Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

The Silvicultural Novel

Anna Burton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, ecological, geographical, and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century.

Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel identifies the picturesque thinker William Gilpin as a significant influence in this literary and environmental tradition. Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791) is formed by Gilpin's own observations of trees, forests, and his New Forest home specifically; but it is also the product of tree-stories collected from 'travellers and historians' that came before him. This study tracks the impact of this accumulating arboreal discourse upon nineteenth-century environmental writers such as John Claudius Loudon, Jacob George Strutt, William Howitt, and Mary Roberts, and its influence on varied dialogues surrounding natural history, agriculture, landscaping, deforestation, and public health. Building upon this concept of an ongoing silvicultural discussion, the monograph examines how novelists in the realist mode engage with this discourse and use their understanding of arboreal space and its cultural worth in order to transform their own fictional environments. Through their novelistic framing of single trees, clumps, forests, ancient woodlands, and man-made plantations, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy feature as authors of particular interest. Collectively, in their environmental representations, these novelists engage with a broad range of silvicultural conversation in their writing of space at the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century.

This book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and academics working in the environmental humanities, long nineteenth-century literature, nature writing and environmental literature, environmental history, ecocriticism, and literature and science scholarship.

1 A silvicultural tradition

A silvicultural tradition is an ongoing series of writings that celebrate and reaffirm the presence of trees in the landscape: a long-standing network of texts that explore the relationship between arboreal space, human experience, cultural identities, and environmental history. Writers cross-reference and borrow anecdotes about significant specimens, forests, and woodlands from one another; and through this, there is an ongoing inheritance of silvicultural authority that can be traced across generations of tree-oriented study. This is a retrospective and enduring tradition of no fixed origin, but this book argues that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed an expanse of specific arboreal awareness. This particular span of time saw significant and lasting developments in the perception, perambulation, and utilisation of environment; and this had a corresponding impact on an arboreal scale too.

During the long nineteenth century, the continuation of parliamentary enclosures and increasing industrialisation meant that the landscapes of Britain were in a constant state of change. Notional and physical boundaries, often defined by the figure or grouping of the tree, were readjusted; landowners utilised trees to define the limits and aesthetics of their land to separate it from common use, and with this, a displaced rural population was moving into the country’s cities. With a growing urban populace, paradoxically, came a need for the preservation and creation of woodland, and a move towards the production of green spaces in the planning and caretaking of land, areas that were once again defined by the presence of trees and foliage. More specifically within this very broad course of events, the knowledge, perception, and use of trees developed significantly. In rural contexts, trees continued to form part of enclosed and politicised boundaries; deforestation and environmental pollution were emerging concerns; there were investigations into the benefits of trees to public health; developments in dendrological sciences, taxonomy, botany, and scientific forestry; an interest in arboretums, the preservation of woods and forests, and the planting of trees in parks and gardens. Moreover, as the following analysis illustrates, these dialogues cannot be considered distinct or absolute, but are often confluent with one another within a stream of silvicultural history and association. This multi-temporal mycorrhizal network of associated arboreal issues reflects the physical nature of the rooted and branching entities in question, and can be seen at work in the varied form and content of written silvicultural exchanges that discuss trees and tree culture(s).

This chapter establishes this association of arboreal authority for the first time, and highlights the crucial role of William Gilpin in the development of this silvicultural writing—and the perception of trees, woodland, and forests—in the long nineteenth century and beyond. This chapter provides an analytical overview and historicised contextualisation of Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views (Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty) Illustrated by the Scenes of the New Forest in Hampshire (1791/1794); and scrutinises this text’s place and relevance in relation to preceding and succeeding tree-writing, simultaneously.¹ Just like the picturesque and the politics of its aesthetics, the silvicultural network of writing is made up of intersecting and conflicting ideas about how, why, and to what purpose we perceive trees and tree cultures. Gilpin’s tree-writing is significant, not simply because it is part of a larger picturesque project, but because the very fluid form of this work allows it to engage with, and in some cases define, multiple strands of arboreal ideas and information, all at once. In form and content, Forest Scenery is a key touchstone for a productive understanding of complex arboreal interconnection(s), textual and otherwise.

