novel is set in the Irish midlands, in County
Longford. Ibid., 7.
4. Cheryl Temple Herr, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland
to the American Midwest (Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1996), 22.
5. “The Novel of the Big House,” in Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel,
ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 60.
6. Although it is written in the voice of the lower class Irish, the text’s
close attentiveness to the manners and perspectives of the native Irish
emerges from Edgeworth’s own experience in managing the accounts for
her father’s estate and from her research into her own family’s history.
Sophie Gilmartin suggests, “she was herself a good genealogist who took
great care of the book of her family history written by her grandfather,
which the family referred to as ‘The Black Book of Edgeworthtown.’ This
book traces the history of the family from the close of the sixteenth
to the middle of the eighteenth century.” Ancestry and Narrative in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to
Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 33.
7. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972),
394. Likewise, Elizabeth Fay argues, in the Irish tales it is “the lack of
responsible action that degrades society.” A Feminist Introduction to
Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 164.
8. Mellor points out that the critique emerged from the way she compared
the plight of the Irish tenantry to West Indian slaves. Romanticism and
Gender (London: Routledge, 1993), 80.
9. Gallagher also notes, “Edgeworthian authorship was consciously thought
by both partners to be the daughter’s execution of the father’s inten-
tions.” Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the
Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 305, 268.
10. See Romanticism and Gender, 45.
12. Slow Violence, 14.
13. As discussed in the chapter on Bewick’s History of British Birds, Gallagher
and Greenblatt point out that “the miniature completeness of the anec-
dote interrupts the continuous flow of larger histories.” Practicing New
Historicism, 50. Michael Gamer argues that in Castle Rackrent, the anecdote
has definitive teleological ends: “Defined as private rather than public,
overheard rather than heard, sincere rather than performed, ‘anecdote’
promises to deliver textual truths superior to history because of the par-
ticular kind of ‘reality’ it claims to embody.” “Maria Edgeworth and the
Romance of Real Life,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2 (Spring 2001): 243.
14. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
since 1790 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 39. Luke Gibbons, “Alternative
Enlightenments: The United Irishmen, Cultural Diversity, and the Republic
of Letters,” in 1798; 200 Years of Resonance; Essays and Contributions on
the History and Relevance of the United Irishmen and the 1798 Revolution,
ed. Mary Cullen (Dublin: Irish Reporter Publications, 1998), 123.
Notes 185
15. Her taste for vivid anecdote spans all of her later Irish writings, in which
narrators and characters repeatedly assert that attention to local customs
is crucial for ethical interaction with differing cultures. An important
part of Lord Glenthorn’s education in Ennui, for example, is understand-
ing custom; he does not want to become one of those “cursory travelers,
who expose their own ignorance, whilst they attempt to ridicule local
customs, of which they have not inquired the cause, or discovered the
utility.” Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin
Classics, 1992), 253.
16. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-
Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 99.
17. In the irony employed here, Edgeworth points to the end of her own
knowledge of the Irish poor; she can mimic their speech, but not fully
understand their meaning. The use of Thady’s voice can be usefully read
alongside Maria and her father Richard Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls
(1802), which was published just after Castle Rackrent; it attempts to make
a defense of the Irish blunders as forms of art and wit. See Richard Lovell
Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1979).
18. Susan B. Egenolf argues, “Just as blackface minstrelsy had its moments of
greatest popularity, attempting to reinscribe the ‘myth of the benevolent
plantation’ during the period when American slavery was being exposed to
mounting abolitionist criticism [. . .], Edgeworth’s blackface performance as
Thady attempts to reinscribe a system of benevolent patronage in Ireland.”
“Maria Edgeworth in Blackface: Castle Rackrent and the Irish Rebellion of
1798,” ELH: English Literary History 72 (2005): 848. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick,
“Introduction,” in Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), xxvii.
19. See Imperial Eyes, 80.
20. Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture
in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007), 5.
21. Such complicated and changing inheritances also arise in the later Irish tales.
22. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 10.
23. Magna Carta Manifesto, 44.
24. Thady adds that these practices meant that the house servants benefited
from the additional food. Thady’s loyalty, according to Terry Eagleton,
amounts to “an extraordinarily perceptive portrait of the workings of
ideology, in which conscious beliefs and unconscious intentions can cer-
tainly be at odds.” Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture
(London: Verso, 1995), 167.
25. In Ennui, Lord Glenthorn’s combats hypochondria through the manage-
ment of his estate, which involves learning about the tenants’ rights to
“parks” that were available for grazing rights. The issue of grazing rights
is an important one in both England and Ireland; in the next chapter,
it is central to Cobbett’s defense of the poor in Cottage Economy. See Castle
Rackrent and Ennui, 185.
186 Notes
26. Monstrous Society, 16.

27. Edmund Burke and Ireland, xiii.
28. “Tales of the Locale: The Natural History of Selborne and Castle
Rackrent,” Modern Philology 100.3 (February 2003): 394–5.
29. Ecology without Nature, 187.
30. “The Novel of the Big House,” 64.
31. Backus, The Gothic Family Romance, 103, 100.
32. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke
UP, 2008), 2.
33. “The Novel of the Big House,”60.
34. “Ride to Bollitree,” Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 1333.
35. Invention of the Countryside, 11.
36. The monument is inscribed: “Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monu-
ment of old Irish hospitality” (CR 37).
37. While Gamer makes this argument about Sir Kit’s valorization of
Murtagh’s bog preservation, I think perhaps a more consequential
example is that of Sir Condy following the example of the glutton,
drunkard, and debtor Sir Patrick. “Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of
Real Life,” 247.
38. Thady relates, “he gave my son a bargain of some acres which fell out of
lease at a reasonable rent,” Castle Rackrent, 41.
39. Vivaldi’s “romantic” ideas of autonomy clash with the values of his par-
ents. His father argues: “Are you to learn, Signor, that you belong to your
family, not your family to you; that you are only the guardian of its hon-
our, and not at liberty to dispose yourself?” The Italian, or the Confessional
of the Black Penitants: A Romance (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 38.
See also, Robert Mighall’s “History as Nightmare” in A Geography of
Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1999), 1–26.
40. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 121.
41. Thompson, Customs in Common, 57.
42. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia UP,
2009), 179.
43. Illuminations, 255.
44. Brian Hollingsworth argues that Castle Rackrent’s “incidents are comic
and amoral. It has no message for the reader.” Maria Edgeworth’s Irish
Writing: Language, History, Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 72.
45. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
46. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1997), 51.
47. “Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity,” SEL: Studies in
English Literature 1500–1900 39.4 (1999): 648.
48. Introduction to Ormond (London: Penguin, 2000), xx.
50. See Becoming Native to This Place (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996).
Notes 187
51. Maurer argues, “I read Edgeworth’s plots as centering around the

instability of identity and mutability of tradition that make all posses-
sion random and illegitimate.” “Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth
and the Illegitimacy of National Ownership,” Criticism 44.4 (2002):
364, 366.
5 Subsistence as Resistance: William Cobbett’s

