English Country House Research Articles

Review: The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England by J. T. Cliffe; Creating Paradise. The Building of the English Country House 1660-1880 by Richard Wilson, Alan Mackley; Whitehall Palace. An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240-1698 by Simon Thurley, Alan Cook, David Gaimster, Beverley Nenk, Mark Samuel; Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome.

Review: The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England by J. T. Cliffe; Creating Paradise. The Building of the English Country House 1660-1880 by Richard Wilson, Alan Mackley; Whitehall Palace. An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240-1698 by Simon Thurley, Alan Cook, David Gaimster, Beverley Nenk, Mark Samuel; Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome.

The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745 by Bruce McLeod

69 imagination that ‘‘is not opposed or subsequent to truth, but synonymous with its vigorous pursuit.’’Akensidesuggeststhat a ‘‘prospect’’ one views with pleasure may lie within oneself—‘‘within your cheerful breast.’’This implied correspondence between subject and object is divinely providential. For Mr. Vallins, ‘‘probably the most striking affinity’’ between Akenside and Coleridge ‘‘is their paradoxical combination of the highest pleasure of ‘delight’ with an ideal of laborious evolutionary self-purification.’’In this well-written essay , it is argued that Akenside may have influenced the Romantics more than German Naturphilosophie: ‘‘Akenside’s suggestion that the clue to our identification with nature . . . is so strikinglysimilar to Coleridge’s and Schelling’s theories that one is . . . forced to point out the unoriginality of many of the ideas for which Schelling is well-known [sic].’’ Mr. Vallins’s point about Schelling needs further study. In the most interesting essay Mandy Green shows that Akenside’s odd poem, ‘‘Hymn to the Naiads,’’is modeled on the Greek hymns of Callimachus (this validates Joseph Warton’s remark that Akenside among his contemporaries was ‘‘the best Greek scholar since Milton’’). This poem more than any other sets Akenside apart from the Wartons and other poets of the ‘‘new sensibility’’because of its concern for public affairs; it reveals, in Ms. Green’s view, Akenside’s desireto be seen as an essential commentator on national affairs. Like ‘‘Windsor Forest,’’ this poem focuses symbolically on the vitality of the Thames, a locus amoenus for Akenside’s concerns. Akensidehastransferred the rural deities of classicalGreece to the English river to signify ‘‘thewholesale transfer of power from the ancient world to contemporary Britain.’’ Britain is‘‘heir toGreekpoliticalfreedom,whereas Rome is the fate and inevitable ruin of greatness.’’ Beyond this social commentary , Akenside ‘‘is clearly concerned to lay his claim to his right, as a poet, in presuming to speak on ‘themes / Not unregarded of coelestial powers.’’’ Four other essays have narrower concerns : Robin Dix discusses the precocity of the 1737 poems; Richard Terry recounts Akenside’s involvement in a debate over the moral value of ridicule;Harriett Jump examinesthepoet’sadmiration for Bishop Hoadly (expressed in an ode); and John Constable analyzes the differences in prosody between the two versions of the poem on the powers of the imagination. The final impressions from this collection are Akenside’s distinctive contributions to mid-century poetry and a new admiration for his complex intellect and his personal commitment to his craft. Henry L. Fulton Central Michigan University BRUCE MCLEOD. The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580– 1745. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1999. Pp. xii ⫹ 284. $65. The subject of The Geography of Empire is organization of space in early modern British culture. Mr. McLeod analyzes Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Faerie Queene to lay out the paradigm of British colonialism: to ‘‘plot’’(as map and story) the land and thereby control the native population. The colonial project is driven by emerging capitalism’s expansionist need for new markets and resources, and the two dangers it faces are absorption into the 70 native population and individual greed displacing collective, national economic goals. Spenser directly argues this policy in his View and reasserts it in Faerie Queene ‘‘through episodes of negotiating a plainly anarchic geography’’and transforms it into a ‘‘capitalist spatial order.’’ This spatial order finds expression also in the English country house—and its poem—as well as in actual colonies such as Plymouth Plantation. The ‘‘country house ethos,’’‘‘the romanticization of the country house as a place of uncorrupted community,’’ Mr. McLeod shows, ‘‘is part of an imperial ethos imposed by the garrison governments . . . throughout the British realm.’’ Mr. McLeod argues that Milton, Behn, and Mary Rowlandson (1635–1711) all express the ‘‘necessity to organize, survey and, ultimately, police the domains of empire’’against ‘‘the danger of bodies merging or fusing with the wildness,’’ where ‘‘women pose a threat in some ways worse than that of the Indian or Irish, since they are an internal foe who can ruin the reproduction of civilization.’’ Rowlandson’s narrative, for example, ‘‘serves as a plumb line measuring the depths of Indian depravity’’ in which the ‘‘wandering female’’ signifies the threat to...

