Abstract
By the 1830s the tourist in search of the picturesque was likely to be a metropolitan man out of sympathy with sporting culture. In Melesina Bowen’s poem Ystradffin (1839), a tourist meets a Welsh guide ‘of a grade beyond the peasants, who usually attend on such occasions, both in rank and intelligence’.2 The guide represents the poorer rural classes, and the tourist, metropolitan middle-class mobility. The picturesque had become by 1839 what it is today, ‘an aesthetic for the increasingly affluent town and city dwellers’.3 A difference of opinion soon arises between them regarding country sports. During their ride to Ystradffin from Llandovery, there is the sound of hunting in the distance, and the guide’s melancholy, induced by memories of the late-lamented owner of the estate of Neuadd, vanishes when he hears hounds:
… a distant sound
Of Sportsman’s shout, and yelping hound;
Quickly dispers’d the unwonted sigh,
Uplifts his head, and lights his eye.
Ther is a saying emong hunters that he cannot be a gentlemen whyche loveth not hawkyng and hunting, which I have hard old woodmen wel allow as an approved sentence among them. The like sayinge is that hee cannot be a gentleman whych loveth not a dogge …
Anon., The Institucion of a Gentleman (1568)1
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Notes
Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 117.
Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, passim; and for a good regional study, Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon During the English Civil War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994).
Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957). I thank Margaret Ferguson for suggesting that Milton was relevant to this inquiry.
Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–23.
Robert Greene’s cony-catching texts of the 1590s are written in much the same irreverent, deliberately ‘low’, spirit as his contemporary Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller and other works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
On the most appropriate short title for this poem, commonly abbreviated as ‘Tintern Abbey’, see David Fairer, ‘“Sweet native stream!”: Wordsworth and the School of Warton’, in Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ and James G. Basker, eds, Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 314–38, esp. pp. 316–17. Nicholas Roe recovers some aspects of the poem’s contemporary politics in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 268–75, and The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 117–36.
See David Perkins, ‘Wordsworth and the Polemic Against Hunting: “Hart-Leap Well”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 52: 4 (March 1998): 421–45.
David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 141.
Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 91.
Dryden, ‘To my Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden, Of Chesterton In The County of Huntingdon, Esquire’, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 4: 11. 92–3.
[John Lilburne?], The hunting of the foxes from New-market and Triploe-heaths to White-hall, by five small beagles, late of the armie, or The grandie-deceivers unmasked. Directed to all the free-people of England by R. Ward, T. Watson [and 3 others.] (London, 1649). Bodleian Library shelfmark: G. Pamph. 111 7 (11). On this text, see David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 39–42.
Marvell, ‘The First Anniversary Of the Government under O.C.’, in H.M. Margoliouth, ed., The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd edn rev. by Pierre Legouis and E.E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1: 11. 125–6.
Buchan, A Prince of the Captivity (1933; Edinburgh: B & W Publishing, 1996), p. 47.
See, for example, Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 321–5; Turner, Politics of Landscape, pp. 49–61; and Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), pp. 45–88.
Wallace, ‘Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’, English Literary History 41: 4 (Winter 1974): 494–540; this passage p. 532.
Evelyn Philip Shirley, Some Account of English Deer Parks with notes on the management of deer (London: John Murray, 1867), pp. 47–8.
Vesey-FitzGerald, It’s My Delight (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947), pp. 130–4.
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). The Sporting Life. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_5
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