Food Politics
1. G. K. Chesterton, “Preface,” in Cottage Economy, by William Cobbett
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), ix–x.
3. “Ride to Bollitree,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 40.20 (London:
C. Clement, 1821), 1333–4.
4. Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1996), 111.
5. Cottage Economy intends to return to the moral economy: because the
laboring class work to produce the food for a nation, “a man’s earnings
[must] be sufficient to maintain himself and family with food, raiment,
and lodging needful for them.” CE para. 85.
6. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 232.
7. Whale, Imagination under Pressure, 164. Nattrass, William Cobbett: The
Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 123. Nattrass includes
a chapter on Cobbett’s “teaching texts” that compares his Advice for Young
Men to Hannah More’s Tales, but she does not consider the agricultural
“teaching texts.”
8. While Dyck perceptively suggests that a better way to evaluate Cobbett’s
work is as “populist” form of writing, in Dyck’s analysis the food politics
of Cobbett’s work remain marginal. William Cobbett and Rural Popular
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 2.
9. “To the Radicals,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register 39.4 (1821): 217–18.
10. For more on the concept of consumption as performance, see Timothy
Morton, “Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer
in the Romantic Period,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating
Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 1–18.
11. The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 755.
12. “Deciphering a Meal,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, eds. Carole Counihan
and Penny Van Esterik (London: Routledge, 1997), 36.
13. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 13.
14. For more on contemporary movements toward food sovereignty, see
Walden Bello, The Food Wars.
15. “To Gaffer Gooch,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 39.1 (1821), 9.
16. Ibid., 10.
188 Notes
17. “To the Distressed Stocking-Weavers,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register,

vol. 39.3 (1821), 89–190.
18. Cobbett explains that he published Cottage Economy so that laborers could
be “belly-full”: “They may Tract it as long as they please: but they will
never make a man believe, that he has not a right to a belly-full from his
constant labour.” This quotation is from an announcement for the second
edition of Cottage Economy. Cobbett’s Political Register, vol. 43.7 (1822), 440.
19. Klancher goes on to state, “The radical text was not meant to form a sin-
gular bond between reader and writer, but to bind one reader to another
as audience, a readership the radical writer both confronted and spoke
for in a complex rhetorical act of ‘representation.’” The Making of English
Reading Audiences, 1790–1832, 100.
20. Cobbett declares, “My efforts have, all my life long, since I became a man,
been directly the reverse of these projectors. I have used various endeav-
ors to cause an addition to be made to the food, the drink, the raiment,
of the industrious classes.” A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn (London: Mills,
Jowett, and Mills, 1828), para. 4–5.
21. “To Lawyer Scarlett: On his Poor Law Project, as illustrated by the Famine
in Ireland,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 43.2 (1822): 88.
22. “To Parson Malthus, On the Rights of the Poor; and on the cruelty rec-
ommended by him to be exercised towards the poor.” in Cobbett’s Weekly
Register, vol. 34.33 (1819), 1036.
23. Ibid., 1029.
24. Chase explains, he “endorsed private property in land, as long as there
existed beside it a continuing framework of use-rights.” The People’s
Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), 182.
25. Nicholas Roe makes a similar argument: “In Cobbett’s time as in the
twenty-first century in England, agri-monopolizers are responsible for
rural depopulation and for the transformation of the English landscape
into a chemically fed monoculture to supply a voracious urban mar-
ket.” “Eating Romantic England: The Foot and Mouth Epidemic and Its
Consequences,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism,
ed. Timothy Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 102.
26. Cobbett complains about Bull-frog Farmers “who, like the Bull-Frogs of
the American swamps, have swallowed up the small-farmers, as the Bull-
Frogs do the little chirping frogs.” “To the Radicals,” 274.
27. Ibid., 277–8.
28. In this analysis, Helsinger also argues that Cobbett’s politics anticipate de
Certeau’s tactics. Rural Scenes and National Representation, 119.
29. The English Gardener (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), para. 34.
30. Anthony Huxley, “Introduction,” in The English Gardener, vii.
31. Rural Rides, ed. Ian Dyck (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 164.
32. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994), x.
33. Landscape and Ideology, 82.
Notes 189
34. “To Mr. Attwood,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 39.5 (1821), 329–30.
35. “To Mr. John Hayes,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 39.7 (1821), 461.
Cobbett here echoes an undercurrent of advocacy in the period for the
“People’s Farm” in which “Continued access to the countryside was hence
an important element in workers’ attempts to retain control over their
environment and general quality of life.” Chase, The People’s Farm, 14.
36. Cobbett was deeply skeptical of the goals of Hannah More and others
who wished to teach the poor to read in order to ensure their subservi-
ence. More warns against “mischievous books,” and suggests, “those who
teach the poor to read, should not only take care to furnish them with
principles which will lead them to abhor corrupt books, but should also
furnish them with such books that shall strengthen and confirm their
principles.” Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education: With a
View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and
Fortune (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), 187.
37. A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn, para. 1.
38. Cobbett admits that his agrarian plans for independence would be frus-
trated by the lack of cultivatable land in urban areas. See CE, para. 91.
39. The Politics of Language, 230.
40. Anecdotes of William Hogarth: Written by Himself (London: J.B. Nichols and
Son, 1833), 64.
41. “Advertisement,” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 40.2 (London:
C. Clement, 1821), 134.
42. Ibid., 135–6.
43. Cobbett also suggests that the laboring class make their own mustard
rather than trust the commercial versions, which he believed were poi-
sonous. CE, para. 198.
44. The Consequences of Modernity, 88.
45. Accum also published a list of names of those brewers who had been
convicted for unlawful additives in beer and expresses these radical senti-
ments: “It is really astonishing that the penal law is not more effectually
enforced against practices so inimical to the public welfare. The man who
robs a fellow subject of a few shillings on the high-way, is sentenced to
death; while he who distributes a slow poison to a whole community,
escapes unpunished.” A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary
Poisons Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine,
Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper,
Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy
(Philadelphia: Ab’m Small, 1820), iv, 22.
46. Ibid., 21.
47. The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1969), 295.
48. Imagination under Pressure, 148.
49. Romanticism and Masculinity, 165.
50. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, eds. Robert Carroll and Stephen
Prickett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 1 Timothy 5.18.
190 Notes

