This book is a history of English literary writing about the work of people and animals in farming communities, and about the land as it is understood through that work. Since the sixteenth century, English authors with rural interests have looked to a four-part didactic poem called the Georgics (29 bce) by the Roman poet Virgil as a model for this kind of text. The classical and late medieval inheritance of agricultural writing is itself diverse and very ancient, as Philip Thibodeau shows in the first chapter of this collection. Yet it is Virgil’s poem that has lent its title most often as a general label for farming literature, and it does again for this history.¹

There are two broad categories of English georgic writing. The first is a category of genre, made up by imitations and adaptations of Virgil’s Georgics. These tend to be long, mixed poems about rural work in which a didactic authorial voice allows itself to be sidetracked at regular intervals into passages of historical narration, of philosophical discussion, of local description or of rhapsody. They were especially prestigious and widely read in Europe and America between the middle of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.² Some poems of this kind make their lineage obvious, such as James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–46), which features sections of direct imitation of the Georgics, and shares its four-part structure and rural outlook. In others, the agricultural content has fallen away from recognizable formal georgic structures, as is the case with John Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), for example, or with John Gay’s entirely urban Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). The second category of georgic is one of theme and mode, and it covers all sorts of literary texts, in poetry, prose and drama, that deal with life on the land in a practical way. Usually they share with Virgil’s Georgics a distinctive circle of concerns: unremitting labour as human fate; the clash between progressive civilization and natural rhythms that are cyclical and recursive; the bonds between humans and companion species; the persistence of local attachments in national or imperial political contexts. These themes are prominent, for example, in certain novels by Thomas Hardy, as discussed by Andrew Radford in Chapter 10 of this volume – although there is no formal georgic among Hardy’s surviving poems. The essays collected in this volume trace a literary history shared by these two categories of georgic writing. Together they show how georgic has been an ever-present and vital green force in English literary history from the sixteenth into the twenty-first century.

A growing body of literary criticism has recognized the variety and significance of English georgic writing.³ Other kinds of literature rise and evolve, or stay tied to some ancient precedent or well-defined form. Georgic is a different sort of tradition: fragmented and discontinuous, each iteration starting in a new direction, it is always too absorbed in external things – in natural processes and in human practices – to worry about formal conventions. Georgic is thought of sometimes as an interrupted genre, an abandoned literary form.⁴ This book argues on the contrary that it has been a constant presence in English and American culture over the last five hundred years. Yet you must know how to read and recognize it. A History of English Georgic Writing shows how, and gives a map of the territory.

Virgil’s Georgics is arranged in four parts, and foursquareness is a characteristic feature of georgic poetics. This History of English Georgic Writing has a correspondingly quadrilateral design, its sixteen chapters arranged in groups of four and eight. The first quarter (‘Turnings’) is made up of four chapters on different scales of change in rural writing: from ancient to modern, from season to season, from day to day, from tradition to technology. The second and third quarters (‘Times’) give a historical overview of English georgic writing in eight chapters. These feature readings of the principal georgic texts for each period, and specialist scholars find in each a scheme of wider contexts for period-specific knowledge. The final quarter (‘Territories’) looks at English georgic writing from the special perspectives of landscape and environment over four chapters: from home, the perspectives of rich lowland fen and open highland weald; from abroad, the perspectives of America, and of Britain’s history as a former colonial power.

This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic writing, as viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles, and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns, and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. What none of the contributors to this volume proposes, however, is a continuous narrative of development in English georgic writing. This frees us from having to begin the survey at the very beginning. We can start instead with a triptych of modern georgic snapshots, featuring three contemporary British writers. They will give us a sense of what formal resources the georgic tradition can afford to writers today.

Three Modern Georgic Snapshots

The first snapshot features the poet Simon Armitage. In May 2016, Armitage wrote a series of poems to accompany an exhibition at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, featuring early aerial photography from the First World War. Most of the photographs are landscape ‘obliques’, unpopulated panoramic images taken during reconnaissance of the Somme battlefields. Armitage’s texts are translations from the Georgics, focused on Virgil’s darker passages, but still resolutely agricultural. The poems were printed onto transparent fascia fixed an inch in front of the enlarged military photographs, ‘to suggest an aerial detachment and perspective’, as Armitage explains it, ‘to bring about a form of “oblique” refraction’.⁵ This displacement makes sense of the photographs’ odd perspectives, and it matches the Georgics as well: Virgil designed his poem ‘to suggest a Truth indirectly’, wrote Joseph Addison in 1697, ‘and without giving us a full and open view of it: To let us see just so much as will naturally lead the Imagination into all the parts that lie conceal’d’.⁶ Like the wartime ‘obliques’, Armitage’s translations are down-to-earth and straight-talking. Yet they hold back from reading the missing soldiers and their bloody actions onto the battlefields. These they insist on seeing as agricultural landscapes, ready for seedtime, plough and harvest. The solemn didactic poetry leads our imaginations into war, but Armitage does not want us to approach too closely. Like Euridice ascending from death behind Orpheus in the fourth Georgic, the past only follows us until we turn to look straight at it.

A second georgic snapshot, more fleeting this time, features the novelist Ali Smith. In summer 2021 the Royal Academy of Arts exhibited a new series of works by David Hockney, ‘The Arrival of Spring’, painted by the artist at his home in Normandy the previous year using an iPad and stylus. Smith had published her novel Spring the year before. Like the other volumes in her ‘Seasonal Quartet’, the cover of Spring features a striking half-jacket image of a particular lane in Yorkshire painted by Hockney. So Smith was the obvious person to introduce the artist’s new work with an article for the RA Magazine. She illustrates her commentary on Hockney with vernal poetry by Thomas Carew, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings, but her main exhibit is a passage from Virgil’s second Georgic (lines 336–42) in Kimberly Johnson’s translation:

The lines capture not only the beginning of all life on earth, but also the moment of respite between frost and heat when human consciousness at last looks up at it all – ‘the first noticing moment’, as Smith puts it. She sees it in Hockney’s pictures as well, when he captures the season’s ‘merry falling-over-itself, the swing of a branch loaded with not-snow, spring like the hinge on the seasonal door’. Georgics are poems about the pleasures and revelations of the everyday, according to Smith. They form a mediating genre, hemmed in between the heedless amorousness of pastoral and the pride of epic violence. They are still full of myth, but stripped of illusions. Armitage turns to georgic for a poetic mode at once ironic and deadly serious in its realism; Smith finds in it a trace of the generative pause in which true poetic attentiveness began.

