Abstract
Peter Hunt’s observation that the landscape of camping and tramping fiction is always ‘enviably empty’ is particularly apposite, as it both points to emptiness as a convention of the genre and alludes to the desire for privacy and peace that motivates many people, both in the past and the present, to go out into the countryside.1 It really does not matter which country or region the books were set in, or what the topography was, the main point was that it offered an empty and tranquil landscape that was valued in part because of the quietude it offered. As such, the genre reflects what Raphael Samuel describes as ‘the fetishization of the unspoiled’ that dominated British landscape taste in the interwar years and which was somewhat predicated on the ability to imagine the countryside as a private, hence empty, space.2 The imaginative emptying of the British landscape certainly did not begin in the 1930s, and in imagining the countryside in this way, children’s camping and tramping literature continued a process that Ysanne Holt traces back to the landscape painting of the 1900s. Holt argues that this aesthetic emptying prepared the countryside ‘to be that place of private middle-class contemplation, unhindered by the presence of others, natives or otherwise’.3 As Alex Potts notes though, the insistence on the peace and tranquillity of the landscape ‘excluded many people’s notions of what was enjoyable, or desirable, about a visit to the countryside, most notably its sociable aspects’.4
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Notes
Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 122.
Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting: AMemoir’, in Island Stories. Unravelling Britain. Theatres of Memory, Volume II, ed. by Alison Light (London: Verso. 1998), pp. 132–52 (143).
Ysanne Holt, ‘An Ideal Modernity: Spencer Gore at Letchworth’, in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, ed. by David Peters, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 91–113 (110, 107).
Alex Potts, ‘Constable Country between the Wars’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. III: National Fictions, ed. by Raphael Samuel (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 160–8 (164).
Malcolm Saville, Country Scrap-Book for Boys and Girls, 3rd edn (1944; London: Gramol, 1946), blurb on the front inside sleeve of the dust jacket.
Garry Hogg, Explorers on the Wall (1939; London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948), pp. 35, 250, 251.
Gordon Stables, Leaves from the Log of a Gentleman Gypsy: In Wayside Camp and Caravan (1891; London: Jarrold & Sons, 1931), p. 80.
M. E. Atkinson, The Compass Points North (London: The Bodley head, 1938), p. 38.
While imagery of South Country may have dominated British inter-war landscape taste, it did not go entirely unchallenged. Other more ‘masculine’ landscape tastes, centred for example on the Peak District, offered some resistance to the cultural hegemony of the southern country. On South Country, see Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), and Potts, ‘Constable Country’, p. 167. On the masculine aesthetics of the Peaks, see Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting’, p. 133, and
Melanie Tebbutt, ‘Rambling and Manly Identity in Derbyshire’s Dark Peak, 1880–1920s’, The Historical Journal, 49.4 (2006), 1125–53.
Norman Ellison, Adventuring with Nomad, illus. by C. F. Tunnicliffe (London: University of London Press, 1950), p. 44.
See Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 62–89 (68); Potts, ‘Constable Country’, p. 173, and
David Matless, Landscapes and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 16.
Stefan Szczelkun has challenged how progressive Clough Williams-Ellis was and argues that he belittled working-class taste and culture. See Stefan Szczelkun, The Conspiracy of Good Taste. William Morris, Cecil Sharp, Clough Williams-Ellis and the Repression of Working-Class Culture in the 20th Century (London: Working Press, 1993).
Thomas Sharp, Town and Countryside (1932), quoted in Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 33.
J. B. Priestley, Our Nation’s Heritage (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1939), p. 166.
H. H. Symonds, Walking in the Lake District (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1935), p. viii.
Carol Forrest, Caravan School (London: Arthur Pearson, 1946), pp. 134, 28–9, 192.
H. V. Morton, In Search of England (1927; London: Methuen, 1954), p. 9.
See George Sturt, Change in the Village (1912; London; Duckworth, 1920), and
F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and the Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto and Windus, 1934).
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land. The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quarter Books, 1982).
David Gervais, Literary Englands. Versions of Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 174.