52. Piero Camporesi observes, “The hierarchy of breads and their qualities
in reality sanctioned social distinctions. Bread represented a status sym-
bol that defined human condition and class according to its particular
colour, varying in all shades from black to white.” Bread of Dreams: Food
and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996),
120. Redcliffe N. Salaman explains, “white bread has always served as a
token of class distinction, and was recognized as a mark of privilege. Its
adoption by the working classes should be interpreted as evidence of an
equalitarian spirit beginning to make itself felt throughout England.” The
History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985),
480. Likewise, Drummond and Wilbraham insist, “The inhabitants of the
towns, with the exception of those in the north, would eat nothing but
fine wheaten bread.” Drummond and Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food,
186. E.P. Thompson explains how bakers profited from the vogue for
white bread: “It was to the advantage of bakers and millers to sell white
bread or fine flour, since the profit which might be gained from such sales
was, in general, larger.” Customs in Common, 190.
53. “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” in Gallagher and Greenblatt,
Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), 126.
54. “To the Distressed Stocking-Weavers,” 191, 189.
55. The protest against workers eating potatoes because potatoes are associ-
ated with poverty comes up again in the Swing Riots in the 1830s. In
Kent, the banners said “WE WILL NOT LIVE UPON POTATOES.” See
Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 166.
56. “Deciphering a Meal,” 40.
57. See Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York:
Penguin Books, 1986), 110.
58. Tea was expensive, as Drummond and Wilbraham document: “The
amount spent on tea by working class families was considerable. The fam-
ily budgets [. . .] show that it was not uncommon for two pounds a year
to be so spent when the total income was only a matter of forty pounds
a year.” The Englishman’s Food, 204.
59. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006), 175.
60. Cobbett’s Corn, para. 156.
61. Tales for the Common People and Other Cheap Repository Tracts, ed. Clare
MacDonald Shaw (Nottingham, UK: Trent Editions, 2002), 127, lines
87, 90. Cottage Economy was published at a time when numerous dietary
reform initiatives were being advocated, and the comparison with
More’s work is apt because in “The Cottage Cook,” she also encourages
home economy and provides cheap recipes. Cobbett certainly had read
Cheap Repository Tracts in the 1790s, and in the nineteenth century,
Ian Dyck sees the two authors as engaged in a battle for the reading
attention of the masses. See William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture,
pp. 76–106.
Notes 191
62. In Cobbett’s political rhetoric, bacon tends to serve as synecdoche for all
kinds of meat or other animal-sourced protein such as milk. His empha-
sis on the importance of bacon in the diet is reminiscent of George
Morland’s painting The Cottager’s Wealth (1791), in which a woman
feeds discarded cabbage leaves to hungry young pigs. Cobbett’s attitude
towards animals is a complex one. Animals serve their purpose, but they
should not be treated cruelly. In Cottage Economy, Cobbett registers his
disdain for the French practice of nailing down the feet of ducks in order
to fatten them and of plucking the feathers from turkeys while they are
still alive to tenderize the meat. He mentions that being kind to animals
is an admirable trait to foster in children, and the ability to care for ani-
mals humanely is the mark of the reliable worker.
63. William Cobbett, 154.
64. William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 113.
65. The Practice of Everyday Life, 38. Cottage Economy also includes sugges-
tions for making one’s own consumer goods such as straw hats, and how
to make rush candles so the poor can avoid buying candles and paying
candle tax.
66. “To Mr. Coke” in Cobbett’s Weekly Register, vol. 39.8 (1821), 519–20.
67. Ibid., 521.
68. Moreover, Linebaugh argues, “safeguards against tyranny were becoming
linked to preservation of commoning.” Magna Carta Manifesto, 59, 83.
69. Making of the English Working Class, 762.
70. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 163.
6 Anthropomorphism and the Critique of Liberal Rights

in John Clare’s Enclosure Elegies
1. McKusick describes an “ecolect” as “poetic language [that] must strive
to obtain the opacity and concreteness of natural phenomena while
also evoking the sincerity of response that can only emerge from a wild,
unpolished idiom.” Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 88.
2. John Lucas argues that Clare was a radical but also was a “deferential
worker,” who reflected “the ambivalence of rural working-class culture,
with its combination of conservative deference and radical resentment.”
“Clare’s Politics,” in John Clare in Context, eds. Geoffrey Summerfield,
Hugh Haughton, and Adam Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994),
132. P.M.S. Dawson reads Clare as a “common-sense liberal” in “Common
Sense or Radicalism? Some Reflections on Clare’s Politics.” Romanticism
2 (1996): 81–97. Eric Robinson, the editor of Clare’s work, claims that
Clare is a conservative whose “politics are local, or at most regional, rather
than national; conservative rather than radical; monarchical rather than
revolutionary or republican.” “Introduction,” in John Clare, A Champion
192 Notes
for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, ed. P.M.S. Dawson, David Powell, and
Eric Robinson (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), xiv–xv. Alan Vardy docu-
ments Clare’s contributions to both Stamford’s conservative paper, The
Bee, and the radical paper, Drakard’s Stamford Champion, in John Clare,
Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171. Simon
White argues that Clare’s elegies for Langley Bush suggest a longing for
the manorial system with its custom of hundred courts. “Landscape Icons
and the Community: A Reading of John Clare’s ‘Langley Bush’,” John Clare
Society Journal 26 (2007): 21–32. Bridget Keegan reminds readers, “When
labouring-class writers address social issues, they frequently do so without
employing an explicitly political rhetoric which would have cost them
patrons and a chance at publication.” British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry,
1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4.
3. Johanne Clare was the first critic to call the poems analyzed in this chap-
ter “enclosure elegies.” She argues, the enclosure elegies “reveal the depth
of Clare’s understanding that his position in society decided not only
the limits of his material expectations, but the quality of his relations to
his physical and human environment.” See John Clare and the Bounds of
Circumstance (Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 1987), 7.
4. Bate, “The Rights of Nature,” John Clare Society Journal 14 (1995): 7;
Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, 82.
5. Although often this view was put forth to highlight the threat of liberal
rights, such as in Thomas Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
(London: Edward Jeffrey, 1792). See Bate, Song of the Earth and Perkins,
Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
6. “The Fallen Elm” (line 54), Poems of the Middle Period, vols. 1–5, eds. Eric
Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996–2003), III. 440–3. “Miscellaneous Fragment,” A Champion for the
Poor: Political Verse and Prose, 285.
7. The first line is from “Helpstone” (line 88), The Early Poems of John Clare:
1804–1822, vols. 1–2, eds, Eric Robinson, David Powell, and Margaret
Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 156. The last three lines are
from Poems of the Middle Period: “The Lament of Swordy Well” (line 140,
V.109), “Remembrances” (line 43, IV.130), “The Lament of Swordy Well”
(line 87, V.107).
8. Keegan argues that John Clare’s poetry “tries to imagine if not a world
entirely without us, at least a world where humans tread more carefully.”
She further suggests that “He was courageous enough to understand
that nature’s beauty and purpose might ultimately have nothing what-
soever to do with us, and that the world without us was the true poem,
the poem Clare again and again aspired to write.” “The World without
Us: Romanticism, Environmentalism, and Imagining Nature,” in The
Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), 555, 570.
9. All lines from “The Lament of Swordy Well,” Poems of the Middle Period,
V.105–14. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by the poem’s lines.
Notes 193
10. Green Writing, 86.