In a third snapshot of contemporary georgic, the Virgilian inheritance lines up with modern British agricultural and environmental thinking. James Rebanks lives and works on an upland mixed rotational farm in Matterdale, near Ullswater in the English Lake District. There is nothing in the title of his second book, English Pastoral (2020), to surprise readers of his bestselling memoir The Shepherd’s Life (2015), which described the author’s annual cycle of work with a flock of tough Herdwick sheep (Suzanne Joinson discusses The Shepherd’s Life in Chapter 14 of this collection). However, it turns out that English Pastoral’s title is a little misleading: its contents are less pastoral – particularly ‘beseeming shepherds’, as Samuel Johnson defined it – than deeply georgic.⁸ Rebanks is drawn to the hardscrabble belligerence of life on a mixed farm as described by Virgil in the first Georgic: ‘His [Virgil’s] farming philosophy was that we had to take things from nature by using our wisdom and our tools, because the alternative was defeat and starvation.’⁹ He notices, as do many of the earlier writers discussed in this collection, that Virgil describes the plough and hoe as weapons (arma) in a war, and that by the same analogy the technology of modern agribusiness would be ‘something more comparable to tanks, jet fighters, and chemical and nuclear weapon systems’.¹⁰ Unremitting labour, learning through practice and commitment to a plot of ground are central georgic themes. Rebanks brings them together in the figure of his grandfather, who was ‘rooted in work, connected to the soil and the crops and the animals upon it’.¹¹ He represents an inheritance of traditional knowledge embedded in farming landscapes, bloodstock lines and working communities.

English Pastoral wants to pass on some of that knowledge, but Virgilian didactic is hardly an option for mass-market non-fiction. So rather than offering direct instruction, Rebanks tells the story of his own schooling in the land. The policy-level argument here is that small marginal holdings like his are crucial components in the jigsaw of diversified British agriculture. They are repositories for the older understandings of land management and food production, knowledge that conventional farming needs to ensure its own sustainability at a time of recalibration for the agricultural sector.¹² At the end of the era of Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, as government looks to reward farmers for environmental stewardship as much as productivity, the argument is especially timely.

These snapshots show three high-profile contemporary writers drawing on the georgic tradition in different contexts. All three deploy Virgil’s poem as a catalyst to bring alive stubborn cultural materials. Armitage’s ghostly images from the military archive, Smith’s poems and paintings of a fugitive season, Rebanks’s passed-over agricultural ecologies: each is looking for a vivifying connection to the realm of everyday human practice in the natural world. In all three snapshots the perspective offered is oblique, reflecting georgic’s characteristic poetics of openness and indirection. Georgic cannot think of a thing, a place or a process without thinking of its analogue or opposite at the same time. Battlefield and farm, painting and poem, rooted labour and abstracted technology, each is displayed as part of a larger scheme of natural patterns. Each involve historical artefacts – reconnaissance photographs, seventeenth-century lyrics, a shed of old farm tools – that require a serious attentiveness, an engagement stripped clean of nostalgia. Each represents a particular natural environment, and lets it stand in for somewhere else as well, for any landscape the reader has worked in and belonged to. It is a cluster of poetic functions that georgic is uniquely well equipped to perform. This collection of essays shows that English writers have been using the georgic mode to these ends for over five hundred years, and that in the second decade of the twenty-first century that georgic inheritance is as valuable and fruitful as it has ever been.

The Sixteenth Century

If Armitage, Smith and Rebanks give us a glimpse of where English georgic finds itself today, where does the story begin? Looking back in 1659 on the history of vernacular agricultural writing, the educational reformer and horticulturalist Samuel Hartlib found nothing to challenge the primacy of his own Discourse of the Whole Art of Husbandry – at least, he argued, there was no earlier ‘Systema or compleat book’ of agriculture in English. ‘Till the latter end of Queen Elizabeths days’, he wrote,

Hartlib’s dismissive remark at least gives us some leads on the origins of English georgic. He was right: signs of the first growth of agricultural writing in the Tudor period are hard to spot. The Georgics themselves were familiar to scholarly readers at the start of the sixteenth century, and supplied hortulan themes to English humanist writers from the 1520s onwards. In fact, a Scots poet got there before anyone writing in English: the ‘Prologues’ of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (completed 1513) have a georgic frame of reference and characteristically georgic themes – labour, didactics of practice, landscape and seasonality.¹⁴ There are georgic glimmerings in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The laws of the Utopians permit the invasion of neighbouring peoples who leave their fields idle and waste, a colonial extrapolation from Virgil’s ‘neu segnes iaceant terrae’.¹⁵ The Utopians are also self-sufficient horticulturalists, and More seems to have shared his contemporary Sir Thomas Elyot’s appreciation of the variety of cultivation discussed in the Georgics, ‘the divers graynes, herbes, and flowres, that be there described’, as Elyot put it in The Governour (1531), ‘that redig therin hit semeth to a man to be in a delectable gardeine or paradise’.¹⁶

The musician and farmer Thomas Tusser first ‘made his verses’ in 1557, though Hartlib’s true dawn for English georgic is the Elizabethan 1570s, when Tusser expanded A Hundreth into Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573). They are discussed by Alexandra Harris in Chapter 2 and by Andrew McRae in Chapter 5. Hartlib also mentions Reynolde Scot’s Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden, which appeared a year later, and Barnabe Googe’s Foure bookes of husbandry, collected by M. Conradus Heresbachius, which followed in 1557. In 1570, Roger Ascham had invoked ‘that perfite worke of the Georgickes’ as his model for poetic ‘epitome’. Virgil ‘used daily, whan he had written 40 or 50 verses, not to cease cutting, paring, and polishing of them, till he had brought them to the number of x or xii’ – the quartering proportions of the Georgics were always significant to the humanists.¹⁷ By the end of the decade, Edmund Spenser was incorporating georgic features into the pastoral of the Shepheardes Calender (1579): his shepherds are ‘mortal men, that swincke and sweate’, while Virgil is remembered as one who left his sheepwalks ‘and laboured lands to yield the timely eare’.¹⁸ So Hartlib’s first shoots of English agricultural writing appeared among the established greenery of humanist literary georgic.

The Seventeenth Century

Hartlib goes on to mention ‘divers small Treatises’ on agriculture written later by ‘divers, as Sir Hugh Platts, Gab. Platts, Markham, Blith, and Butler, who do well in divers things’.¹⁹ Two of these ‘divers’ (i.e., partial and unsystematic) books belong to the first decade of the seventeenth century, and are happy still to cite Virgil’s Georgics as a technical authority. Sir Hugh Platts’s New and Admirable Arte of Setting of Corne (1600) refers to Virgil’s strictures on the selection and preservation of seed stock, while Charles Butler’s enduringly popular The Feminine Monarchie, or a Treatise Concerning Bees (1609) quotes extensively from the fourth Georgic.²⁰ Edward Maxey’s Nevv Instuction [sic] of Plowing and Setting of Corne (1601) is another late Elizabethan book advocating rectilinear regularity in farming practice, while A Surveyor’s Dialogue (1607) by John Norden, a topographer and mapmaker with much experience of crown estates, stands out, according to Joan Thirsk, as an early Jacobean work remarkable for the precision and range of its local information on soil types and social patterns.²¹

Is it a coincidence that this flourishing of agricultural books during the first decades of the seventeenth century happened at the same time as Francis Bacon turned, in The Aduancement of Learning (1605), to the Georgics as his model for a new kind of progressive inquiry that no longer ‘dispised to be conuersant in ordinary and common matters’? After all, wrote Bacon, Virgil got as much literary fame from his observations on husbandry as he did from his epic poetry:

