Conclusion: culture's field, culture's vital robe

Summary

In nineteenth-century England ‘culture’ signified, variously, occupation and tilling of the land; the ‘harrowing of selves’; and, increasingly, a space which writers and critics came to see as ‘a court of appeal’ for issuing judgements and evaluations of human artistic and intellectual practices, and their educative capacity. The court of appeal was one venerated location within the totality of culture's sphere of operations, a sphere that came increasingly to be imagined as a field, thereby neatly looping back to the horticultural origins of the term. Conceiving the operations of culture's field always involved symbolic imaginings: from Wordsworth's wandering pedlar to J. H. Green's Coleridgean fenced field, cleared of noxious speculative growths, to Herbert Spencer's ghostly ‘secondary environment’ to J. G. Frazer's ‘ether’ mysteriously connecting the different strands of the ‘tangled skein’ of magic, science and religion and, finally, to T. H. Huxley's garden-colony, as both a site of judgement and a volatile ‘hothouse’ of symbolic activity. In imagining the power and reach of ‘culture’, scientific discourse, especially from the evolutionary life sciences, sought to engage audiences with the wonders of its new and challenging revelations, and to fashion symbolic substitutes for a crumbling Christian religion. In doing this, the life sciences contributed what Gabriel Tarde described as ‘insertions’ into various imaginings of culture's work. Those insertions gave rise to powerful supplementary meanings; in short, they have contributed to the emergence of a practice of counter-insertion that we recognise to be ‘literary’.