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4 A wonderful discussion of these topics is A. O. Lovejoy's ‘ “Nature” as Aesthetic Norm’ (1955).
5 Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711), 11. 70–73, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 146.
6 ‘I was abashed… I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things’: quoted in R. W. Harris, Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century (1968), p.22.
7 Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (1996). The history of aesthetics is beyond the scope of this book, but see chapter 7 above and Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (1989); Stephen Copley (ed.), The Politics of the Picturesque (1994); Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-century Aesthetic Theory (1957); Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1946); Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds.), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-century Aesthetic Theory (1996).
8 Trevor Fawcett (ed.), Voices of Eighteenth-century Bath (1995), p. 191.
9 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995), pp. 6–7.
10 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle I,1. 289, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 515. For ‘thinking the environment’, see Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape (1988); Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974); Derek Wall, A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics (1994); Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World (1991); Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature (1993), and Nature's Economy (1985).
11 Roy Porter, ‘The Terraqueous Globe’ (1980); B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960); Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage Into Substance (1984); Neil Rennie, Far-fetched Facts (1995).
12 Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack and Roy Porter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (1999), vol. v.
13 [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Signs of the Times, An Addiction to Prophecy, Not a favourable Indication, Either of Nations or Individuals’ (1829).
14 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle IV, ll. 332, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 546; for Addison, see Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (1962), p. 51. Addison remarked: ‘we find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art’: quoted in Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, p. vii. For another popular instance of cosmic poetry, see Richard Blackmore, Creation (1712).
15 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle I, 11. 233-46, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 513. For Pope on the Chain of Being, see An Essay on Man, epistle I, 11. 233–36; see also A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936).
16 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983).
17 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (1994); Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1977 [1789]).
18 Genesis, 1: 26, 28. See C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967); J. A. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (1972), and Man's Responsibility for Nature (1980), pp. 6f.
19 Richard Bentley, ‘Eight Sermons Preached at the Hon. Robert Boyle's Lecture in the Year MDCXCII’, in A. Dyce (ed.) The Works of Richard Bentley (1838 [1693]), vol. iii, p. 175. See discussion in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 18.
20 William Derham, Physico-Theology (1713), pp. 54–5, 112. Derham was ordained in 1682, and from 1689 was vicar at Upminster, Essex, where he conducted amateur studies into meteorology, astronomy, natural history and mechanics. The work reached twelve editions.
21 William Phillips, An Outline of Mineralogy and Geology (1815), pp. 193, 191; William Paley, Natural Theology (1802). The Bridgewater Treatises formed a series of natural theological works produced during the 1830s, in accordance with the will of the Earl of Bridgewater, the aim being to illustrate the argument from Divine Design. They are discussed in Charles C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (1951).
22 See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (1991).
23 Abraham Cowley, ‘Of Solitude’ (1668), in John Sparrow (ed.), The Mistress with Other Select Poems of Abraham Cowley (1926), p. 178; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), p. 76.
24 Miles Weatherall, In Search of a Cure (1990), p. 10.
25 Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), vol. i, p. 401.
26 George Hakewill, An Apologie, 2nd ed. (1630), preface; Yi-fu Tuan, The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God (1968), p. 65
27 Gordon Davies, The Earth in Decay (1969).
28 Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1965 [1684–90; Latin original, 1681]), quoted in Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, p. 411.
29 John Evelyn, Silva (1776 [1662]); see also Richard Grove, Green Imperialism (1995).
30 John Woodward, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695), pp. 30, 32. See the discussion in Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976); Tuan, The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, p. 76.
31 Woodward, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, p. 35.
32 Woodward, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, pp. 61, 94.
33 Roy Porter, ‘Creation and Credence’ (1979).
34 Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. i, p. 163.
35 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795), vol. i, p. 3; Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (1992).
36 See Hutton, Theory of the Earth; T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (1956).
37 Jean Jones, James Hutton's Agricultural Research and His Life as a Farmer’ (1985).
38 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1964); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World (1995).
39 G. Williamson, ‘Mutability, Decay and Seventeenth-century Melancholy’ (1961); Victor I. Harris, All Coherence Gone (1966).
40 Hutton held that ‘a proper system of the earth should lead us to see that wise construction, by which this earth is made to answer the purpose of its intention, and to preserve itself from every accident by which the design of this living world might be frustrated’: Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. i, p. 275.