11. “A Speaking Place: The Matter of Genre in ‘The Lament of Swordy Well.’”
Wordsworth Circle 34 (2003): 133. John Goodridge argues that prosopo-
poeia in “Swordy Well” conveys Clare’s “clear belief that there is much
more to a piece of land than its agricultural and mineral wealth.” See John
Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 121.
12. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1953), 55.
13. “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” Early Poems, I. 228–34.
Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by the poem’s lines.
14. Oerlemans argues, “What is centrally important about the animal [. . .]
is that it presents them with an otherness that stands at the boundaries
of understandings of the human.” Romanticism and the Materiality of
Nature, 68, 71. Simons suggests that anthropomorphism has “the effect
of portraying the non-human in such a way as to make it interesting and
worthy of human sympathy.” Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary
Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 116–7.
15. The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 257.
16. See Rhetoric of Romanticism, 241, and Cynthia Chase. Decomposing Figures:
Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1986), 84.
17. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne,
1780), n.309.
18. “The Animal that I Am: More to Follow,” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter,
2002), 396.
19. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 143. Even though Bentham, unlike Clare,
is a liberal utilitarian who imagined that his felicific calculus would
maximize human pleasure and social cohesion, Bentham’s footnote on
animals occurs somewhat paradoxically at the opposite end of his quest
for collective pleasure, at the dimension of irrational, inscrutable suffer-
ing to which all life is exposed.
20. Perkins describes the “unremitting stream of warnings” against allowing
children’s cruelty to animals. See Romanticism and Animal Rights, 20–2.
“Isaac Walton,” Poems of the Middle Period, IV.209–10.
21. Champion for the Poor, 267.
22. Man and the Natural World, 45 and Romanticism and Animal Rights, 106.
23. Spiegel argues, “Comparing the suffering of animals to that of blacks (or
any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciest [. . .] Those
who are offended by the comparison to a fellow sufferer have unquestion-
ably accepted the biased worldview presented by the masters.” The Dreaded
Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror Books, 1996), 30.
Bentham’s passage that compares animal suffering to human slavery reads:
“The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire
those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by
the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness
of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned with redress
194 Notes
to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that

the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the
os scarum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being
to the same fate.” Principles of Morals and Legislation, n.309.
24. Poems of the Middle Period, II.21–9 and III.91–119.
25. “Post-Colonial Critique in a Multi-Species World.” PMLA.124.2 (March
2009): 558.
26. “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals” SubStance: A Review of Theory and
Literary Criticism 37.3 (2008): 80.
27. “The Flitting,” line 212, Poems of the Middle Period, III. 479–89.
28. “John Clare’s Gypsies: Problems of Placement and Displacement in
Romantic Critical Practice.” In Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed.
Peter Kitson (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001), 58.
29. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124.2 (March
2009), 530.
30. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the
Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972), 66–7.
31. See Poems of the Middle Period, “Going to the Fair,” III.91–119, “The Wild
Bull,” III.520–2, “Pleasant Spots,” IV.299, line 1.
32. “Helpstone,” line 96, Early Poems. I.156.
33. See Poems of the Middle Period. “Gipsey’s Song,” IV. 53–5. The poem reads,
“We pay not rent nor tax to none / But live untythd & free,” lines 3–4,
and “Tho the wild woods are our house & home / Tis a home of liberty,”
lines 49–50. “Pastoral Liberty,” IV. 303–4, and “mountain liberty” is
extolled in “July” I.84.
34. “John Clare’s ‘I’ and ‘Eye’: Egotism and Ecologism,” in Green and Pleasant
Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside, ed. Amanda Gilroy
(Leuven-Paris-Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2004), 88.
35. “The Fallen Elm,” Poems of the Middle Period, III.440–3, line 12. Hereafter
cited parenthetically in the text by the poem’s lines.
36. Poems of the Middle Period, III.453 and IV.253–4.
37. The Mirror and the Lamp, 65.
38. See “The Second Discourse,” from The Social Contract and The First and
Second Discourses (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 93 and 90–1.
39. “Natural Man as Imaginary Animal: The Challenge of Facts and the
Place of Animal Life in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.”
Interpretation 27.3 (Spring 2000), 215.
40. Giorgio Agamben argues, “In the system of the nation-state, the so-called
sacred and unalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protec-
tion and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form
or rights belonging to citizens of a state.” Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 126.
41. “Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees.” The John Clare Society
Journal 14 (1994), 58.
42. “John Clare’s Dark Ecology.” Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (Summer
2008), 193.
Notes 195
43. I bring in Schopenhauer here in order to distinguish Clare’s vision of

natural ontological freedom from natural rights discourse based on
human rationality. According to R.S. White, “Reason, the capacity which
defines the uniqueness of human beings, is at the heart of notions of
fundamental law and fundamental rights, since only what is reasonable
can be agreed upon by all human beings.” Natural Rights and the Birth of
Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 2.
44. “On Religion,” in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. J.R. Hollingdale (New York:
Penguin, 1970), 189.
45. The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995), 17, 5.
46. Poems of the Middle Period, III.287–95.
47. “Clare Among the Gypsies,” Wordsworth Circle 29.3 (1998): 167.
48. Poems of the Middle Period, II.35–40.
49. Clare’s view resonates again with Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as
“blind, irresistible urges, and we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable
nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life.” See
“The World as Will: Second Aspect” in Philosophical Writings, trans. Virginia
Cutrufelli, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York: Continuum, 1994), 129.
50. Poems of the Middle Period, III.527–31.
51. “freak”, n.1” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online.
Oxford UP.
52. “Common Sense or Radicalism?,” 94.
53. “The Mores,” Poems of the Middle Period, II.347–50, line 3.
54. British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 163.
55. “The Fallen Elm,” line 53, “Helpstone,” line 6. Theory of Religion
(New York: Zone Books, 1992), 41.
56. “Pleasant Spots,” Poems of the Middle Period, IV. 299.
57. “To a Rosebud in Humble Life,” Early Poems. I.411, line 1, and “The Mole”
Poems of the Middle Period, IV.294, lines 12–3.
58. “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays
(London: Verso, 1980) 76.
59. “The Robins Nest” from Poems of the Middle Period, III.532–6. Hereafter
cited parenthetically in the text by the poem’s lines.
60. “The Flitting,” Ibid., III. 479–89, lines 198, 59–60.
61. “The Nightingales Nest,” Ibid., III.459, line 62.
Epilogue
2. The Country and the City, 301.
3. Ecology without Nature, 93–4.
4. “The Philosophy of Shipwreck,” 991.
5. See Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996),
42–5. Another reason one might hesitate to explore the connection
196 Notes
between Romantic conservatism and environmental conservation is

articulated by Luc Ferry, who warns that any political position that
“continually hesitates between conservative romantic themes and ‘pro-
gressive’ anti-capitalist ones” is in danger of drifting into a xenophobic,
blood and soil, “Nazi ecology.” My work focuses on the British historical
context, and British Romanticism’s intergenerational imagination is not
so much about the desire to stay in one place or xenophobia, as much as
it requires an interrogation of one’s ancestors – with a critical eye – and
assessment of the impact on future generations when making decisions.
The New Ecological Order, 90.
6. Slow Violence, 2, 3.
7. Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, in a Series of Letters (London:
J. Owen, 1796), 51.
9. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the
Global (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 10.
10. Slow Violence, 134.
11. Ecology without Nature, 18, 195.
12. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation
of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 2.
13. Žižek defines “unknown knowns” as “the disavowed beliefs and supposi-
tions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves.” In Defense of Lost
Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 457.
14. Specters of the Atlantic, 46.
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Index
Note: “n” after a page reference denotes a note number on that page.
Abrams, M. H. 145, 153 Bachelard, Gaston 66, 76