Creating paradise: the building of the English country house, 1660-1880

Creating paradise: the building of the English country house, 1660-1880

Architectural heritage of the Caribbean: an A-Z of historic buildings

Better known for its sand and sea, the Caribbean is also home to a wealth of historic buildings. As a region colonised by Spanish, French, British and Dutch settlers, its architecture reflects an unparalleled variety of colonial influences. Its buildings are also testimony to a history of slavery and constant immigration, revealing the legacy of African, Asian and African styles and techniques. The wealth of the islands' sugar plantations has left behind a tradition of great while inter-European conflict can still be traced to many well-preserved forts and naval bases. Spanish cathedrals and convents, Dutch gabled warehouses, English country houses and French ironwork market buildings: all these have survived the perils of earthquakes and hurricanes. Featuring over one thousand architectural sites across the region, this comprehensive guide describes churches, plantation houses, fortresses and ordinary homes. With a useful glossary of architectural terms and advice on what to look out for, it covers notable and interesting buildings in every island from the Bahamas down to Trinidad.

The Familiar past?: archaeologies of later historical Britain

Contents. Lists of figures. Contributors. 1.Introduction, Susie West The Familiar Past. 2.The Processional City: Some Issue For Historical Archaeology, Roger Leech 3. The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England Circa 1650-1750, Sara Pennell 4. Building Jerusalem: Transfer-Printed Finewares and the Creation of British Identity, Alasdair Brooks Familiar Spaces 5.Reconstructing Castles and Refashioning Identities in Renaissance England, Matthew Johnson 6. The Familiar Fraternity: The Appropriation and Consumption of Medieval Guildhalls in early Modern York, Kate Giles 7. Social Space and the English Country House, Susie West Breeding Contempt 8. The Archaeology of the Workhouse: The Changing Uses of the Workhouse Buildings at St Mary's, Southampton, Gavin Lucas 9. Planning, Development and Social Archaeology, Shane Gould 10. Familiarity and Contempt: The Archaeology of the 'Modern', Keith Matthews Familar Spirits 11. Wormis Clay and Blessed Sleep: Death and Disgust in Later Historic Britain, Sarah Tarlow 12. 'The Men That worked for England They Have Their Graves at Home': Consumerist Issues Within the Production and Purchase of Gravestones in Victorian York, Susan Buckham 13. Welsh Cultural Identity in Nineteenth Century Pembrokeshire: The Pedimented Headstone as a Graveyard Monument, Harold Mytum Old Familiar Places 14.Bolldy Meadows: The Places of Battle, John Carman 15. The Archaeological Study of Post-Medieval Gardens: Practice and Theory, Tom Williamson Afterwords Across the Atlantic 16. Strangely Familiar, Sarah Tarlow 17.Negotiating our 'Familiar Pasts', Charles E. Orser. Jr Index.

How much did the English country house cost to build, 1660‐1880?

How much did the English country house cost to build, 1660‐1880?

Metiendo Vivendum: ‘By Measure We Must Live’

Convinced that his father's work was arranged around an underlying structure, Robert Lutyens, in 1944, posed the challenge that ‘…someone will someday discover my father's system of applied geometry’. Drawing on an analysis of the ground floor plans of 40 English country houses designed by Edwin Lutyens between 1889 and 1913, this paper considers Robert Lutyens's ‘Armature of Planes’, a theory which he closely associated with the development of his father's work. The analysis reveals Edwin Lutyens's consistent use of ratios to structure his work.

Space, Genre, and Methodology in Max Stafford-Clark's Touring Production of Chekhov's ‘Three Sisters’

It is received theatrical wisdom – indeed, a self-evident truth – that performances of a particular production differ not only night by night, depending on the chemistry between actors and audience, but in the case of touring productions, in response to the changing relationship between the driector's approach and the venue for which it must be freshly adapted. Yet studies of the theoretical or practical effects of such differences are rare – and can rarely draw on such a range of performing venues as those in which the Out of Joint company presented Max Stafford-Clark's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1995. Originally staged at the ornate, tradition-steeped Bristol Old Vic, the production was taken on tour to modernist, hangar-like auditoria in India, and presented in the unusual yet apt ‘found’ environment of an English country house, before reaching its final home at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with its renovated Victorian interior surrounded by a modernist shell. Exploring the terminology used by lain Mackintosh in his Architecture, Actor, and Audience, Sylvia Vickers compares and contrasts the conception, realization, and reception of the production in these varying venues. Sylvia Vickers worked as an actress in a wide range of theatre before co-founding and creating the Brighton Actors' Workshop and Studio Twelve in the 'seventies. She then took a first in English at Sussex, and now teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute while continuing her work as a director, most recently for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

