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Patrician Landscapes and the Picturesque in Nottinghamshire c.1750–c.1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

RICHARD A. GAUNT
RICHARD A. GAUNT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK [email protected]
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Abstract:

This article considers the Dukeries estates of north Nottinghamshire in the heyday of aristocratic power and prestige, from the mid Georgian to the mid Victorian period. It poses a contrast between visitors' impressions of the area as one of constancy and continuity, a point of reassurance in an age of political and social upheaval, and the reality of internal changes from within. Closely crowded as these estates were, their aristocratic owners competed with one another to fashion the most economically viable and aesthetically pleasing symbol of status and power. The article pays close attention to the hold which picturesque principles exercised on individual owners and considers the role of plantation, animals and water in parkland management and improvement. Finally, the article considers the extent to which the estates were sites of contestation. Owners attempted to keep unwanted plebeian incursions at bay, whilst carefully controlling access on set-piece occasions such as coming-of-age festivities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , October 2015 , pp. 161 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

Notes

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63. Newcastle Diary, 13th-19th October 1831 in Gaunt, Unhappy Reactionary, pp. 84–6.

64. Curtis described the Reform Riots as ‘a standing reproach and monument of outrages resulting from some of the basest of human passions, revenge and personal antipathy, from a mere difference of political opinion’: Nottinghamshire, p. xv.

65. Cowell, ‘Landscape’, pp. 61, 210, 213; the political dimensions of the picturesque are explored in Williamson, T., Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Stroud, 1995)Google Scholar and Copley, S. and Garside, P., eds, The Politics of the Picturesque (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar

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68. Cowell, ‘Landscape’, p. 113.

69. See Fowkes, D. V., ‘Nottinghamshire Parks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 71 (1967), 72–89 Google Scholar; Fowkes, D. V., ‘The Breck System of Sherwood Forest’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 81 (1977), 55–61.Google Scholar

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73. In this respect, the Dukeries were typical of the English aristocracy as a whole; Beckett, Aristocracy, pp. 206–86.

74. A process described widely in Mandler, Peter, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (Yale, 1999)Google Scholar and locally in Matthew Kempson, ‘The State and the Country House in Nottinghamshire, 1937–1967’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, 2006).