Accum, Frederick 128–9, 189 n45 Backus, Margot Gayle 96
Adorno, Theodor W. 38 bacon 107, 116, 117, 124, 125,
Aesop’s fables 89 135–6, 191 n62
Agamben, Giorgio 155, 194 n40 Baker, Samuel 50, 54
agriculture Ball, Terence 18
capitalism 9, 11, 22, 33, 41, 53, ballad form 9, 41, 43, 62, 175 n9
61–2, 80, 119–20, 139–40, 151–2 Barrell, John 151–2
as a form of culture 18, 92, 114, Bataille, Georges 159
122, 124–5, 177 n22, 178 n34 Bate, Jonathan 2, 43, 142
subsistence 53, 77, 110, 116, Baucom, Ian 4, 168
121–5, 140, 189 n35 beer 6, 11, 107, 113, 117, 125, 130,
as violence 53, 159–60 135–6, 138
workers 33, 53, 113–15, 133, 160 adulterated 127, 129, 131,
Ahuja, Neel 150 189 n45
Anglo-Irish estates 10, 91–4, 108, chemical experiments for
110, 166 detecting additives in 128–9
absenteeism 101–5 cultural heritage 116, 124,
management 98–101, 108–10 126, 129
animals 11–12, 70, 123–4, 151, malt tax 126, 138, 149
157, 169 n3 replacement with tea 11, 126,
cruelty 82, 142, 147–9 131–2, 133
fishing 85, 88–9, 149 Beilby, Ralph 67, 68, 69
human animality 80, 85–90, Bello, Walden 33
130–3, 149–50, 154–5 Benjamin, Walter 20, 70, 108
hunting 69–70, 85 Bentham, Jeremy 38, 147–8, 149,
meat 135–7 193n 19, 23
see also anthropomorphism, Bermingham, Ann 88, 122, 180 n11
natural history Bewell, Alan 62, 65
Ankersmit, F. R. 17 Bewick, Thomas 4, 6, 91, 100, 119,
anthropomorphism 11–12, 141–62 122, 166
anti-Jacobinism 115 General History of Quadrupeds,
Arendt, Hannah 26, 34 67–70, 72, 82
Audubon, John James 71 History of British Birds 9–10, 32,
autonomy 11, 12, 21, 71, 143 65–90, 95, 96, 179 n5, 180 n7
freedom characterized by 154 History of British Fishes 70, 85
liberal 19, 22 bioegalitarianism 143, 151, 153, 162
solitary 154 biopolitics 54, 59, 147
211
212 Index
Blake, William 73, 84, 181 n26 organicism 16, 26–36, 58, 60, 164
Bohrer, Marta Adams 100 Philosophical Inquiry into .. the
Book of Common Prayer 83 Sublime and Beautiful 23
Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 29, 65 Reflections on the Revolution in
Boym, Svetlana 6, 40, 77 France 1, 3–4, 7, 8, 15–36, 142
Braidotti, Rosi 151 Thoughts on the Prospect of a
bread 6, 11, 107, 113, 117, 124, Regicide Peace 165
125, 134 tradition 5, 8, 20, 26
adulterated 129–31 see also Burke-Paine debate
brown 131, 132 Burke-Paine debate 2, 8, 20, 24,
experiments for detecting 38, 163
additives in 128–9 Butler, Marilyn 93
cultural heritage 116, 126, 129,
130–1, 190 n52 capitalism 2, 9, 19, 22, 41, 55, 110,
replacement with potatoes 126, 114, 125, 168
130, 131–2, 133, 135 critiques of 3, 4–5, 171 n14
riots 130, 134 environmental changes 30, 61–2
store-bought 127–8 green-washed 165, 168
Brewer, John 68, 81, 82 see also agricultural capitalism
British colonialism 8, 25, 31, 53, Catholicism 21–2, 28, 97, 104,
65, 101, 134 173 n14
Broglio, Ron 4, 7, 43 Certeau, Michel de 81, 138
Buell, Lawrence 30, 167–8 Chandler, James K. 5, 27, 42–3,
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte 176 n15
de 32, 72, 82–3, 180 n14 Chase, Cynthia 146
Burke, Edmund 42, 45–6, 54, 57, Chase, Malcolm 119
59, 66, 75, 97–8, 119, 120, 125, Chesterton, G. K. 113
129–30, 136–7, 151, 158, 163 Chillingham cattle 69–70
anti-colonial stance 8, 25, 31, Clare, John 4, 6, 61, 111, 119,
100, 174 n38 124, 166
conservatism 1, 3, 5, 17, 42, 68, anthropomorphism 11–12,
53, 83–4, 100, 152, 170 n5, 141–62
172 n2 By Himself 50, 141, 142, 153, 154
customs and common enclosure elegies 11, 89, 142,
rights 33–4, 43–4, 75, 100, 143, 150, 159, 162; “Fallen
120, 171 n14, 174 n27 Elm” 152–3, 154–6; “Round-
environmental conservation 7–8, Oak Waters” 145, 148, 153;
15–16, 18–19, 22–3, 29–30, “Swordy Well” 144–5, 147,
31–3, 34, 164–5 148, 151–2, 153, 155
habits and “second nature” 5, 8, Clymer, Lorna 49
27–30, 31–2, 57, 66 Cobbett, William 4, 6, 104,
inheritance 4, 6, 17–18, 23–5, 142, 166
35–6, 91, 97, 105 Cottage Economy 11, 91, 107,
intergenerational imagination 3, 113–24, 125, 127–33, 135,
8, 16, 23–4, 40–1, 44, 91, 108, 136–40
111, 142 English Gardener, The 120–1, 139
Index 213
Political Register 115, 117–18, County Longford 92

127, 132, 139 Cromwell, Oliver 25
Rural Rides 113–14, 115, 116, 129 Cronon, William 7
Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn 118, culture 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 20, 26, 35,
124–5, 134 42, 50, 83, 95, 101, 104, 118,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54 125, 133, 139
Collings, David 5, 58, 84, 99–100, consumer 110, 126, 138, 168
171 n14, 174 n27, 179 n44 emergent 6, 49, 62, 80–1, 109
commodification indigenous 168
food 128, 131, 137, 138, 166 inherited 4, 16, 23, 34, 61,
land 11, 22, 94, 101, 105, 139, 165–6, 168
166 local 45, 61, 96, 100, 129, 143,
personal items 68 185 n15
commons 84, 87–8, 89, 98, oral 48
113–14, 123–4, 139, 145, 150–1 rebellious 84, 87, 171 n14
“commoning” 5, 81, 125, residual 6–7, 9, 43, 62, 66,
139–40, 166, 191 n68 67–70, 109
cultural 27, 29, 119, 142, 151, working-class 126, 139, 191 n2
171n14 customary rights 28, 78, 82, 84,
enclosure of 7, 11, 15, 41, 52–3, 88, 89, 98, 99, 101, 117
61–2, 66, 76, 114, 123, 135, ancient 136
139, 141–2, 147, 156 criminalization of 134
see also enclosure decline of 10, 90, 107, 120, 125
common rights 5, 7, 9, 52, 72, 76, see also commons and
83, 87, 91, 98–9, 119, 143 common rights
inheritance of 80
hunting and fishing 84–6, Dawson, P. M. S. 159
182 n44 Deane, Seamus 95
gleaning 53, 87, 157–8 De Man, Paul 6, 50, 62, 146
grazing 135, 138, 151, 185 n25 Derrida, Jacques 148
private property and 79, 99 Dick, Alex J. 56
see also customary rights disposition 33, 34, 68, 85
Connolly, Claire 110 Disraeli, Benjamin 3
consciousness Douglas, Mary 116, 133
class 106,119 Dovaston, John F. M. 73, 182 n35,
customary 27, 158, 174 n27 182 n37
planetary 65 drinking habits see beer; tea
conservatism 3, 12, 15–16, 32, Dyck, Ian 116, 137
83–4, 115, 116, 142, 162, 163–4,
165, 168, 170 n5, 172 n2 ecology
and environmentalism 2, 8, 17, cognitive 7, 43
43, 55, 91, 104–5, 110–11, 160–2 dark 55, 101, 156, 167
intergenerational view 4, 6, 12, social 1, 3, 4, 7, 16, 28–9, 39,
35, 152, 164, 168 41–3, 59–62, 94, 101, 104, 110,
traditionalism 3, 5–6, 17, 20 113, 119, 121–3, 142, 145, 157,
Conway 37 163, 170 n7
214 Index
economy environmental ethics 2, 3, 5, 8, 17,