Where the Aeneid depends for its moral power on a precarious process of exemplarity, according to Bacon, the Georgics has a method (and perhaps even a psychology) of education built into it.²³ Earlier in the Aduancement Bacon had quoted Virgil’s famous distinction in the second Georgic between the contentment of the rustic and the happiness of the Epicurean philosopher (‘Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ – ‘Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working’).²⁴ In her influential reading of these passages, Annabel Patterson argues that Bacon was advancing a new blend of inward-looking pastoralism (Stoic in origin, rooted in the ‘cultura animi’ tradition) with a distinctly georgic emphasis on human labour and inventiveness – ‘a principled synthesis of two conceptual structures’.²⁵ The prominence of these quotations in Bacon’s text suggest that the psychological and therapeutic components of his programme, as well as the practical ones, could be supplied out of the Georgics, without bothering too much about Virgil’s own strictly pastoral writings.²⁶

Of the remaining three agricultural writers mentioned (‘Gab. Platts, Markham, Blith’), Gervase Markham belongs more to the Jacobean flush of English georgic writing than to Hartlib’s own mid-century moment. In the first of his agricultural books, The English Husbandman (1613; followed by a Second Book, 1614; and a Farwell to Hvsbandry, 1620), Markham claimed that it was an English paraphrase of the Georgics – presumably Abraham Fleming’s translation (or ‘mere crib’) of 1589 – that provoked him to write. He objected to Virgil’s methods on account not of their ancientness, but of their ‘onely belonging to the Italian climbe, & nothing agreeable to ours’.²⁷ Thomas Fuller later reported that the poet Samuel Daniel took up farming at around the same time, but with doubtful success, blamed once again on the inappropriate continental influence of Virgil:

Over the same decade in which Daniel turned farmer and Markham published the English Husbandman volumes, Michael Drayton produced the first great English chorographical georgic, Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622). Drayton goes even further than Markham in scolding ‘this lunatique Age’ for entertaining ‘fantasies of forraine inventions’.²⁹ British specificity is a necessary first step towards Drayton’s real theme in Poly-Olbion, which is the particularity of regions within a diverse national prospect. In Drayton’s poetics, each landscape and feature has a name and a voice with which to reveal itself. The general perspectives of earlier antiquaries are folded into particular descriptions, ‘making the various places themselves recite England’s chronicle history’, as Richard Helgerson puts it.³⁰ In Chapter 5 of this volume, Andrew McRae’s assessment is that for Drayton and his contemporaries the Georgics changed from a stable, universal classical authority into a dynamic catalyst for understanding a time of precarious national politics: ‘Georgic did not so much present a model for understanding their world’, he concludes, ‘as provide resources that helped them to think for themselves’. In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, georgic came into its early modernity.

The next historical hotspot for English georgic was the 1650s and 1660s, the age of Hartlib himself and of our two remaining authors (‘Gab. Platts’ and ‘Blith’). Gabriel Plattes is best known today as the author of an early Baconian utopia with much to say about agricultural improvement, A Description of Macaria (1641), and for the role he played in Hartlib’s correspondence network.³¹ Plattes first published on agriculture in the late 1630s, but his main contribution to the subject was his 1656 treatise Practical Husbandry Improved, very much a work of the 1650s, with its restless emphasis on technical innovation and experiment.³² Another member of the network was Leicestershire farmer and ‘lover of ingenuity’ Walter Blith. In his 1649 treatise The English Improover, Blith recommended six basic methods of fertilization, drainage and ploughing, none of them especially original. Yet by the time he revised his book as The English Improver Improved (1652) three years later, he had found half a dozen new techniques to promote, including the cultivation of special crops for fodder, textiles, seed oil and dyeing.³³ Hartlib was also responsible for the publication of Sir Richard Weston’s Discours of Husbandrie used in Brabant and Flanders (1650), the earliest English work to promote the use of turnips and clover in crop rotations on marginal land. The Discours is another instance of Hartlib’s inclusive, expansive cultural energies: Weston wrote his treatise as a Royalist exile in the Low Countries, but in Hartlib’s hands it was converted to the Commonwealthsman’s cause by the addition of material from one of his lieutenants, Cressy Dimock, the circle’s most enthusiastic advocate of land reform, mechanical innovation and agricultural education. Turning to the classically georgic topic of apiculture, Hartlib published another book that converted Charles Butler’s ‘feminine monarchie’ of the hive into a republicanized ‘Common-wealth of Bees’, fit to produce industrial quantities of honey and wax.³⁴

The restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and Hartlib’s death two years later threatened to dissipate the georgic energies of the previous decade, but in the event they were converted and extended once again. Two years after its foundation in 1662 the Royal Society convened a ‘Georgical Committee’, with old Hartlib correspondents John Evelyn and Ralph Austen among its thirty-two members.³⁵ A year after that Austen carefully updated his Treatise of Fruit-Trees (1653), apparently trimming it for the new Caroline regime. In its first edition, published under the Protectorate, Austen had advocated the cultivation of apple orchards for the sake of economic development and the employment of the poor. In a new preface to the 1665 edition, now dedicated to Robert Boyle and the work of the Royal Society, Austen changed his emphasis to the promotion of well-regulated and profitable cider production for the benefit of proprietors.³⁶ A few years later the innovations that Walter Blith had proposed in 1653 were swallowed whole and then extended by John Worlidge in his Systema agriculturae (1669), the most compendious farming publication of the age.³⁷ Another work revised across a series of editions that spanned the restoration was Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653; final authorial edition 1676), a sporting miscellany containing prose dialogue, natural history and tavern balladry, concerned more with riverside recreation rather than agricultural labour – but its mode is unmistakably didactic and georgic.³⁸

Once again, there are circumstantial connections between these Hartlibian continuities and the further development of georgic modalities in post-Restoration literary culture. In Paradise Lost (1667), Hartlib’s friend John Milton places georgic labour at the heart of the prelapsarian everyday, and develops the theme further as a marker of what changes after the fall.³⁹ A case can be made for the georgic formalism of Milton’s four-book Paradise Regained (1671), which is at very least, as Alastair Fowler puts it, a ‘brief epic with georgic modulation’.⁴⁰ In the plans for the funeral of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, Hartlib and Milton are seen walking with another poet, Andrew Marvell.⁴¹ The beneficent floods that feature in Marvell’s poems ‘Upon Appleton House’ (written 1651) and ‘The First Anniversary’ (1655) have long been connected with georgic techniques for levelling and fertilizing water meadows by floating them with silty water, as set out by Sir Richard Weston and Walter Blith.⁴² As Melissa Schoenberger shows in Chapter 6 of this volume, the georgic tradition emerged in its full agrarian form at several seventeenth-century moments, while at others its presence constituted ‘merely part of a looser georgic mode that winds and weaves its way through various genres and forms’.