Nevill Holt: The Development of an English Country House

Nevill Holt Hall, in south-east Leicestershire, is an extensive and complex country house of many periods, which has received little detailed architectural study. This paper, based on a comprehensive analysis of the building fabric and documentary evidence, examines the development of the house from its origins in the late thirteenth century to the present day. A wide range of contributions from every century make up an extraordinary amalgam, reflecting the whole pattern of development of the English country house, and present an intriguing challenge to the archaeologist and architectural historian. Evidence from the timber roofs suggests that the unusual, great, elongated plan took shape at an early date. Ensuing generations continued to add to and adapt this underlying structure, but no single owner, it seems, had the breadth of vision, fixity of purpose or, perhaps more crucially, depth of pocket to impose order on this rambling and uncoordinated complex.

The archigenderic territories: mansfield park and a handful of dust

This article compares two novels, 120 years apart, which have at their centres the English country house with all its social and economic implications. It contrasts the treatment of the women and men who inhabit such houses and the ways in which they are controlled - or not a controlled – by the iconic “Country House-Man”. Both Hetton and Mansfield are highly successful representations of gendered space, belonging inescapably to the periods in which they were written, but superimposing the two works adds depth to the reader's understanding of both.

Charleston Kedding: a history of kitchen gardening

Charleston Kedding is an imaginary English country house through whose history the story of kitchen gardening is told. The guided tour takes in the glasshouses where pineapples once thrived, to the compost yard, frameyard, apple store and mushroom house.

A Green Velvety Carpet: The Front Lawn in America

Domestic front lawns the United States didn't just happen. Lawns do not grow naturally. They are a learned aesthetic that has become popular during the past 120 years. European colonists did not find lawn or pasture grasses America. They brought them with them. Since then, particularly during the 20th century, there has been a radical change the ecological makeup of America with millions of acres of lawn grass creating a savannah from coast to coast.Front lawns are an American cultural artifact. Americans have been taught to desire and to care for lawns. Lawns are achieved at great expense and by continual labor. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have been developed to help homeowners achieve an ideal lawn. Millions of dollars are invested lawn mowing machinery and irrigation equipment every year. Scarce water resources are allocated to domestic and municipal lawns the Southwest. A multimillion-dollar lawn care industry has developed the United States, unlike any other country the world. To most Americans, grassy yards are so familiar, so common and so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine an alternative landscape without them and to realize that most people other countries do not have American-style front lawns.In the 18th century, Washington and Jefferson and a few other wealthy Americans emulated the landscape of English country estates. Nineteenth-century-American landscape architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted also modeled their work after English country house parks.Nineteenth-century suburban houses were furnished with front lawns emulation of upper-class park-like estates and the new municipal parks such as Central Park New York, Front lawns were semipublic spaces that belonged to the community. Suburban developments were designed with houses set back from the street in a park. Many 19th-century suburbs were named Park such as Tuxedo Park New York, and College Park, Takoma Park, Garrett Park and Cleveland Park outside of Washington, D.C.The invention and manufacture of the lawn mower and irrigation equipment growing availability of a public water supply and the importation of hybridization of appropriate grasses brought the cost of making and keeping a lawn within the reach of a growing middle class of homeowners. Products for the new lawns were promoted through advertising, mail-order catalogs, gardening books and magazine and newspaper articles on lawn keeping that educated many Americans the w landscape aesthetic. The lawn aesthetic was also promoted through the work of the ladies of the Garden Club of America and other similar organizations, City Beautiful campaigns and the combined efforts of the United States Golf Association and the United States Department of Agriculture.In the 1920s suburban developments were built around or modeled after golf courses. By World War II the pattern for suburban developments had become fixed. Developers surrounded tract houses with grass as the easiest and cheapest way to cover the scars of construction. The family that moved was left to cope with the care of the new lawn. Peer pressure kept homeowners at work on their lawns through neighborly rivalry and community regulation. These standards were reinforced by advertising and horticultural advice popular magazines.The lawn care industry used popular magazines to sell the idea of a lawn to middle-class Americans. As new products became available for lawn care, the standards for a good lawn tended to rise. Advertisers promoted these standards order to sell more lawn care products. Lawns were marketed to homeowners terms of status and prestige. They were promoted as a good investment that would, perhaps, increase the real estate value of the home. Magazine readers were told that a good lawn represented good citizenship transient communities which residents were judged on the appearance of the home from the street. …

Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827 (review)

396 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 of Berglund's book as the symbol of eighteenth-century female wish-fulfilment, does not constitute Austen's final word on the subject. Perhaps the largest problem with this work is its historical arbitrariness and cultural vacuity. The introductory survey of the position of middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth century certainly explains the interest of these writers in the social and psychological dimensions of domestic space, but it does not account for (or even recognize) a much longer, larger cultural interest. It is as if house imagery bloomed suddenly among these three women writers in response to new or sharply felt social conditions. The houserepresents -owner (or-ought-to) theme, of course, goes back through Palladio to Vitruvius, and its literary history is rich: elaborately treated in the works of Roman poets, revived in England with the country-house poems of Jonson, Donne, and Marvel, re-idealized by Pope, Fielding, Smollett, and Byron, and surfacing in many less obvious works from Defoe 's A Journal of the Plague Year to Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, the image of the house has been a standard fixture of English literature. Berglund's rather mechanical dichotomy between male and female experiences of confined space (for men "there is never any doubt ... that confinement is bad and liberty good. ...[PJersecution ... comes from outside their family circle," pp. 16, 102) pays no attention to the literary works of Defoe (and only briefly mentions Richardson), or to the critical work, among others, of W.B. Camochan and John Bender. Although Berglund cites Mark Girouard's indispensable Life in the English Country House, she makes no comparable use of his rich historical background to contextualize the apparently dramatic debuts of her chosen authors . Woman's Whole Existence follows the boundaries of gendered literary space; it does not push them. Cynthia Wall University of Virginia Gary Kelly. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ? + 328pp. £35.00. ISBN 0-19-812272-1. The political importance of women's writing, and particularly women's fiction, in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is now well established. Among the critics who have contributed over the past twenty years or so to our developing understanding of this literature, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey, Terry Lovell, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd, and Patricia Meyer Spacks spring immediately to mind. So does Gary Kelly. Alongside the work of these female and feminist commentators, Gary Kelly's studies of fiction in the Revolutionary period—The English Jacobin Novel (1976) and English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)—scrupulously map the interventions made by novels in political debate and ideological struggle. In doing so, they inevitably engage with the importance of women's writing; and in Kelly's recent book on Mary WoUstonecraft , Revolutionary Feminism (1992), and now in Women, Writing, and Revolution, that focus on the revolutionary role of women has become explicit. In the preface to Women, Writing, and Revolution Kelly presents his method of "historical enquiry" as having "much to offer" both to "women's literary studies" and to "Uterary and cultural studies in general" (p. vi). And he enlists strong feminist support for this unexceptionable position, quoting both Rita Felski and Laurie Finke on the importance of investigating the particular meanings of gender and feminism within specific cultural and REVIEWS 397 socio-economic formations. Thereafter, KeUy confines his engagement with current feminist analyses to footnote references and concentrates on offering the results of his own "historical enquiry." His study is divided into two equal sections: "Women and Writing in the Revolutionary Decade" focuses on the 1790s; "Women, Writing, and the Revolutionary Aftermath" deals with the remaining thirty years of his chosen period. Both sections follow exactly the same pattern: a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period is foUowed by chapters on the careers of three individual women—Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton. Through these case-studies of women who, in very different ways, "challenged discursive , generic, and stylistic orders that subordinated women and their writing" (p. vi...

The English Country House From The Archives Of Country Life 1897-1939

Offers a unique and vivid insight into what has become known as the golden age of the English country house.

Reviewing and Viewing: New Books, Etcetera

This book is one of a series by the distinguished painter John Goodall that traces the history of a particular locale over time. Here the story of a great English country house unfolds as readers follow its historical development from Tudor times to the present.

War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honor of Sir Michael Howard

War and the English in the reign of Henry VIII an English country house at war - Littlecote and the Pophams the continental commitment in the 18th century Cornwallis Triumphant - War in India and the British Public in the late 18th century parliamentary debate, economic vulnerability and British Naval expansion 1860-1905 Britain, Germany, and the Admiralty's plans for attacking German territory 1906-1915 Lord Kitchener and the Battle of Loos - French politics and British strategy in the summer of 1915 who knew what and when? The French Army mutinies and the British decision to launch the Third Battle of Ypres Hidden in the Rock - American military perceptions of Great Britain 1919-1940 Alanbrooke and Britain's Mediterranean strategy 1942-1944 being friends - the combined chiefs of staff and the making of allied strategy in the Second World War Britain and the Alliance grand strategies and less than grand strategies - a 20th-century critique continuity and change in Soviet strategic thought problems of command in limited warfare - thoughts from Korea and Vietnam strategic studies and the problem of power.

