Chapter 7 - Enlightenment, Improvement and Experimentation

Summary

The eighteenth century is the richest period of georgic writing in English literary history. No era before or since exhibits a like range of experimentation with the georgic form, from translations and formal imitations of the Virgilian original to prose essays, pamphlets, treatises, periodicals and technical manuals. Though various in form and purpose, these texts declare their georgic affiliation by the tropes and themes they employ and by the structure of feeling they evoke. This chapter explores four of these distinguishing features: persistent authorial reflection on the style appropriate to georgic writing (elaborate or plain, poetic or technical?), the labour of the farmer and that of the writer, variety and miscellaneity in the georgic and traditional farming practices versus experimentation. These characteristic concerns are taken up by writers with a wide range of thematic preoccupations: agriculture, labour, sport, human health, mining, manufacturing, empire, nationhood, political economy and slavery.