So in the mid-seventeenth century we see moments of convergence between literary georgic and practical agricultural instruction. The georgic poetry of this period is characterized by its efforts ‘to extend the exegesis of Virgil’s text into the practice of agriculture’, as Douglas Chambers has drily put it.⁴³ Yet poetry and instruction are set far apart at the turn of the eighteenth century by John Dryden’s era-defining translation of the Georgics. It appears in Dryden’s Works of Virgil (1697), a grand folio volume published by Jacob Tonson, where it is supported by an essay on georgic by a rising protégé of Dryden’s, Joseph Addison, still a student at Oxford when he wrote the piece in 1693. Addison asserts the dignity of Virgil’s poem, although he cannot do so without a finicking shudder of irony: the Mantuan ‘breaks the Clods and tosses the Dung about with an air of gracefulness’.⁴⁴ Dryden had prepared the ground for all this activity by commissioning a sequence of appetizer translations from the Georgics by some of his most fashionable and aristocratic collaborators. They appear across the six volumes of the Dryden-Tonson Miscellanies (1684–1709), their authors including the Earl of Mulgrave, Knightley Chetwood, two successive Earls of Lauderdale, Addison’s college friend Henry Sacheverell, and Addison himself.⁴⁵

These grand literary performances contrast strikingly with the most innovative agricultural publication of the same period, which is a humble one, despite its elite institutional associations. A Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade was one of the very first encyclopaedic periodicals, appearing monthly between September 1681 and 1683, and again, as a modest folio sheet, between March 1692 and September 1703.⁴⁶ Its editor was John Houghton, a rare Fellow of the Royal Society who did not claim the rank of gentleman (he was an apothecary by trade) and a member of the revived Georgical Committee. Houghton solicited letters on agricultural innovation from a wide network, ranging from his fellow FRSs to farmers, countrywomen and agricultural merchants, and contributors were rewarded with free subscriptions to the periodical. The Collection of Letters is full of reforming optimism, but it is also a document of the depressed and therefore hard-working agricultural economy of the period 1664 to 1691, witness to the ‘great improvement made of lands since our inhuman civil wars, when our gentry, who before hardly knew what it was to think, then fell to such an industry, and caused such an improvement as England never knew before’.⁴⁷ Houghton always struggled to find a paying readership for his uncostly periodical, resorting in the end to advertisements and news-mongering.⁴⁸ By contrast, Dryden’s Virgil was, like his Miscellanies, a bold commercial experiment in leveraging elite cultural and social capital against a lucrative subscription system.⁴⁹

The Eighteenth Century

A more modest classicism and a mercantile spirit had converged once more, however, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, in the first formal English imitation of the Georgics: John Philips’s two-part poem Cyder (1708). Looking forward to the ‘sweet prospect of a mutual gain’ represented by the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Act of Union, Philips anticipates a century of ‘uncontrol’d’ naval dominance and colonial plenty, crowned by some unlikely British exports: ‘to the utmost Bounds of this | Wide Universe, Silurian Cyder borne | Shall please all Tasts, and triumph o’er the Vine’.⁵⁰ Joseph Addison himself used a passage from the first Georgic (lines 54–61, on the special productivities of different lands) as the epigram for Spectator 69 (19 May 1711), his famous essay on the cosmopolitan Royal Exchange.⁵¹ These texts are examples of a distinctively georgic trajectory of focus. The poet’s attention starts off at home, or at least among domestic landscapes – which can now be urban too, as in Spectator 69, or in Jonathan Swift’s prognosticating ‘Description of a City Shower’ (1710), or in the urban digressions on georgic mythography of John Gay’s Trivia (1716).⁵² Then it shifts outwards to a dispersed scene of consumption and use that hides its evidently imperial logic by stressing reconciliation, mutual adaptation and copious supply: ‘trade, without enlarging the British Territories’, Addison concludes, ‘has given us a kind of additional Empire’.⁵³ This georgic sequencing of attention finds its most characteristic expression in Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713). From the ‘rich Industry’ of Pope’s native Loddon valley, where ‘Ceres’ Gifts in waving Prospect stand, | And nodding tempt the joyful Reaper’s Hand’, to ‘Earth’s distant Ends’, and the further prospect of a time when ‘Conquest cease, and Slav’ry be no more’, Windsor Forest hopes to reshape the over-weaning energies of a recent European war into a peaceful, wealthy and multifarious georgic order.⁵⁴

A century after Plattes’s Setting Corne was published, and fifty years after the period of Hartlib’s information-sharing activity, English farmers of the early eighteenth century were enjoying increases in agricultural productivity unparalleled in Europe. As the economist Robert C. Allen sums it up, the output-to-worker ratios for British farming in 1600 were at the low end of the continental norm, but by 1750 they had risen sharply to the leading position.⁵⁵ An average English cornfield that had yielded ten bushels per acre in 1600 was yielding twenty bushels or more by the early eighteenth century, and national productivity continued to rise over the following fifty years as more waste land (particularly in the East Anglian fens) was brought into cultivation and fallow reduced.⁵⁶ Georgic poets and agricultural writers were on hand to bear witness to these improvements, and to make their contribution to the diffusion of progressive practice that helped propel them. It is also significant that these extraordinary rises in farming productivity had levelled by about 1750 – that is, before the fabled period of British agricultural improvement, parliamentary enclosure and industrial revolution, throughout which farm outputs remained stable, spread through an expanding rural population. It makes more sense to see the golden age of English georgic writing – if that is not too grand a label for the period c.1697–c.1767 – as a literary reflection of these gathering energies, than as anticipations of a slightly later agrarian revolution.

There is another contextual factor that muddies the eighteenth-century picture: steadily increasing productivity did not always mean economic prosperity. A succession of big harvests through the second quarter of the eighteenth century led to tumbling farm prices and emptying rent rolls, and the consequence was a sustained agricultural depression in 1725–50.⁵⁷ These challenging years help to account for the grit one finds mixed in with even the most optimistic eighteenth-century georgic writing. The jarring disjunction between georgic abundance and grinding economic adversity marks the labouring-class complaint literature of the 1730s, most famously in The Thresher’s Labour (1730) by Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier’s answer to it, The Woman’s Labour (1739) – the latter opening a new domestic prospect for georgic drudgery half-hidden, as Alexandra Harris argues in Chapter 2 of this collection, by Virgil.⁵⁸ It casts a shadow over passages of satire against agricultural innovation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), itself another deeply worked literary experiment in georgic form.⁵⁹ The bitterness of the ad hominem exchanges between Jethro Tull and Stephen Switzer, horse-hoeing modernizer and champion of ancient agronomy, respectively, suggest the heightened tensions of straitened times. Frans De Bruyn tells their story in Chapter 7.⁶⁰

The most popular and hopeful of all eighteenth-century English georgics was James Thomson’s four-part poem The Seasons (1726–30). A few months after its publication in 1730, Queen Caroline struck a coin commemorating the life of Sir Isaac Newton which bore the inscription ‘felix cognoscere causas’ – the georgic motto adopted by Bacon, here reflecting the scientific optimism that Thomson’s poem was doing much to popularize.⁶¹ Yet it is striking how many of The Seasons’ frequent Virgilian allusions are to darker and more threatening passages from the Georgics. Admittedly, several of The Seasons’ set pieces – the awakening of ploughed land in ‘Spring’, the scenes of ‘happy Labour, Love, and social Glee’ and the extended patriotic hymn in ‘Summer’, the prophesy of British commercial greatness at the start of ‘Autumn’ – seem if anything to soften their sources in the first Georgic.⁶² Yet representations of nature at its most threatening, toilsome and tragic, often with allusions to Virgil, are frequent: the Nightingale’s robbed nest and the lover’s agonies in ‘Spring’; the stinging insects, fires and serpents of ‘Summer’; the sublime storms of ‘Winter’.⁶³ Thomson’s moral ideals of social love and charity could prevail easily over vice, if only humanity could pay proper attention to

When Thomson imitates the joyful ‘O fortunatos nimium’ section from the second Georgic in ‘Autumn’, it is significant that he largely replaces the modest and unknowingly lucky farmer focused on by Virgil with the figure of a rhapsodizing rural philosopher-poet.⁶⁵ Expanding prospects and productive abundance explain the hopefulness of Thomson’s patriot ideology. Yet the lived experience of rural workers during the second quarter of the eighteenth century could only bare so much hopeful scrutiny.

