Views of the landscape

In a talk on Monday (20 May 2013) Dr Simon Nightingale will explore how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into the literature of agricultural improvement in a way that might surprise modern readers. Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences. Dr Simon Nightingale The second half of the18th century witnessed a revolution in agriculture driven by individuals who saw in the emerging scientific methods of producing food the means of securing wealth for themselves and prosperity for the nation. The contemporary sources that tell the story of these improvements in farming provide a window on how people saw the land in its role as a provider, and how they worked with the resources that nature offered on a practical level, putting into motion the practices developed through careful experimentation. A close reading of these publications and archival materials reveals a complex discourse which drew on artistic and literary traditions as well as the developing field of agricultural improvements. This overlap in the perceptions of land and landscape, how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into at least some of the literature of agricultural improvement, represents one of the strands of my current research as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). On Monday, 20 May I will be talking about, 'Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c 1770-c 1820', in a presentation that will discuss how one man in particular - Arthur Young - embodied this blurring of boundaries.