absentee 102–3 22, 32–3,144, 151, 162, 169 n3
animal 66 conflicting 19–20, 30
capitalist 3, 8, 11, 19, 33, 34, 54, intergenerational 8, 161
84, 101, 109, 114–15, 117, 120, melancholic 55, 167
128–9, 134, 166 environmental history 7, 59,
cottage 11, 121–2, 127, 135–40 91, 167
domestic 95, 100, 110 environmental justice 145,
gift 81, 178 n39 148, 167
local 56, 92, 122, 130, 145 epistemology 32, 55, 68, 69, 96,
moral 80, 84, 86, 91, 115, 116, 184 n14
122, 130, 187 n5 embedded 67, 73
nature’s 83, 86–7, 122 narrowly morphological 83
political economy 11, 41, 53, 58, relational 73, 90
60, 119, 131 Evangelicalism 117–18, 125
spiritual 62 Everett, Nigel 53, 174 n34
subsistence 113, 123, 147
Edgeworth, Maria 4, 6, 61, 119, 166 Ferguson, Frances 42, 176 n11
Absentee, The 10, 93, 94, 103–5, Ferry, Luc 157
108, 110 Finn, Margot C. 98
Castle Rackrent 10, 91–103, food
105–8, 110 customary right to 84–7
Ennui: Memoirs of the Earl of heritage 107, 115–16, 126, 142
Glenthorn 10, 93, 94, 103, politics 11, 113–40, 142, 4
108, 110 scarcity 53–4, 134
Ormond 10, 93, 94, 108–10 sovereignty 117, 123, 187 n14
Empedocles 32 see also bacon; beer; bread;
enclosure 5, 8, 9, 15, 41, 62, 80–2, potatoes; tea
84–5, 90, 113, 141–2, 149 Fosso, Kurt 46
birds not restrained by 10, 66, Foucault, Michel 39, 59, 62
76, 81, 89 France 7, 29–33, 80, 120, 128, 149,
consequences of 52–3, 113–14, 165, 173 n14
120, 123, 125, 135, 139, 141–2, see also Burke (Reflections)
144–7, 151–5, 166, 178 n35 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) 167
resistance to 11, 30, 123, 140, freedom 22–4, 57, 66, 68
143, 168 conservative approach to 72, 82,
see also privatization 85, 123–4, 131, 138, 143, 155
enclosure elegies 11, 89, 141–62 liberal approach to 17, 19–20,
English Civil War (1642–51) 20, 25 24, 25, 27, 62, 143, 146, 164
environmental conservation 1–2, positive 151–62, 195 n43
5, 6–7, 15, 20–1, 35, 42–3, 91, Fulford, Tim 23, 129–30, 156
104–5, 110–11, 119, 142–3, 162, Furniss, Tom 22
163, 165, 168
ties to cultural conservation 6, Gadamer, Hans-Georg 17
8–9, 15–6, 24, 29, 35, 39, 46, 48, Gaelic culture 109–10
100, 125, 140, 175 n9, 177 n22 Gainsborough, Thomas 122
Index 215
Gallagher, Catherine 69, 93, 94, 132 imagination see intergenerational

Gamer, Michael 105, 184 n13 imagination; moral imagination
Gibbons, Luke 23, 95, 100, 173 imperialism 3, 31, 174 n38
n17, 173 n21, 174 n38 individual rights 30, 150, 154,
Giddens, Anthony 20, 30, 128, 172 155, 156
n7, 174 n33 legitimacy of 2
Gilmartin, Kevin 139–40 negative liberty of 152
Glorious Revolution individualism
(England 1688) 25, 35 see liberal individualism
Goldsmith, Oliver 89 inheritance 4–5, 12, 43, 91, 93,
Goode, Mike 21 123, 137, 166, 168
Gothic mode 20–4, 99, 101, Anglo-Irish 97, 98, 100, 101–2,
103, 106 104, 105, 109, 111
graveyards and graves 6, 8, 20–6, Burke on 8, 15–18, 23, 25–6,
37–62, 97, 168 33, 34
Gray, Thomas 45 debate between improvement
Green Belt Movement (Kenya) 167 and 15, 53, 151
green Romanticism 2, 28, 169 n3 intergenerational imagination 44,
Greenblatt, Stephen 69 60–1, 91, 94, 97, 111, 150, 165,
166–8
habit 1, 5, 8, 23, 65–9, 71, 110, 126, Burke’s Reflections and 15–36
132, 163, 166, 168, 172 n7 conservatism and 1–12, 28,
communal 45, 55, 57–8, 119 103–4, 108, 142–3, 164, 168
domestic 7, 11, 91–2, 97 environment reinforces 38, 50–1,
relation to environment 16, 67, 101, 159, 161–2
26–35, 85–8, 122 memorials that encode 38–40,
“second nature” 5, 29 43, 62, 70
habitation 4, 8, 12, 16, 18–20, regional 42, 101
27, 29, 35, 43, 60, 71, 75, 76, traditionalism and 17–26, 119
91, 164 Ireland 25, 31, 96, 108, 111
habitus 10, 29, 69, 76, 79, 81, impact of absenteeism in 103–4
83, 89 status of the Irish 133
anthropomorphism as 144–50 see also Anglo-Irish estates,
Harrison, Gary 39, 41, 58, 110 Irish culture
Hartman, Geoffrey 42, 60, 176 n11 Irish culture 25, 91, 92, 95–100,
Hazlitt, William 1, 28, 30 107, 110, 133, 173 n21,
Heise, Ursula 166 185 n17
Helpston 141
Helsinger, Elizabeth 114, 120 Jacobinism 2–3, 25, 30, 32
Hess, Scott 12, 44, 176 n19 see also anti-Jacobinism
Hogarth, William 126 Jameson, Fredric 3
Horkheimer, Max 38 Janowitz, Anne 43, 157–8
Horton Heath 139
husbandry 7, 98, 104, 113, 115, Kafka, Franz 70
140, 175 n41 Keegan, Bridget 144, 159, 191 n2,
radical 114, 116, 120, 122 192 n8
216 Index
Kenya 167 lower classes 10, 94, 97, 131