As farm prices rose again after 1750 there was a flush of substantial new georgic poems, lineal descendants from Philips, Pope and Thomson. First to appear was a pair of Virgilian imitations that stuck to an agricultural brief: Christopher Smart’s ‘The Hop Garden: A Georgic’ (1752), and Robert Dodsley’s ‘Agriculture’, the latter published as the first instalment of a larger, never-to-be-finished work, Public Virtue, in 1753. The painter and farmer John Dyer, an old friend of Thomson, published The Fleece in 1757, the physician James Grainger issued his Caribbean georgic The Sugar-Cane in 1764, and finally came the Warwickshire clergyman Richard Jago’s topographic georgic Edge-Hill in 1767. These georgic poems have attracted more critical attention than their profile on publication would seem to warrant, perhaps because they are such a coherent set poetically and ideologically, and because they fit so promisingly into larger historical narratives about agricultural and industrial revolution. No other group of writers took on so willingly the work of securing moral and aesthetic connections between farming, industry and empire.⁶⁶ They were more optimistic than earlier georgic writers about the capacity of human labour to overcome nature’s tendency to entropy.⁶⁷ Indeed, their appearance ‘marks the point at which the morality attached to frugality and self-limitation is exchanged for the morality of improvement’, writes Clare Bucknell, ‘and the georgic poet rejects the genre’s traditional investment in modest ambition and difficult circumstances’.⁶⁸ They also present a kind of literary mystery. If the mid-century fashion for full-scale georgic poems answered so directly to the cultural and economic questions of the age, and if those questions only became more urgent through to the nineteenth century, why did the literary fashion for georgic end so abruptly with Jago’s Edge-Hill?

Many different explanations have been proposed for the sudden eclipse of patriot-spirited georgic poetry after 1767. John Barrell and Juan Christian Pellicer have pointed to the development of sentimental novels and political economy as modes of writing that handled the moral and industrial components in georgic separately and more effectively, not having to negotiate their poetic entanglement in an ancient literary genre.⁶⁹ Kurt Heinzelman and Frans De Bruyn both attribute it to a slipping of didactic confidence in the unity of scientific knowledge, as an age of encyclopaedism gave way to one of romantic fragmentation.⁷⁰ Karen O’Brien and Barrell agree that growing national shame over the dependence of British imperial economics on slave labour – a problem woven deeply into Virgil’s text – drove mid-century georgic to rapid obsolescence.⁷¹ Each of these explanations is significant, and together they do much to explain the genre’s decline. Yet none of them considers the one sufficient cause for the fading of mid-eighteenth-century georgic. These sorts of poems stopped appearing because the only London bookseller who was willing to underwrite the publication of long-format georgics died in 1764. That bookseller was Robert Dodsley, who we have met already as the author of ‘Agriculture’.⁷² Dodsley was behind the financing or publication of every mid-century example of the genre.⁷³ These were prestigious but expensive quarto-format poems that did not sell well.⁷⁴ Dodsley was willing to risk financing them, or to use them as loss leaders, out of a real cultural commitment to didactic poetry on rural themes. He was also committed to a patriotic, manufacture-focused, physiocratic agenda in economics that his georgic authors tended to share.⁷⁵ The true context for mid-century georgic is the wider publishing catalogue of Dodsley’s bookshop at the sign of Tully’s Head. It features three separate translations or editions of Virgil’s Georgics (and the distribution of a third) between 1750 and 1767.⁷⁶ It also connects literary georgic with some important agricultural publications of the day. Dodsley published Edward Lisle’s Observations in Husbandry, edited posthumously by his son in 1757, and distributed Walter Harte’s Essays on Husbandry (1763). It would be hard to write a coherent history of English georgic writing if Robert Dodsley had not drawn together so many of its strands in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Romantic and Victorian Periods

As we have seen, it is a paradox of economic history that levels of agricultural productivity (as measured by output-per-worker) in England plateaued during the later part of the eighteenth century, the great age of agricultural improvement and enclosure, having risen steeply and steadily between 1600 and 1750. It is often assumed that parliamentary enclosures drove country people off the land during the second half of the eighteenth century, but again the historical record suggests the opposite: between 1751 and 1789 a population increase averaging at 22 per cent was recorded in sixteen English counties in which there was no major industrial development.⁷⁷ In 1784, the young Marquis de la Rochefoucauld toured Norfolk with the age’s most prolific advocate of improvement, Arthur Young, author of a series of Tours of agricultural England and the bestselling Farmer’s Kalendar (1771), which went through ten editions to 1820. Rochefoucauld was especially impressed by the region’s large-scale tenant farmers, who speak ‘with more intelligence than one would expect from peasants’ – one is reminded of the alert and well-informed young farmer Robert Martin, and of the patronizing social judgements that he faces, in Jane Austen’s novel Emma (1815).⁷⁸ Population in rural counties grew even faster at 27 per cent between 1789 and 1815 – the early Romantic period in literary history – and farm prices rose strongly as well, pushed by the Napoleonic wars.⁷⁹ The agricultural economy remained precarious, however: 1794–5, 1799–1800 and 1810–11 were years of scarcity, inflation and ultimately famine, with government slow in its efforts to buy compensatory stock from abroad.⁸⁰ Still, this era saw the height of the improving spirit: government took an increasing interest in farming with the foundation of the Board of Agriculture in 1793, and advanced farming practices were disseminated more quickly than ever by journals such as the wide-reaching Farmer’s Magazine (founded 1800).⁸¹ Then after Waterloo the fortunes of British farming changed suddenly and gravely for the worse: further population increases and falling farm prices led to significant civil conflict and rural unrest during the period 1815–37, especially the Swing Riots (1830–1).

English georgic writing during the Romantic period maps unevenly onto this historical terrain. The voices of writers and rural workers come closest together during the dark years for British farming after 1815. The correspondence is evident in the development of John Clare’s writing between The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) and his unpublished The Parish, where local elegy is apt to turn swiftly into social protest, and protest to harden again into satire. It is articulated especially clearly, and with a distinctly georgic emphasis, in William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1821–2) and Rural Rides (1822–6). Cobbett feels that country people are far better off in marginal and afforested landscapes, where they can keep a pig in the woods, or continue to enjoy ancient common rights to turbary (peat-cutting), estover (fire-wood) or fiscary (fishing), than they are in the prosperous and enclosed landscapes such as Clare’s Northamptonshire. In Chapter 9, James Grande ascribes Cobbett’s sympathetic attention to the difficulties and obstacles overcome by rural workers to a georgic spirit: ‘History is not buried in Rural Rides’, he writes, ‘but continually uncovered’, as it is uncovered at the close of the first Georgic.