41 Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. i, p. 400. Writers commonly celebrated the fusion of the beautiful with the useful:
What pleasing scenes the landscape wide displays!
The ‘enchanting prospect bids for ever gaze…
To social towns, see! wealthy Commerce brings
Rejoicing Affluence on his silver wings,
On verdant hills, see! flocks innumerous feed,
Or thoughtful listen to the lively reed.
See! golden harvests sweep the bending plains;
‘And Peace and Plenty own a Brunswick reigns’.
John Langhorne, ‘Studley Park’ (nd), ll. 83-4, 91–6, quoted in John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840 (1972), p. 74. The well-cultivated landscape is the beautiful one.
42 Richard Blackmore's Creation (1712), p. xx, opposed ‘Bigots in Atheism’, who celebrated the universe while slighting its creator:
I would th'Eternal from his Works assert,
And sing the Wonders of Creating Art. [p. 4.]
R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (1982), p. 120.
43 For Thomson, see Robert Inglesfield, ‘Shaftesbury's Influence on Thomson's “Seasons” ’ (1986); for Young, see Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, p. 188. Akenside addressed superior souls:
To these the Sire Omnipotent unfolds
The world's harmonious volume, there to read
The transcript of Himself. On every part
They trace the bright impressions of his hand:
In earth or air, the meadow's purple stores,
The moon's mild radiance, or the virgin's form
Blooming with rosy smiles, they see portray'd
That uncreated beauty, which delights
The mind supreme.
Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination
(1744), in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (1866), bk I, ll. 99–107.
44 Edward Young, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1780).
45 Henry Brooke, Universal Beauty (1735).
46 Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, bk I, 11. 97–107.
47 Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. i, p. 401; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930); Richard Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).
48 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Heresies’ (1597), in J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon (1857–74), vol. vii, p. 253, and New Atlantis (1627), in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. iii, p. 156; Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra, Or the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle (1668). See the discussion in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980), p. 188.
49 René Descartes, Le Monde (1664), quoted in Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression (1981), p. 72: Robert Boyle, ‘A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature Made in an Essay Addressed to a Friend, To Which is Pre-Fixed the Life of the Author by Thomas Birch’, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1744), vol. iv, p. 363; Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, p. 11; for the critique, see, for instance, Merchant, The Death of Nature.
50 John Ray, The Wisdom Of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), pp. 113–14. Civilization was better than Arcadia:
If a Country thus planted and adorned, thus polished and civilized, thus improved to the height… be not preferred before a Barbarous and Inhospitable Scythia… or a rude and unpolished America peopled with slothful and naked Indians, instead of well-built Houses, living in pitiful Huts and Cabans, made of Poles set end-ways; then surely the brute Beasts Condition, and manner of Living… is to be esteem'd better than Man's, and Wit and Reason was in vain bestowed on him. [p. 118.]
51 Ray, The Wisdom Of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, ll. 117–18.
52 Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677), sect. 4, ch. 8, p. 370.
53 G. E. Mingay, A Social History of the English Countryside (1990).
54 Evelyn, Silva, p. 1.
55 Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (1972), p. 351.
56 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1954 [1726]), pt II, ch. 7, p. 143.
57 Jones, ‘James Hutton's Agricultural Research and His Life as a Farmer’, p. 579.
58 James Hutton, ‘Principles of Agriculture’, quoted in Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (1987), pp. 172–3; Jones, ‘James Hutton's Agricultural Research and His Life as a Farmer’.
59 Erasmus Darwin, Phytologia (1800), p. vii: Phytologia is in three parts: 1) ‘physiology of vegetation’, with detailed accounts of plant structure and functioning (pp. 1–139); 2) ‘economy of vegetation’, covering seed growth, photosynthesis, nutrition, manures, drainage, aeration and diseases (pp. 141–372); 3) ‘agriculture and horticulture’, with the accent on productivity, of fruits, seeds, root crops and flowers (pp. 373–578).
60 This inequality of mankind in the present state of the world is too great for the purposes of producing the greatest quantity of human nourishment, and the greatest sum of human happiness; there should be no slavery at one end of the chain of society, and no despotism at the other. Darwin, Phytologia, pt II, pp. 415, 416.
61 J. G. Gazley, The Life of Arthur Young (1973), pp. 20f G. E. Mingay (ed.), Arthur Young and His Times (1975). See also Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 236.
