Making the rural home in nineteenth-century British literature

Making the Rural Home in Nineteenth-Century British Literature focuses upon how the rural home maintains its symbolic and cultural importance throughout the entire nineteenth century. Persistently reiterated within poetry, novels, travelogues, and other nonfiction texts, the rural home constantly resurfaces as a way to evaluate the status and identity of the English people and England itself. An idealized, representative model, the rural home gains longevity and cultural power through its constant repetition and lingers on as an element of residual culture, promoting beliefs and practices of an earlier agrarian nation. Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, and Charlotte Smith define the rural home and its family dynamics as a privileged but potentially vulnerable paradigm for nation and national identity. In the Romantic model of the rural home, the success of the entire family depends upon the contributions of each family member, which by analogy demonstrates that national success hinges upon citizens fulfilling gender-based obligations. Mid-Victorian texts persistently perpetuate the symbolic image of the rural home in political debates about progress. Novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Chartist writers such as Feargus O'Connor and Ernest Jones variously represent the rural home as a possible alternative to modernization and factory life. For nineteenth-century travelers, such as Alexander William Kinglake, Samuel Baker, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird, the rural home serves as a comparative point for defining and creating an identity and a temporary home abroad. Late Victorians such as Thomas Hardy and H. Rider Haggard indicate that the metaphoric relationship between home and nation remains an ideologically potent cultural aspect of consequence to end-of-the century debates about modernity. Perennially present, the nostalgic image of the rural home circulates and recirculates, defining and redefining the way that nineteenth-century Britons conceive of themselves as a people and as a nation.