DOI: 10.1111/nana.

12585

BOOK REVIEWS

Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of

English National Identity
Paul Readman

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 335 pp. £24.99 (hbk)

Paul Readman has already, in Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, national identity, and the politics of land, 1880–
1914 (2008), given us one valuable account of the relation of land to national identity in England. He now broadens
his investigation to cover a longer period, the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, and a wider range of cases cov-
ering the whole country. He selects six landscapes: the “White Cliffs” of Dover, “the Northumbrian Borderland,” the
Lake District, the New Forest, Manchester, and the Thames. Together, these are meant to show not just the impor-
tance of landscape to national identity, in a period in which nationalism was gathering force throughout Europe, but
the variety and types of landscapes that went into the making of English national identity.
Landscape—broadly interpreted—has nearly always been seen as important, if not central, to national identity: the
Swiss Alps, the Rhine in Germany, and the mountains and lakes of Italy. Equally significant has been the fact of the
changing character of the landscape that is supposed to constitute the “essence” of national identity. Thus, it has
been argued, by Alun Howkins among others, that in England, the Romantic celebration of wilderness and ruggedness
characteristic of the north of England gave way, as the nineteenth century progressed, to a stress on the soft and
gentle landscape of the “south country,” the hills and valleys of Kent, Sussex, Wiltshire, and the Cotswolds, and points
west. These, it is said, rather than the north, now scarred by industrialism, came to represent the true and to an
extent timeless England.
Readman contests this as he does many other received ideas about landscape and national identity. He shows, for
instance, the persisting importance of the Lake District, first discovered in the eighteenth century as a “picturesque”
landscape but transformed in the nineteenth century, above all through the writings of Wordsworth, as a region with
a whole way of life under threat from the encroachments of urbanism and commercialism. It was the Lake District
that gave rise to the preservation movement in England, but preservation understood not just as the protection of
past ways of life but as preserving a resource that could be enjoyed by all classes, not least the urban working class
in need of rest and recreation. It was as a national asset—what Wordsworth called “a sort of national property”—that
that the Lake District was defended in the late nineteenth century against developers and others who sought to
exploit its natural beauty for commercial purposes.
Readman similarly shows the importance of the even more rugged, not to say bleak, borderland of Northumbria as
a key component of national identity. Here, however, the stress is on Britishness—what Readman, following Walter
Scott, calls “unionist nationalism”—rather than Englishness. He illustrates this well through the example of Flodden
Field, site of the famous victory of the English over the Scots in 1513. In the nineteenth century, Flodden Field
was physically as well as culturally transformed to make it an emblem of the union of the Scots and English. From
signifying English‐Scottish enmity, it came to stand for amity and “British national progress.” Readman argues that

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© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019

Nations and Nationalism. 2020;26:283–292. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nana 283

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Northumbria also figured specifically in the English, not just British, imaginary, but here as elsewhere, the move from
one to the other is ambiguous and not clearly specified.
Not just the North in general, but the industrial north in particular, argues Readman, contributed its share to
English national identity. One of his best chapters is on Manchester, the “shock city” of the nineteenth century. It
has been commonplace to argue that Manchester came to stand for all the was ugly and disfiguring about the indus-
trialism that was transforming English society, one reason, therefore, for the reversion to the south as the heart of
Englishness. Readman does not deny that this was partly true. But he makes a good case for showing that for many
writers and painters, Manchester was a cause for celebration, its magnificent civic buildings such as the Free Trade
Hall, the new Town Hall, the John Rylands Library, and even the palatial warehouses, the subjects of much enthusi-
asm and a considerable draw for tourism. The urban landscape, Readman insists against many contrary views, was as
important in the creating of English national identity as the rural landscape that dominates so many accounts. His
case might have been stronger had he included a consideration of London, a conspicuous absence among his cases;
but undoubtedly, he is right in stressing that there were many positive accounts of the city among English writers and
artists of the nineteenth century—though perhaps more at the beginning than at the end. Any account of English
national identity needs to acknowledge this, once more underlining Readman's stress on the heterogeneity of the ele-
ments that go to make up that identity.
With the move to the south, we are in more familiar territory; but even here, there are fresh insights. Thus, in the
chapter on the White Cliffs of Dover, Readman makes the point that for many commentators, what marked the cliffs
as symbolically significant was not so much their connection to the sea and England's overseas enterprises but more
that they stood for England's defiance and defence against all foreigners, from Caesar's legions to Napoleon's ships. It
was England as an insular, not an imperial, nation that the white cliffs signified. Readman generally argues against the
view of those of us who see empire as central to English national identity. England's landscape—rural and urban—was
interpreted more in terms of “island history” than of imperial history, despite England's centuries‐long involvement
with empire. This was as true of the Thames as of the white cliffs of Dover. By the end of the nineteenth century,
it was the pastoral upper Thames, rather than the busy commercial lower Thames—the object of earlier commentary,
which linked it to England's empire and the wider world—that came to represent England and Englishness (though
this example at least tells against the effort to overturn the more common “ruralist” view of English national identity).
William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) idealizes that part of the Thames, culminating in the utopian depiction of
Morris's own home, Kelmscott Manor, on the upper Thames, vividly exemplifies that turn to the interior, and to an
island past.
There is, it is clear, much that is fresh and challenging in this book. Many of us will need to re‐think our views of
English national identity, or at the very least to incorporate the insights in this very well‐written and highly readable
account. Even if we disagree with some of the general points, the richness of the individual chapters, based on deep
scholarship and laced with copious quotations from the sources, provide ample food for enjoyment and
contemplation.

Krishan Kumar
University of Virginia, USA