Klancher, Jon P. 51, 118 see also working class
Kreilkamp, Vera 92, 101, 104 Luhmann, Niklas 25
Lake poets 122 Maathai, Wangari 167

see also Coleridge; Wordsworth MacIntyre, Alasdair 86
Lancet, The 129 Makdisi, Saree 31, 170 n6, 174 n38
land use 1, 26, 29, 30, 120, malt tax 138, 149
122, 151 Malthus, T. 54, 117–19, 123,
abrupt changes in 32–3 125, 133
continuity in 3–4, 18, 53 Marie Antoinette 21
decisions about 8, 12, 15–16, 32, Martin, Philip W. 151
34, 91, 111, 165, 167 McCormack, W. J. 107
development 21–2, 30, 41, McKusick, James 141, 144, 169 n3,
43, 80 191 n1
Landry, Donna 6–7, 104, 113–14, Mee, Jon 73
166, 182 n44 Mehta, Uday Singh 5, 8, 31
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 65 Menely, Tobias 71
liberal individualism 2–3, 11, militant particularism 9, 42
16–17, 32, 35, 38, 43, 98, 118, Mintz, Sidney W. 116, 133
143, 165, 170 n7 Mitchell, Robert 59, 173 n17,
atomistic 24, 35 179 n46
bourgeois 4, 36 mobility 7, 17, 44, 48, 152
competitive 4, 29, 44, 149 see also social mobility
conception of rights 11, 124, 143 modernity 4, 6, 9, 25, 42, 48, 50,
conservative stance against 4, 8, 79–80, 128, 164
17, 24, 35–6, 40–1, 58, 60, 86, actuarial ethos of 168
118, 121, 124, 138, 163–5, 168 capitalism and 4, 7, 33, 55, 165
environmental impact of 18–19, consequences of 3, 30, 42, 61,
29–30, 52, 154–8 128, 175 n4
possessive 8, 11, 92, 103, 168 conservative view of 1–3, 41, 163
punctual 4, 19, 32, 57 negative critique of 116
liberal rights 5, 66, 141–62 philosophical predicament
critiques of 11, 123–4, 155, 162 of 35–6
liberalism 2–3, 43, 115, 157 resistance to 16, 17, 23, 25,
free-market 3, 20, 170 n6 35–6, 40, 43, 45–6
political 17, 19 synecdochic figures of 25, 38
Liddell, Anthony 85–6 moral imagination 8, 16, 35
“life-renters” 8, 18, 35, 75, 91, 111, communal 164
177 n22 intergenerational 4, 60
Linebaugh, Peter 5, 7, 98, 139, More, Hannah 134, 187 n7,
191 n68 189 n36
Linnaeus, Carl 65, 68, 72, 179 n3 Morland, George 122, 191 n62
Locke, John 158, 160 Morton, Timothy 55, 101, 134,
London 102–4, 127 150, 156, 164, 167
Loudon, J. C. 121 Muller, Jerry Z. 32
Index 217
nationalism 3, 28, 30, 53 Paine, Thomas 2, 8, 24, 35, 45, 82

Nattrass, Leonora 115, 116, 136 Agrarian Justice 87
natural history 1, 9, 65–90, 100–1, argument for rights of the
163, 166 living 17–20, 38, 155, 171 n23
taxonomy 65–6 political liberalism 17, 19, 170 n6
Nevil, George, Archbishop of Rights of Man 19, 87
York 80 see also Burke-Paine debate
Newcastle 9, 67, 73, 74, 75 paper money 11, 121, 126, 138
communal rural life in 72 “depotism” 19, 22
particularized environments in or Paris 29–30
around 66 pastoral 43, 52, 60, 152, 180 n11
rebellious culture of 87 Pepper, David 164
see also Tyne Perkins, David 142, 149, 193 n20
Newcastle Moor 84 Pfau, Thomas 2, 35, 60, 164
Newcastle Philosophical Society 84 Philosophical Club of Newcastle 66
Nixon, Rob 10, 94, 164–5, 167 picturesque 67, 88, 90, 122,
Northumberland 65, 69 180 n11
see also Newcastle Pocock, J. G. A. 17, 21–2
nostalgia 47, 55, 69, 72, 79, 84, Poor Laws 124, 147
86, 88, 90, 115, 122, 142, 156, potato
181 n17 debates 132
escapist 41 diet 106, 126, 128, 130–3, 135,
middle-class 149 190 n55
place-based 9, 67, 75 Pratt, Mary Louise 65, 74–5, 96
reflective 6 Price, Richard 20
restorative 77, 78 privatization 1, 7, 10, 15, 50, 53,
81, 89, 148
obligations 5, 17, 18, 38, 81, championing neglect resists the
119, 139 logic of 12, 160
epitaphic 60 consequences of 52–3, 148
fixed, traditional community of 4 opposition to 5, 7, 12, 85, 144
freedom from 19, 24 predatory 11
gifts with 26 rapidity of 1, 15, 84, 139, 156
moral 6, 19 property rights 82, 99, 121, 138
Oerlemans, Onno 142, 145, 176 absolute 10, 83, 85, 90, 117, 119
n11, 193 n14 prosopopoeia 144, 146, 150,
O’Gorman, Frank 27, 31 193 n11
organic
community 26, 38, 41, 52, 58, Quinton, Anthony 16, 32, 172 n2
123, 142, 146, 149
embeddedness 92, 110 Radcliffe, Ann 106
intellectual 117 rationality 16, 138, 155, 157,
system 28, 66, 115, 140, 195 n43
152, 159 Benthamite 38
organicism 16, 26–36, 60, 137, economic 23
158, 164, 167 means/end 164
218 Index
Ravaisson, Félix 28–9, 57 Simons, John 145

reciprocal vision 74–5, 96 Simpson, David 59, 68, 144,
reciprocity 3, 16, 35, 83, 88, 90, 180 n13
115, 131, 166, 182 n50 Smith, Adam 23, 172 n17
customary 5, 95, 97, 98, 100, Smith, Olivia 115, 125
107–8 Snell, K. D. M. 41–2, 53, 92,
economy of 86, 120, 130 183 n2
environmental 5, 7, 10, 16, 31, slow violence 10, 94, 108,
35, 60–1, 86, 94 164–6, 168
epitaphic 42 social ecology 1, 3, 4, 7, 16, 27–9,
gentry-crowd 10, 84, 94, 96, 107 31, 35, 59, 101, 113, 119,
intergenerational 97 138–9, 142, 163, 170 n7
models of 60, 70, 83 dangerous 10, 94
moral 119, 130 epitaphic 39, 41–2, 50–1, 55
narrative 10, 94–7 intergenerational 7, 119,
site of contest for 92, 110 122, 145
symbolic 132, 136 regional 7, 104, 110, 165
regional novel 91–2, 183 n2 second nature and habit 31, 62,
regionalism 4, 42–3, 163, 171 n14, 122–3
177 n22 social mobility 7, 41, 43, 44,
critical 30, 92, 93, 96 48, 110
reflexive 10, 91–111 inheritance counteracts 17
Revolution Society 20 represented as kind of premature
Rigby, Kate 38, 43 death 46
rights 18, 24, 124, 132, 151, younger generation influenced
161, 164 by 60
abstract theories of 30, 194 n40 Spence, Thomas 66, 84, 87–8, 119,
animal 82, 142, 169 n3 171 n14
grazing 7, 138, 185 n25 Spenser, Edmund 96, 107
lost 53 Spiegel, Marjorie 149
negative conception of 5, 17 stability 11, 24, 25, 36, 39,
women’s 142 94, 129
see also common rights; environmental 28, 33, 122,
customary rights; individual 177 n22
rights; liberal rights; property intergenerational 94, 115, 142
rights; Paine, Rights of Man Stewart, Susan 67, 78–9, 175–6 n9
Ritvo, Harriet 69, 70, 189 n17 sublime 23, 173 n15
Roe, Nicholas 44, 188 n25 subjectivity 4, 28, 33, 55, 138
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 154 autonomous 11, 143, 154
communal 21, 49, 116
Schopenhauer, Arthur 157, liberal 143, 157, 173 n17
195 n49 subsistence practices 11, 53, 54,
Schor, Esther 21, 24, 51 61, 83, 113–40, 147, 168,
Schulz, Max F. 71 178 n34
Scruton, Roger 28, 174 n28 sugar 133–4
Secord, Anne 74 blood-sugar topos 134
Index 219
Taylor, Charles 4, 19 Wordsworth, William 5, 6, 8, 25,

