The Forest and the City: Savagery and Civility in the British Atlantic World

Abstract

In his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791), William Gilpin presents a model of history depicting the as humankind's first home: That was originally a forest-animal appears from every page of his early history. Trace the first accounts of any people, and you will find them the inhabitants of woods; if woods be found the countries which they lived (1.271). And yet, if human societies originally rooted the woodlands, the course of development they had not only forsaken those roots but actively destroyed them, as populations increased, man began to find [the forest] his way. In one part, it occupied grounds fit his plough; another, the pasturage of his domestic cattle; and parts, it afforded shelter his enemies. He soon shewed the beasts, they only tenants at will. He began amain lay about him with his axe. The groaned. The fable was realized: begged of the a handle his hatchet; and when he had obtained the boon, he used it felling the whole (Gilpin 1.285-6). Under such circumstances, deforestation had already reached epidemical proportions England by the mid 17th century, the extent that forester John Evelyn, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees (1664), called the enactment of civic legislation for the preservation of our Woods (108). As Evelyn noted, the preservation of wooded spaces was crucial the future of English it was from the forests that ships England's naval security and commercial prosperity built. And yet, such preservation could also be dangerous for, return Gilpin, the often sought shelter among the trees. The association of such enemies with wooded environments is implicit their identification as savages. Derived from the Latin silvaticus, or woodland, literally means forest person (Rigby 215; Forbes 106), white the term civilization, derived from civitas, means city (Volney 388). Dwelling the forest--a word springing from the Latin foris, signifying outside (Rigby 215)--the woodland savage is thus the quintessential the civilian. Indeed, as C.F. Volney remarks, many of the earliest cities nothing other than garrisons enclosed by walls to protect [civilians] from plunderers without (388). During the Romantic period, the peasants inhabiting British forests often regarded as impediments the civilization of an urbanizing agrarian nation (Harrison 104-9). For if, as William Marshall argued 1801, unimproved common lands appeared in the present state of civilization and science, as filthy blotches on the face of the country (12), the inhabitants of such lands also deeply offensive the civilized gaze. Consider, example, a remark J. Howlett offered Enclosures (1787): Seldom have I passed over an extensive waste, but I have been shocked with the sight of a proportionable number of half-naked, half-starved women and children, with pale meagre faces, peeping out of their miserable huts, or lazing and lounging about after a few paltry screaming geese, or scabby worthless sheep ... (80). Worse than the offensive sight of uncouth people was the danger they ostensibly posed civilized notions of law and order. A century earlier John Evelyn had noted, example, that forest-dwellers were not generally so civil, and reasonable, as might be wished; and therefore design a solid Improvement such places, his Majesty must assert his power, with a firme and high Resolution Reduce these men their due Obedience, and a necessity of submitting their own, and the publick utility (112-13). Associating the promotion of domestic civility with related processes of social and geographic improvement, Evelyn preached a secular gospel of internal colonialism that anticipated the modernizing discourses of Romantic-era theorists like William Marshall, who also argued that some degree of compulsion appears be necessary when dealing with the inhabitants of England's unenclosed common lands (15). …