Yet social protest had been the dominant note in English georgic writing during earlier improving decades as well: ‘In the Romantic period’, Tess Somervell argues in Chapter 8 of this collection, ‘to the role of the georgic poet – observing and describing the natural environment of the countryside and the traditional ways of working it, and instructing the reader in those ways – was added the task of rural complaint.’ This is especially evident in the line of displaced country voices that dominate the moral landscape of early Romantic literature: the economic emigrants of Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (1770); the sojourners in blighted, infertile east Suffolk of George Crabbe’s The Village (1783); impoverished Margaret and her absent husband in Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (written 1797); and the now-disillusioned ‘early worshipper at Nature’s shrine’ of Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807).⁸² These works correspond in different ways to historical evidence that the growth of rural economy in the Romantic period was purchased at the cost of widening social divisions: between big farmers and struggling small operations, between landlords and tenants, and between the national farming interest and the rural labourer.⁸³

The second half of the nineteenth century was an era of boom and bust in British farming, and a period in which the line of georgic literature grows more faint.⁸⁴ After the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846 there began a golden age for agriculture, the period of ‘High Farming’, during which improvement was underpinned by (among other things) a thoroughly scientific foundation, the introduction of mechanized reaping and mowing machines, and a significant increase in capital inputs.⁸⁵ At the beginning of his period, R. S. Surtees wrote his third novel featuring the Cockney grocer Mr Jorrocks, Hillingdon Hall (serialized 1843–4), to satirize the laissez-faire economics of the Whig agricultural interest. Surtees does not want to discourage progress in farming, but rather to ‘repress the wild schemes of theoretical men’. Jorrocks offers the improving Duke of Donkeyton the sensible concession that ‘drainin’s a grand diskivery, your Greece, it’s the foundation of all agricultural improvement’.⁸⁶ Representing the progressive party in these years is Alfred Tennyson’s character Sir Walter Vivian, the ‘great broad-shouldered genial Englishman’ who we see opening his similarly broad lawns for a kind of local science fair in ‘The Princess’ (1847):

A touch of satire is felt still, but the progressives were clearly set up on the winning side of the argument for the third quarter of the century. Yet from the 1870s into the early twentieth century British farming suffered one of its most sustained economic depressions.⁸⁸ Few were left untouched. The power of landowner-aristocrats such as Sir Walter was eventually broken, and many farmers and workers followed the sad advice given by Thomas Hardy in his study of the Depression’s impact, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883): ‘to adopt the remedy of locomotion for the evils of oppression and poverty – charms which compensate in some measure for the lost sense of home’.⁸⁹ As Andrew Radford shows in Chapter 10 of this collection, Hardy and the essayist Richard Jefferies are examples of writers who resisted the tendency to pastoralize the representation of rural work during the decades of depression, providing instead an ‘excavation of those partially concealed patterns of civic strife, exploitation and bare subsistence that comprise the farmer’s lot’.

The Twentieth Century

The early decades of the twentieth century were another historical hotspot for English georgic writing. Once again this reflects a period of continuing difficulties for British farming. When the adventure writer and Norfolk landowner Henry Rider Haggard completed his tour of twenty-seven English agricultural counties in 1906, his general impression was one of depopulation and rural dereliction, a picture that he swathed with biblical gloom:

There was a countervailing trend as well: city-dwellers flowed from towns into new suburban villas – built often on plots that had been received as enclosure allotments and then sold on by former cottagers – and the countryside was rediscovered by a new class of residents with no immediate interest in the land. The account that George Sturt gave of these changes to his semi-rural corner of Surrey in 1912 was an influential one: ‘The population of some five hundred twenty years ago has increased to over two thousand; the final shabby patches of the old heath are disappearing; on all hands glimpses of new building and raw new roads defy you to persuade yourself that you are in a country place’.⁹¹ Sturt was one of a generation of memoirists scrabbling to record what remained of a traditional way of life connected to the land. Writers had been complaining about the retreat of these rural cultures for centuries, but the losses of the early twentieth century really were of an extreme order. Sturt’s concern was with the vanishing rural crafts-knowledge of wheelwrights and blacksmiths; others dedicated themselves to national societies for the preservation of folk-lore (founded 1878), folk-song (founded 1898) and folk-dance (founded 1911). These projects often have a sense of belatedness hanging over them, and a suspicion that their middle-class organizers are making what remains of a deep-rooted rural culture even more hollowed-out by virtue of their participation. It is harder to hear the voices of working country people in early twentieth-century rural literature than it had been in the age of Bloomfield and Clare a century earlier. Rider Haggard, for example, was conspicuously reluctant to extend his rural surveys to labouring-class countrymen or their representatives, as readers noticed at the time.⁹² Even Sturt was not excepted from Raymond Williams’s cutting verdict, that since the beginning of the century ‘we have had country writing that moves, at times grossly, at times imperceptibly, from record to convention and back again, until these seem inextricable’.⁹³ The problematic conventions were those of myth, nostalgia, ‘half-history’, and the literary canon: even an allusion to Virgil’s Georgics was enough turn off Williams in dismay.⁹⁴

In economic terms, the 1920s were especially hard years for agriculture, following the ‘Great Betrayal’ of the Conservative coalition government, which dropped guaranteed farm prices in 1921. From a September 1920 peak of over three times the levels seen at the beginning of the Great War in 1911, prices fell swiftly by almost 50 per cent to the end of 1922, and continued to contract nearly to pre-war levels by 1933.⁹⁵ Writing in 1939, A. G. Street observed that ‘even today the burden of that piece of political treachery presses hardly on some farmers’ and, remarkably, the events of 1921 are still being invoked as a warning in the farming press today.⁹⁶ It was during the 1920s that Vita Sackville-West wrote The Land (1926), a late, prize-winning and bestselling coda to the line of full-scale English georgic poems that runs back to Thomson’s Seasons, as Juan Christian Pellicer shows in Chapter 11 of this volume. Her georgic poetry ‘from first to last … develops Virgil’s fundamental idea that agriculture is an alternative form of warfare’, writes Pellicer, ‘waged not against human adversaries but against a recalcitrant natural world bent on speeding everything towards the worse (“in peius ruere”, Georgics I, 200)’. A direct commentary on the experience of farming in the 1920s is given in Street’s memoir Farmer’s Glory (1932). Street belonged to a generation made briefly rich by high war-time prices (‘farmers swanked’, he recalls), but for whom, by the mid-1920s, ‘ruin gibbered in the background not so very far away’.⁹⁷ Only a wholesale switch from arable to dairy and the lucky adoption of a new mobile milking rig saved him from bankruptcy. The trilogy of farming memoirs written in the same years by Adrian Bell (Corduroy, 1930; The Silver Ley, 1931; The Cherry Tree, 1932) are more recognizably georgic in the sharp lyricism of their descriptions of land and crop. Yet there is also the sense in these books of the author as a well-resourced incomer reluctant to look squarely at the adversity that his neighbours and employees were obliged to face. In Chapter 4 of this collection Paul Brassley concludes from his survey of these books that they leave the ambivalent and characteristically georgic impression ‘that a life in farming might mean fulfilling daily involvement with satisfying and technically advanced work for some of its practitioners, but that for others, possibly the majority, it was about struggle and worry’.

