The Country House

Abstract

From its first appearance in England in early seventeenth-century poetry, the country house has been used as a locus amoenus (or delightful place), as an emblem of the owner of the estate and as a microcosm of an imagined perfect world. The orderliness of architecture and of the household act as a model for the world beyond them. This pattern was set by Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and continued in numerous country house and estate poems throughout the seventeenth century. The country house — explicitly separated from court and city — characteristically insists on ‘use’, a term which implies a sense of structured community and established moral values: the house and its estate becomes a means of asserting a set of ‘civilized’ values, but values threatened by, or absent from, the modern world. For Jonson, Penshurst was to be distinguished from the prodigy houses he saw springing up in the country early in the seventeenth century; a century later Alexander Pope could still offer the ideals inherent in the architecture of Lord Burlington as something notably absent in those around him.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyFair TreeCountry HouseSecondary ReadingMouth Wide OpenThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.