Andrew Thompson has argued that despite wage rises in real terms, working-class purchases were usually determined by price and afford-ability more than anything else, and certainly more than ideological or political considerations. Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 25.
Arthur Ransome, The Big Six (1940; London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 50.
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (1930; London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 150; subsequent quotations from pp. 148, 153, 372.
John Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, in Class, Culture and Social Change. A New View of the 1930s, ed. by F. Glover Smith (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 269.
M. E. Atkinson, Unexpected Adventure (London: The Children’s Book Club, n.d.), p. 19.
Quoted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, Writing Englishness 1900–1950: An Introductory Source Book on National Identity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 85.
Ian Jeffrey, The British Landscape, 1920–1950 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 10.
Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 470–1.
Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, Escape to Persia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), p. 208.
M. E. Atkinson, August Adventure (1936; London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), p. 260.
Patricia Rae, ‘Double Sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth Century Literature, 49.2 (2003), 246–75 (247).
David Severn, Waggon for Five (London: The Bodley Head, 1944), p. 93.
J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in Tree and Leaf (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), pp. 9–73 (62).
David Severn, Hermit in the Hills, illus. by J. Kiddell-Monroe (London: John Lane, 1945), pp. 195–6.
John Baxendale, ‘“I had Seen a Lot of Englands”: J. B. Priestley, Englishness and the People’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (Spring, 2001), 87–111 (94).
David Matless, ‘Moral Geography in Broadland’, Cultural Geographies, 1.2 (1994), 127–55 (127).
See Simon Stewart, Culture and the Middle Classes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 27;
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory, 7.2 (1989), 14–25 (23).
From William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, quoted in Nigel Curry, Countryside Recreation, Access and Land Use Planning (London: E & FN Spon, 1994), p. 3.
A G. Bradley, Highways and Byways in the Lake District (London: Macmillan & Co., 1908), p. 3.
G. Bramwell Evens, A Romany in the Fields, illus. by Bramwell Evens, 10th edn (1929; London: Epworth Press, 1938), p. 55.
B. L. Thompson, The Lake District and the National Trust (Kendal: Titus Wilson & Sons, 1946), p. 33.
Marjorie Lloyd, Fell Farm for Christmas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 22.
Paul Fussell, Abroad, British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 47.
Marjorie Lloyd, Fell Farm Campers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 111.
Winifred Finlay Cotswold Holiday, illus. by Sheila MacGregor (London: George Harrap, 1954), p. 31.
Quoted in Stella Margetson, Leisure and Pleasure in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cassell, 1969), p. 82.
Stuart Chase, Men and Machines (1929; New York: Macmillan, 1930); both quotations from p. 257.
Arthur Ransome, The Picts and the Martyrs: or Not Welcome at All (1943; London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), pp. 145, 153.
Arthur Ransome, Secret Water (1939; London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), pp. 282–3.
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976; repr. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 10.
Karen Welberry, ‘Arthur Ransome and the Conservation of the English Lakes’, in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Eco-Criticism, ed. by Sidney Dobrin and Kenneth. B. Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 82–100 (89, 93).
Arthur Ransome, Signalling from Mars. The Letters of Arthur Ransome, ed. by Hugh Brogan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 163.
Malcolm Saville, Mystery at Witchend (London: George Newnes, 1943), p. 44.
Malcolm Saville, Lone Pine Five (London: George Newnes, 1949), p. 9.
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934; London: Heinemann, 1949), p. 401.
Arthur Ransome, Coot Club (1934; London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 65, 91.
John Sheail, Rural Conservation in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 181.
Geollrey Trease, Mystery on the Moor (London: A & C Black, 1937), pp. 192, 193 (emphasis in original).
Geollrey Trease, Walking in England (1935; Wisbech, UK: The Fenland Press, 1936), p. 11.
Norman Ellison, Northwards with Nomad, illus. by C. F. Tunniclille (London University Press, 1951), pp. 81, 82.
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© 2014 Hazel Sheeky Bird
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Bird, H.S. (2014). Landscape and Tourism in the Camping and Tramping Countryside. In: Class, Leisure and National Identity in British Children’s Literature, 1918–1950. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_4
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