By the mid-1920s writing with a georgic accent was making a relatively small contribution, despite Sackville-West, to the general chorus of rural literature and commentary. The loudest voice of all was heard in a much-reported speech of 6 May 1924 by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to the Royal Society of St George. The same noises of lost rural labour that George Sturt had recalled the year before in The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) still chink and clank through Baldwin’s patriotic declamation:

Baldwin had been in coalition government at the time of the great betrayal of 1921, so it was daring of him to imagine a British (or at least English) agricultural sector pitched backwards into the pre-mechanized past. Four years later Baldwin spoke at another annual dinner, this time for the Royal Literary Fund, and mentioned as an example of neglected rural writing the novels of Mary Webb: ‘her characters really are the creation of the country’ – and that is why, Baldwin imagined, ‘the appeal fails’ for a generation no longer in touch with country smithies and plough teams.⁹⁹ Baldwin’s recommendation caused such a demand for novels by Webb, who had died the year before, that a new collected edition was swiftly published, with the prime minister providing a ghost-written preface to Precious Bane (1924), Webb’s story about ambition and passion in a remote Shropshire village.¹⁰⁰ However, the posthumous success of Webb’s novels, and of similarly turbulent rural romances written by Sheila Kaye-Smith, author of Sussex Gorse (1916) and Susan Spray (1931), precipitated another reaction. In 1932, Stella Gibbons published Cold Comfort Farm, a determinedly urbane satire on Webb, Kaye-Smith and a line of wild-eyed, heathery rural novelists going back through the Powys brothers, D. H. Lawrence and Hardy to Emily Brontë.¹⁰¹ Susanne Joinson places Cold Comfort Farm precisely in its upland setting in Chapter 14 of this collection. Gibbons was not the only one exasperated by the excesses of rural writing. Mr Salter, foreign editor of the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s satire Scoop (1938), finds the logical counterpoint to Baldwin’s nostalgic, cacophonous patriotism: ‘there was something un-English and not quite right about “the country”’, according to Salter, ‘with its solitude and self-sufficiency, its bloody recreations, its darkness and silence and sudden, inexplicable noises’.¹⁰² Early twentieth-century georgic receded into the widening gap between conservative sentiment, agricultural science and modernistic satire.

In the second half of the twentieth century any connections that remained between changes in the UK agricultural sector and literary writing that reflected them became increasingly complicated and irregular. As Paul Brassley notes in this volume, rural fiction written for adult readers ‘has been much less prominent since the Second World War than it was in the interwar years’, when a little over two hundred rural novels (by Glen Cavaliero’s estimate) were published.¹⁰³ Raymond Williams noticed during his lifetime an inverse proportion ‘between the relative importance of the working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas’.¹⁰⁴ When he wrote this in 1973, the balance was perhaps finer than he thought. The farming sector enjoyed the importance of success. It had made extraordinary gains after the war, with outputs per worker rising 46 per cent over just ten years after 1949, and British wheat yields going up by as much as 67 per cent between 1945 and 1960, powered by the development of artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pest controls.¹⁰⁵ Wheat fields that yielded 2 tonnes of grain per acre during the Second World War were producing over 7 tonnes per acre by the 1990s.¹⁰⁶ However, they did so in a diminishing human context, and at great ecological cost. In 1945–50 there were 865,000 agricultural workers on British farms; by 1981–5 there were 314,000, shrinking to 200,000 by the 1990s.¹⁰⁷ Even the small pockets of precious landscape subject to environmental protection as SSIs (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) were often damaged or destroyed by high-input intensive farming.¹⁰⁸ Throughout this period the rural ideas to which Williams ascribed significance in 1973 – the enduring iconicity of country houses, the poetics of natural description, the resonance of rural memoir – were fairly prominent, especially the third category, which included widely distributed works such as Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) and Ronald Blythe’s Suffolk composite Akenfield (1969). Yet their cultural impact was small in comparison with their equivalents today, as we will see in the next section.

What did remain strong across the middle of the century was a connection between high modernism in literature and advanced agricultural thinking. In Chapter 2 Alexandra Harris makes the case for reading Ford Madox Ford through a georgic lens. Lines of positive influence have been found between the writings of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and the organic movement as it emerged during the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁰⁹ At the time Edmund Wilson assumed that Virgil’s didactics were antithetical to the poetics of ‘pure vision’ that Eliot set out in his early critical essays. Yet Eliot himself saw the Georgics as vitally relevant to his age, arguing that ‘the attitude towards the soil, and the labour of the soil’ that they expressed ‘is something that we ought to find particularly intelligible now, when urban agglomeration, the flight from the land, the pillage of the earth, and the squandering of natural resources are beginning to attract attention’.¹¹⁰ In Chapter 12 of this collection Jack Thacker shows how the Georgics continued to operate as an influence on the generation of poets that succeeded Eliot, lingering ‘at the margins of the literary mainstream, albeit in a diminished form and largely unrecognised’. They are a shadowy presence in Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary (1979) and, Thacker argues, in Alice Oswald’s river-haunting topographical poem Dart (2002). Their significance has been acknowledged more directly in recent Irish poetry, where the Virgil scholar Richard F. Thomas has found a pointed ‘georgics of resistance’ in work by Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Peter Fallon, tougher and darker than the English strain of modernist georgic.¹¹¹

The Twenty-First Century

The inverted proportions between the economic power of British farming and the cultural power of ruralism detected by Raymond Williams in 1973 has become even more pronounced in recent decades. Membership numbers at the National Trust, a common index for the interest in country houses that Williams identified especially with British rural ideas, has risen from 226,200 in 1970 to a high-point of 5.95 million in 2019–20.¹¹² On 7 February 2016, a peak of 9.6 million viewers were tuned in to the BBC1 rural affairs magazine Countryfile, far outnumbering the 5.7 million viewers who watched a big-budget adaptation of War and Peace on the same day.¹¹³ Each year a growing number of popular rural and ‘New Nature Writing’ titles appear in bookshops, supported by their own national award (the Wainwright Prize was founded in 2014) and by specialist publishers.¹¹⁴ While country-facing culture has boomed, the relative economic significance of the agricultural sector has been shrinking, to the point that rural cultural services now contribute more to the nation’s coffers than big agribusiness. In 1973, agriculture accounted for 2.6 per cent of the UK economy; by 2020 that contribution had shrunk to under 0.5 per cent.¹¹⁵ Total income from UK farming was valued at £4.1 billion, less than a tenth of the £48 billion impact that English domestic tourism has on the UK economy, and slightly less than the £5.5 billion contributed to it from England’s National Parks alone in 2017.¹¹⁶ Agricultural holdings take up almost three-quarters of the UK’s total land area, but their position in the economy looks increasingly marginal.