62 Arthur Young, The Farmer's Letters to the People of England (1767), p. 84, letter 3.
63 McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, p. 7.
64 J. M. Neeson, Commoners (1993).
65 Young, The Farmer's Letters to the People of England, p. 91. For ‘moral economy’, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991). For enclosure, see M. Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure (1980), and Enclosures in Britain, 1750–1830 (1984).
66 Arthur Young, A Six Weeks’ Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (1768), p. 21.
67 Arthur Young, View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire (1809), p. 36. The preceding sentences run:
The Oxfordshire farmers… are now in the period of a great change in their ideas, knowledge, practice, and other circumstances. Enclosing to a greater proportional amount than in almost any other county in the kingdom has changed the men as much as it has improved the country; they are now in the ebullition of this change; a vast amelioration has been wrought, and is working; and a great deal of ignorance and barbarity remains. The Goths and Vandals of open fields touch the civilization of enclosures. Men have been taught to think, and till that moment arrives nothing can be done effectively.
68 Young, The Farmer's Letters to the People of England, p. 306. For the involvement of the nobility in progressive agriculture, see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (1963).
69 Arthur Young, A Six Months' Tour through the North of England, 2nd edn (1771), vol. i, p. xiv, quoted in Gazley, The Life of Arthur Young, p. 45.
70 For the bucolic, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973); for pastoral painting, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (1986); Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty (1993); Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (1994).
71 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), vol. i, bk 1 ch. 11.n, p. 258.
72 For Gainsborough's painting of the couple, see Cosgrove and Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape; John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (1972), pp. 106–8; Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art, p. 110.
73 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1985 [1793]), p. 769.
74 Roy Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’ (1995); James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780).
75 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); M. Turner (ed.), Malthus and His Times (1986).
76 Jonas Moore, The History or Narrative of the Great Level of the Fenns, Called Bedford Level (1685), p. 72.
77 John Dalton, A Descriptive Poem Addressed to Two Ladies at Their Return from Viewing the Mines at Whitehaven (1755), p. iii. This Dalton was not the atomic chemist.
78 On English gardening and landscaping, see Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700–1750 (1967); C. Thacker, The Wildness Pleases (1983); Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes (1996).
79 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. iii, no. 414, pp. 551–2 (Wednesday 25 June 1712); see also no. 111, in which Addison protests against the excessive formality of the Continental garden. For the ha-ha, see Thacker, The Wildness Pleases, pp. 32–3.
80 Dorothy Stroud, Capability Brown (1975); Williamson, Polite Landscapes, pp. 77–99.
81 J. C. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (1838), p. 162.
82 For Payne Knight, see Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed (1979), pp. 6, 30f.; Richard Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796); Thomas Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816), in David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), p. 22.
83 A. Constable (ed.), The Letters of Anna Seward, 1784–1807 (1811), vol. iv, p. 10.
84 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists (1709), quoted in Thacker, The Wildness Pleases, p. 12; Shaftesbury there expressed his preference for ‘Things of a natural kind: where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil'd their genuine order’. He continued:
O glorious Nature! supremely Fair, and sovereignly Good! All-loving and All-lovely, All-divine! Whose Looks are so becoming, and of such infinite Grace; whose Study brings such Wisdom, and whose Contemplation such Delight; whose every single Work affords an ampler Scene, and is a nobler Spectacle than all which every Art presented! – O mighty Nature! Wise Substitute of Providence! impower'd Creatress! O Thou impowering Deity, Supreme
Creator! Thee I invoke, and Thee alone adore.
Shaftesbury, The Moralists, sect. 1, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), p. 158, quoted in Brian Hepworth, The Rise of Romanticism (1978), p. 81; Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, p. 62.
85 See Joshua Poole, English Parnassus (1657), pp. 137–8; The Gentleman's Magazine (1747), quoted in David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism (1984), p. 80; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959).
86 John Dennis, cited in Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque (1967), p. 87.
87 Paget Toynbee and L. Whibley (eds), The Correspondence of Thomas Gray (1935), vol. i, p. 128.
88 Horace Walpole, letter to Richard West (28 September 1739), in W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence (1937–83), vol. xiii, p. 181.
89 For William Gilpin, see Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque. The idea goes back to classical aesthetics: ‘We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art,’ wrote Joseph Addison in the Spectator in 1712: Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 414, p. 549 (Wednesday, 25 June 1712).