tea 135–7 91, 110, 115, 122, 125, 136–7,
argument for consumption of beer 156, 166
rather than 136 epitaphic poetry 3–4, 37–62, 89
replacement of beer with 11, Essays upon Epitaphs 9, 39, 41,
126, 131–2, 133–4 45, 48–9, 50
represented as schooling for a life Guide Through the District of the
of prostitution 134 Lakes 177 n22, 178 n34
Thomas, Keith 1, 149 Lyrical Ballads 41, 42, 51, 60,
Thompson, E. P. 5, 10, 27, 67, 83, 62, 80; “The Brothers” 43–4,
94, 116, 130, 139, 163, 190 n52 46–8, 49–50, 52; “The Female
tradition 3–4, 7, 24, 35, 43, 54, Vagrant” 39, 44, 52–5, 56,
71, 79, 93, 162, 167, 172 n7, 58; “Goody Blake” 56; “Hart-
173 n21 Leap Well” 40; “The Last of
and community 20, 26, 31, 84 the Flock” 40; “Last Stage
history encoded in 16, 23, 25 of Avarice” see “The Two
slow progress with 11, 17, 25, 142 Thieves”; “Lines Left Upon
see also conservatism; customary a Seat in a Yew Tree” 40;
rights “The Mad Mother” 39;
Trumpener, Katie 108 “Michael” 39, 44, 59–62,
Tull, Jethro 114 98; “The Old Cumberland
Tyne, River 9, 69, 71, 74, 79, 84, Beggar” 44, 52, 55–9, 97; “Old
89, 179–80 n5 Man Travelling” 39; “Simon
impact on salmon Lee, the Old Huntsman” 39,
population 100 56; “The Thorn” 40, 50;
“To a Sexton” 51; “The Two
Uglow, Jennifer 74, 77, 180 n9, Thieves” 9, 70–1, 72; “We are
182 n28, 183 n51 Seven” 8–9, 37–40, 44–6, 48,
upper classes 52, 55, 56
contagion of luxury from 133 workhouses 58–9, 143, 147–8, 151,
reciprocity between lower 170 n6
and 97, 131 working class 46, 144, 145
animalization of 149–50
Walton, Isaac 146 food politics 116, 118, 120,
Whale, John 24, 115, 116, 129 124–6, 129–30, 133, 135–6,
White, Gilbert 71, 100, 122 190 n52
Wilberforce, William 126, 132 Worster, Donald 122
Williams, Raymond 6, 9, 15, 42,
52, 160, 163–4 Young, Arthur 96, 120
Winchester (William of Wykham), Yousef, Nancy 154
Bishop of 119
Wohlgemut, Esther 109 Žižek, Slavoj 168, 196 n13

Katey Castellano (Auth.) - The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837 (2013, Palgrave Macmillan UK)

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Katey Castellano (Auth.) - The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837 (2013, Palgrave Macmillan UK)

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Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Introduction: Conservatism and the Intergenerational

3.1 “The Newcastle Arms on a Boundary Stone,”

Many people and institutions have provided assistance and encour-

to their assistance and kind permission. Research materials were also

Portions of the material in the introduction and first and second

A Edgeworth, The Absentee

An astute reader of Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt recognized that

The argument that Romantic conservatism and environmental con-

activities in England or as a forerunner to today’s free-market neo-

responsibility and continuity in land use. The second part of the

If modernity and the rise of capitalism are characterized by a pro-

an intergenerational communitas between the living, the dead, and

that in the eighteenth century, ecological sensibility was located in the

the Burkean humility of a “life-renter” within the continuity of many

The girl’s stubborn devotion finally articulates a rage against the

human culture in its habitus, as in Bourdieu’s sense, an “embod-

dimension of these novels articulates nascent ecological concerns

being appropriated into property (land, trees, animals, the poor).

Although many scholars have discussed Edmund Burke’s counter-

that Burke’s “principle of conservation” amounts to a resistance to

Traditionalism and the intergenerational imagination

Scholars of Burke’s work agree that Burke’s conservatism espouses

of social hierarchy, yet Burke’s Reflections also clearly argues for a

and industrial revolutions; he fears that the evolution of a capital-

Although the full environmental implications of these opposing

a place of warning, not of mourning,” Esther Schor observes.9 Indeed

By this means [the seizure of lands by the Revolutionaries] the spirit

The seizure of Church property puts liberal autonomy into practice

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers,

that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and dis-

Burke’s admonition that we should always act “as if in the presence

forefront relationships with the dead (indeed, the era is defined in

Burke’s principle of conservation advocates for choice in deciding

also be flexible to localities and times, as long as decisions are

that erases differences between local, organic communities and the

“Formed by habit”: Burkean organicism and second

“which takes a society to be a unitary, natural growth, an organized,

inseparable. Beyond reinforcing the status quo, every generation’s

Hazlitt points out that although Burke’s work is considered a defense

words, conservatives fear the unintended, unanticipated, latent con-

Conservatives generally insist that different social arrangements are

In an age of optimism about progress, such a stance actively opposes

In the old divisions of the country various accidents at various

new pavement of square within square, and this organization

Cautioning against the unintended consequences of abrupt changes

contradicts his characterization of the poor as a “swinish multitude,”

sort of palates” (R 165). Ideally, England’s organic society will resist

With them [the Revolutionaries] it is a sufficient motive to destroy

This is a cogent description of a progressive disposition: to destroy

of a habitation,” but “No one generation could link with the

of modernity,” which is “the ontological indeterminacy of the mod-

Like many of Wordsworth’s poems in the Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800),

impoverished, as a “disenchantment of the world,” to borrow a phrase

As in these registers the name is mostly associated with others

The girl’s attachment to her dead siblings is a model of “prolonged

that refer to an object associated with the character discussed in the

and environmental collapse, in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth

this seems to indicate a greater rootedness in locality than underlay

and meaningful attachment to place was being chipped into