There is no way to estimate what proportion of the UK’s rural culture can be described meaningfully as georgic – that is, concerned with productive work connected with the land – but it cannot be a large part. As far as literary culture is concerned, books on farming are outnumbered vastly by popular titles that focus on rural recreation, on nature cures of various kinds, or on evocations of the wilder parts of the countryside. Conventional farming makes only rare appearances on the New Nature Writing stage, cast typically as the villain of the piece.¹¹⁷ However, there are signs that this may be changing. Bella Bathurst’s Field Work (2021) is a deeply attentive portrait of modern British farming, unflinching before the daily horrors faced by stock-keepers, vets and knackermen, undeterred by the defensiveness and secrecy of the sector. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s experimental memoir The Grassling (2019) digs its fingers deeply into the redland clay of Ide, the Devon village where she grew up and her forebears farmed, working to articulate ‘a sense of self so deeply tangled in the soil that it is impossible to say who owns who’.¹¹⁸ Melissa Harrison’s novels dwell often on the joys of paying close attention to otherwise unnoticed British farming landscapes. In her second, At Hawthorn Time (2015), Culverkeys Farm is a recently lost component in the village life of Lodeshill, glimpsed at a closure sale; in her third, All Among the Barley (2018), set in the 1930s, Wych Farm moves centre stage, as Harrison explores the different sorts of love – fierce, proprietorial, ideological – that her characters have for a small plot of East Anglian clay.¹¹⁹ Other recent novels with georgic colourings include Tom Bullough’s Addlands (2016), in which the pugilistic Radnorshire farmer Oliver Hamer becomes the unwitting subject of georgic (or ‘Post-Pastoral’) poetry by his lover Naomi Chance, and Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country (2008), in which the teenage son of a hill farmer, Sam Marsdyke, descends into psychosis among the North Yorkshire moors. As the relative contribution of British agriculture to the national economy diminishes, these books show that farming communities remain the key component in contemporary representations of the land.

The idea of georgic is likely to be more useful for readers today as a frame for interpretation than as an essential category of literary genre. As we have seen, georgic writing has a well-defined set of themes: the demands of unremitting labour that recursive nature makes on productive communities; the relationship that human settlements have with unsettling histories of violence or usurpation; the reciprocal moral demands that humans and companion species make upon one another. Sometimes the reoccurrence of these themes in modern georgic literature is a matter of direct influence or of tacit cultural convention, in which case it makes sense to think of it in terms of genre or mode. However, they refer also to logics of human practice that are interconnected in ways that georgic writing has itself evolved to reflect: the anthropology of European land settlement connects with western legal codes relating to labour and property rights; the law of conflict resolution connects with the politics of nation and empire; the genetics of seed crops and domesticated animals connect with the economics of food production. It is inevitable that writers should follow the interconnections between these topics independently of literary convention.

This means that books with an apparently anti-georgic character – including rural memoirs critical of modern farming practices – can have a georgic structure of ideas. An example is George Monbiot’s Feral (2013), which advocates for rewilding in the UK. The book is angry at how modern British agriculture excludes people from access to the countryside and reduces natural environments to monocultures. Yet the author’s ethic of strenuous engagement with the natural world has its own georgic character. His dangerous and exhausting kayak expeditions to fish for mackerel in Cardigan Bay, for example, show all the spirit of Virgil’s famous simile for the tenure of humans in the natural world:

In a later chapter, Monbiot gives a sympathetic hearing to Dafydd Morris-Jones, a Cambrian hill farmer who makes an eloquent case against rewilding, and for the undocumented culture of his disappearing community.¹²¹ Placing a book like Feral in a georgic frame sets off the pragmatic human scale of its proposals, as distinct from the more radical exclusions of deep ecologists – whatever farmers might think about Monbiot’s proposals for (re-)introducing megafauna such as wisent and elephants to the British countryside. The descriptive didactics of the English georgic tradition have been succeeded by the auto-didactics of the new nature writers.

In the third decade of the twentieth-first century, our idea of the history of English georgic writing has two especially powerful forces reshaping the frame it gives us on working rural environments in the British Isles. The first is the changing understanding readers have of how the strenuous, anti-atrophic energy registered in domestic georgic writing should be identified with the expansive and expropriating energy of imperialism. This understanding is likely to continue to shape our sense of the English georgic canon. James Grainger’s plantation didactic The Sugar-Cane (1764) has been the subject over recent years of more monographic academic articles than any other English georgic, taking a central position in post-imperial readings of the genre.¹²² It is not clear, however, whether Grainger’s blithe and self-exonerating representations of the Caribbean slave economy will find a place in tomorrow’s de-colonized research programmes.¹²³ In the concluding chapter of this collection, Charlie Kerrigan looks again at how georgic ‘has been implicated in imperial politics, imagining the world and its peoples from imperial centres in ways which appear to normalize and promote the subjection of imperial subjects’.

A second force that is shaping the course of contemporary English georgic writing is the influence of American agrarianism. In Chapter 15 of this collection, Sarah Wagner-McCoy traces a tradition of American georgic writing that displays more ethical intensity and more moral jeopardy than its British equivalents. From the ideally virtuous husbandman of Thomas Jefferson to the sainted bean-hoeing intellectual of Henry David Thoreau, agrarian writers have taken up the task of imagining an American model for citizenship and selfhood in the figure of the small farmer. Yet the Civil War-era georgics of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Carter Lee and Charles Chesnutt discussed by Wagner-McCoy reveal intractable complications behind the ideology of agricultural independence: ‘Like Virgil’s Georgics, which holds out the promise of progress in a fallen world but shows the human and environmental costs of the hard work it seems to promote’, she writes, ‘complex US adaptations of the georgic mode illuminate the destructive forces of agricultural labour, and the moral ambiguities of imperial expansion and racialized labour.’ Chesnutt in particular uses Virgilian models ‘to represent the experience of black labourers whose knowledge and skills shaped and were shaped by the land’. The discourse of American agrarianism is more urgent and direct than its British equivalent, because the topics of American agrarianism are more deeply contested, and play out for higher moral stakes.

It may be a consequence of these heightened circumstances that writers of international standing have emerged from American farming communities during the second half of the twentieth century. Their influence is felt increasingly in contemporary English georgic writing. The Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry is the most celebrated of these American voices. His agrarian essays set out a complementary vision of ecological stewardship and faithfulness to place. Berry’s writings on agriculture, along with those of his contemporaries Gary Snyder and Wes Jackson, advocate passionate dwelling in local environments, with a commitment to the land so intense that some atonement might even begin for the historical abuse of enslaved workers and indigenes.¹²⁴ Their agendas are full of georgic themes, particularly in their shared concern for the ethics of agricultural work. Other American environmentalist thinkers have developed the positions taken by Berry and Snyder, criticizing how some ecologists have idealized wilderness states in the natural world. Wherever nature is represented negatively in terms of human exclusion, writes William Cronon, ‘we leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honourable human place in nature might actually look like’.¹²⁵ Personal labour is central once again to these theorizations of an ‘everyday nature’: ‘we cannot come to terms with nature’, suggests Richard White, ‘without coming to terms with our own work, our own bodies, our own bodily labour’.¹²⁶ This is a characteristically georgic line of thinking, and it corresponds with arguments made by two very different contemporary British writers for whom Wendell Berry has been an important influence. One is Paul Kingsnorth, in his recent accounts of retreating from environmental activism into a laborious new life on a smallholding in the west of Ireland: ‘I am learning what to make of it’, he reports, ‘slowly and clumsily and often impatiently, and it is work that I will never get enough of, and I will never master.’¹²⁷ The other, to complete the long circuit of this introductory survey, is James Rebanks, who acknowledges Berry’s influence on his own writing in English Pastoral. One characteristic distinction between recent agricultural writing from the British Isles and its American forebears is the former’s responsiveness to the much older landscapes in which it is set. ‘Our land is like a poem’, writes Rebanks, ‘in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience’.¹²⁸ This book tells the five-hundred-year story of how writers have read the signs of husbandry, labour and cultivation – sometimes much older than their own working traditions – as a poem left upon a particular plot of land.