'A happy rural seat': Milton's Paradise Lost and the English country house poem

'A happy rural seat': Milton's Paradise Lost and the English country house poem A foundation essay on one kind of poetry from the seventeenth century begins with the statement that 'Through the poetry of the early seventeenth century there runs a thin but clearly defined tradition of poems in praise of the EngUsh country house and of the whole way of life of which the country house was the centre'. The essay is by G.R. Hibbard and is entided 'The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century'.1 Hibbard correctly identifies the country house as a physical reality that becomes a symbolic focus in poetry celebrating life on the country estate, though there is in his approach a certain literal-mindedness that unnecessarily delimits the area of his discussion. Just as somefinehouses are metonymically evoked as representing ethical and aesthetic values in the poems allowed by Hibbard as constituting the tradition, so too there are other poems that express very simdar concerns without concentrating on architecture. Perhaps it would be better to speak of the specific kind of poem Hibbard identifies as a discrete genre within a much wider tradition. There are many poems and passages in longer poems that share significandy in the characteristics of the English country house poem as identified by Hibbard without expressly evoking a Penshurst, a Saxham, a Wrest Park, or an Appleton House. One such additional instance, I shall argue, is Milton's account of Eden in Paradise Lost. The country house poem, in its strictest form, congratulates a family drawn from the rural aristocracy or landed gentry on its way of life. From the Sidneys of Jonson's 'To Penshurst' to the Fairfaxes of Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House', this famtiy of the poem is eulogized as being the last exemplar of right living in a corrupt world. Living well, in the sense of being well-off and enjoying creature comforts, the family and its dependents live the vita beata of the golden world; living well, in the sense of practising ethical values, this close-knit community embodies the vita bona. The happy life of the vita beata and the honest life of the vita bona have been identified respectively with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies.2 The blend of Stoic and Epicurean is 1 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956), 159-74. For further discussions since Hibbard, see Charles Molesworth, 'Property and Virtue: The Genre of the Country house Poem in the Seventeenth Century', Genre 1 (1968), 141-57; Mary Anne C. McGuire, 'The Cavalier Country-House Poem: Mutations on a Jonsonian Tradition', Studies in English Literature 19 (1979), 93-108; and William A. McClung's two books, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry, Berkeley, 1977, and The Architecture of Paradise, Berkeley, 1983. 2 The concepts of the vita bona and the vita beata as discussed in this context are enunciated by Earl Miner in The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, Princeton, 1971, pp. 43-99. 138 C. Wortham characteristic of Renaissance humanism, but it may be directiy attributed also to Horace, who is the prime classical source for the English country house poem. These Horatian values are invariably accommodated to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and so the golden world of classical mythology and the garden of Eden are seen to meet on this blessed estate. The term 'country house' evokes the house itself, but it subsumes, of course, the lawns and flower gardens, the vegetable gardens and orchards, and the surrounding demesne oftenantfarms. Politically, the country house poem is conservative. The litde world it celebrates is seen as the brave remnant of a feudal order that has passed away: significantly, the medieval custom of 'house-keeping' or hospitality is a central motif in this poetry.3 All who come to the great house—whether strangers from afar or tenants of the manor—are treated with equal courtesy and generosity. All are treated as equals at the generous board, for where hierarchy is unquestioningly acknowledged there is no need to insist upon rank. The very emergence of the country house poem as a genre in the early seventeenth century is an indication that the way...

Lulworth Castle from 1700

The owners of Lulworth Castle were Roman Catholic. That distinction from the mainstream of English culture gave Lulworth Castle a special character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Welds were, and remain, English landowners with their roots firmly in this country, but they were also part of a network which stretched across Europe. Rome had a double significance for cultivated English Catholics. On the one hand was the Augustan idyll perceived through patrician English eyes, which inspired the elegant refurbishment of so many English country houses in the eighteenth century, Lulworth included. On the other, Rome was the head and heart of a religion so alien to the eighteenth-century English establishment that its devotees paid for their loyalty financially, socially and politically.

Supply and Demand in English Country House Building 1660 1740

This is the text of a paper delivered at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in Sheffield in April 1988. It is Published, in spite of numerous imperfections, in order to stimulate discussion about the methodology of studying country houses and to demonstrate the need for more intensive examination of country house building at county level.

Review: The English Country House: A Grand Tour by Gervase Jackson-Stops, James Pipkin

Review: The English Country House: A Grand Tour by Gervase Jackson-Stops, James Pipkin