Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 233

Rachel Crawford asserts in the opening sentence of her monograph that ‘containment is not the first thing to come to mind when reading histories of Great Britain’s eighteenth century’ (p.3). Yet, by the time the reader concludes Crawford’s richly-researched book, she will agree that the idea of containment is essential to understanding landscape architecture, horticultural science, poetic forms, and the very concept of Englishness itself as these each developed during 130-year scope of the book. Crawford’s variegated and erudite exposition forces readers to question many other critical and historical truisms about the forms and aims of writing about the land in the long eighteenth century. Crawford demonstrates that the central concepts of expansion and contraction, when applied to writing about landscape, are not mutually exclusive but exist in a fluid dialectic within an historical trajectory that is much less disjunctive, and thus much more resistant to easy developmental schemas, than previous historians and literary critics have acknowledged.

Knitting numerous heterogeneous sources, from primary texts such as Ralph Austen’s A treatise on fruit-trees (1653) to modern works of critical theory such as Susan Stewart’s On longing (1993), Crawford relies upon a seemingly limitless set of texts to argue for the importance of the bounded and limited space in discussions of national identity in the period. Weaving so many skeins of discussion together, Crawford’s book resists easy summary, though it is organized overall into tripartite structures, presented chronologically and developmentally. Each of the three main sections contains three chapters, and several individual chapters focus on three specific examples or moments. Fundamental to the book’s argument is the premise of what Crawford labels ‘isomeric relations of words and space’ (p.5), evident in how writers, whether of agricultural treatises or of georgic poetry, borrow from one another, demonstrating ‘how representational conceptions of space intersect with representational forms in literature’ (p.9). Crawford gracefully negotiates the linguistic and ideological cross-pollination among horticultural studies and sonnet collections, garden design guides and popular periodical essays. Her serpentine argument demands concentration, but the abundance of sources allows her to break down unproductive boundaries among academic disciplines. The resulting study is an original and important revisionary history of the eighteenth-century landscape and its representations.

The book opens with an overview of the history of parks and of enclosure in the eighteenth century, and the second chapter is especially valuable for its nuanced account of parliamentary enclosure. Crawford refuses the mystifications of previous accounts (such as that of J.M. Neeson), seeing these as perpetuating an over-simplified notion of the ideality of the open-field system. By exposing how the forces of nostalgia blur modern critical understanding of the significance of enclosure, the book illustrates that

reading in and about agricultural tracts and materials drains parliamentary enclosure of its spectacular effect and provides us with a glimpse of the disparity between historical circumstance and symbolic representation. It becomes clear that the symbolic power of enclosure far exceeds either its positive effects for agriculture or its negative effects on the poor or landscape (p.54).

Chapter 3 then traces three moments illustrating the mounting importance of the concept of containment through the gardening treatises of Switzer (1715), Whateley (1770), and Repton (1808). Relying upon these exemplary texts, Crawford underscores the claim of the previous chapter, that it was increasingly the enclosed landscape that was perceived as authentically English.

The second part of the book examines the literary mode most commonly associated with eighteenth-century discourse about the land: the georgic. After summarizing the rise and fall of the georgic as genre, connecting its fate to historical and cultural developments from the Act of Union to the increased popularity of scientific prose to the impact of the loss of the American colonies, Crawford examines John Philips’s Cyder in Chapter 5 and Richard Jago’s Edge-Hill in Chapter 6. For the literary critic, in particular, these chapters offer fascinating explorations demonstrating that there is more to georgic poetry than tedious didacticism. Crawford’s reading of Cyder, often pinpointed as the first major English georgic of the eighteenth century, focuses on how the apple was appropriated by both poetry and agricultural treatises to the status of the fruit of true Englishness. Her ambitious reading of Edge-Hill, often considered as the last major English georgic, focuses on Jago’s techniques of ekphrasis and metaphrasis 234 the agricultural as instrumental in moving the georgic scene from a wide view of the landscape to ‘the small, well-delineated quarters of the industrial shop and from the unbounded prospects of gentry to the ingenuity of tradesmen’ (p.142).

By the end of the century, the unbounded vistas of aristocratic parks and the capacious form of the georgic were replaced by interest in the aesthetic and ideological possibilities of both kitchen gardens and sonnets or minor odes. The study closes with chapters devoted to kitchen garden manuals and minor poems on the subject of garden bowers by Keats, Coleridge, and Hemans. The final chapters illustrate Crawford’s overall contention that the early eighteenth-century emphasis on ‘the boundless view put into play a dialectic between containment and unrestrained space that ultimately provided containment with new symbolic possibilities . . . containment could be visualized anew as the means by which England could be made the Garden of the World’ (p.253).

By grafting sources from literature, horticulture, agronomy and aesthetics (to name only a few), Crawford produces a hybrid scholarly work. Yet, as is the case with many hybrids, Crawford’s argument yields surprising and productive conclusions. By liberally mixing resources currently constrained within separate academic disciplines, Crawford’s work will open up vaster fields of knowledge for readers, challenging the assumptions of literary history with those of agricultural history and vice versa.