A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll

From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss.

A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the "South Country" rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape-indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted "the very essence of England" itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.