The Rural Idyll

Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1989, recounts the changing perceptions of the countryside throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, helping us to understand more fully the issues that have influenced our view of the ideal countryside, past and present. Some of the chapters are concerned with ways in which Victorian artists, poets, and prose writers portrayed the countryside of their day; others with the landowners’ impressive and costly country houses, and their prettification of ‘model’ villages, reflecting fashionable romantic and Gothic styles. This title will be of interest to students of history.