Prologue

European culture after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 was no stranger to ancient beliefs in an organic, religiously sanctioned, and aesthetically pleasing relationship to the land. The many resonances of this relationship form a more or less coherent whole, in which the supposed cosmopolitanism of the modern age is belied by a deep commitment to regional, national, and civilizational attachments, including a justifying theological armature, much of which is still with us today. Untangling the meaning of the vital geographies of the period, including how they shaped its literature and intellectual life, is the goal of this book. In 1902, the adventure novelist and amateur social scientist H. Rider Haggard submitted a “blue book”—an official report, commissioned by the Crown—to the British Parliament. It was called Rural England, and formed the basis for a subsequent study titled The Poor and the Land (1905). The ostensible subject of his report was an account of the Salvation Army colonies in England and North America, but in this and a subsequent work called Rural Denmark and Its Lessons (1911), Haggard focused on one central problem. Between 1870 and 1896, rural England (like other Western European countries, Canada, and the United States) suffered both increasing mechanization and a prolonged recession, with the declining price of farmland and mass emigration to the cities. Having witnessed Britain’s military losses in Africa in the Boer Wars, and a rout by Zulu tribesmen in 1879—failures he attributed to the deteriorating vigor and hardiness of Englishmen reared in cities, a point Adam Smith had already made in The Wealth of Nations (1776) more than a century earlier1—Haggard was convinced that the exodus from the countryside had to be arrested if Britain was to retain its imperial status. “The physique deteriorates. This was a fact that came home to any who, after the country-bred yeomen were exhausted, took the trouble to compare with them the crowds of town-reared men that presented themselves at the London recruiting offices to volunteer for service in South Africa.”2 Moreover, in his view the repatriation of people from the cities to the country would not only arrest the decline of rural areas and improve the empire’s preparedness for war; it would also relieve the overcrowding, poverty, unemployment and social anomie of the cities. “No one is more convinced than I am,” Haggard wrote, “of the absolute necessity, if our Country is to continue in its present place, of the reconstruction of the lost yeoman class, who rear a stamp of children very different to those that are bred in the great towns.”3 Haggard was in no sense alone either in his fears for British prowess or in his remedies. The happy promise of a reborn yeoman class, for example, reappears at the conclusion of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), and no one ever accused Forster of an excess of masculine bellicosity. Indeed, adventure writing toward the end of the nineteenth century was filled with thinly veiled allegories—George A. Henty was a prolific master of the genre—extolling the importance of the same rural hardiness for the preservation of the empire.

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