In 1791, Gilpin published his Forest Scenery as three books within two volumes. This text builds on the formal arrangement of Gilpin’s picturesque principles, aesthetic essays, and regional tour writings. Forest Scenery incorporates these elements more broadly within a focused and extensive study of trees, forests, and woodland spaces; and explores the human and non-human relationships to be found therein, past and present. The first book takes a general view of single trees as individual objects, entities, and species; the second considers the aesthetic, formal, and historical qualities of trees in various combinations, from clumps and parkland scenery, to the forests of Britain; and the third consists of Gilpin’s own tour of the New Forest and its surrounding areas. The succeeding subsections of this analysis examine Forest Scenery’s books, and considers their content and relevance in relation to an ongoing network of silvicultural writing and context(s) into the nineteenth century. Following Gilpin’s own arrangement of ‘methodizing [his] remarks’ then, under three subsections this chapter considers trees ‘as single objects’; ‘under various modes of composition, from the clump to the forest’ (Gilpin, 1794, 1:iii), and then examines the New Forest as a specific case study, in order to reflect upon the human perception, navigation, and treatment of these tree spaces into the Victorian period. The fourth and final subsection of this chapter focuses on the subsequent developments in preservation and planting during a century of cultural, socio-political, scientific, and technological advancement. As a whole, this first study of a silvicultural tradition serves to provide an impression of the rich history of trees and tree spaces of interest during the long nineteenth century.²

Single trees and remarkable specimens

In its entirety, Forest Scenery isolates and makes a case for trees as ‘the grandest, and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth’ (Gilpin, 1794, 1:1); the first book looks at trees as individuals from an aesthetic, formal, and historical viewpoint. In principle, for Gilpin, a tree is pleasing to the eye if its form is made up of a harmony of parts, if there is a looseness to its extremities, and if there is a certain poise to how the bole supports the branches. Whilst Gilpin acknowledges that these components are not absolute, without ‘form, lightness and a proper balance, no tree can have that species of beauty, which we call picturesque’ (1794, 2:6). However, there are incidental qualities of ‘an adventitious kind’ that can ‘often add great beauty to [a tree]’ (1:7); for instance, the ‘variety of mosses’, ‘lychens’, and ‘liver-worts’ on its bark (1:10,12); the ‘ragged, scathed, and leafless’ aspect of a blasted specimen (1:14); the parasitical plants such as ivy that grow up the trunk; the raised and ‘radical knobs’ of the roots that ‘heave up’ amongst the soil (1:20); the motion of the tree itself and the ‘chequered shade, formed under it by the dancing of sun-beams among it’s [sic] playing leaves’ (1:22). A tree can be picturesque through the coincidence of natural circumstances and external influences.

In putting forward these ideas, Gilpin acknowledges that he is not fully conversant with ‘whatever names’ that the mosses and lichens are ‘distinguished’ as specifically, other than that they are ‘parasitical, as the botanist expressively calls them’ (1794, 1:12, 16). Equally, he admits that a number of his aesthetic views on the rough textures of old, hollow, or moss-covered trees value those ‘maladies, which our distressed naturalist bemoans with so much feeling’ (1:8). Despite Gilpin’s attempt to distance himself tentatively from the knowledge of botanists and naturalists, his work shows an awareness of these conversations that are occurring and developing in and around this arboreal subject matter. Across Forest Scenery, naturalists and natural historians interested in trees from Pliny onwards are consulted and referenced by Gilpin, and it is here where the ‘picturesque’ writer can be seen to engage with a silvicultural tradition of writing. In the case of the ‘distressed naturalist’ mentioned above, the author refers to an earlier horticulturalist, a ‘Mr Lawson’ (1:7) or William Lawson (1553/4–1635); he consults the naturalist and keeper of the Ashmolean, Robert Plot (1640–1696); and he refers to various members and transactions of the Royal Society more generally, including the naturalist Daines Barrington (1727/8–1800), and the natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). The natural historian and famous diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) is a key reference point for Gilpin throughout.

John Evelyn’s Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (1664) was a response to the arboreal destructions of the English civil war; through this treatise he wanted to draw attention to ‘concerns of the Improvement of the Royal Forests and other Timber-trees, for the Honour, Security and Benefit of the whole Kingdom’ (Evelyn, 1776: p. 464). In Silva, Evelyn appealed to the ‘Nobility and Gentry of the whole nation’ and to the reader’s sense of patriotic duty in encouraging landowners to repair their woodlands and plant more trees, ‘since there is nothing which seems to threaten a weakening, if not a dissolution of the strength of this famous and flourishing nation, than the decay of her wooden walls’ (Evelyn, 1776: pp. 1, 582). This visible arboreal presence was of vital importance for Evelyn as it served to reinforce English cultural identity, to remind the spectator of the historical and cultural past, and it was necessary that these entities would continue to shelter the nation physically for generations to come. Beryl Hartley makes the case that this text was a collaborative work between Evelyn and other members of the Royal Society; for instance, Hartley suggests that John Lightfoot (a botanist Gilpin had correspondence with) was one of the many contributors in later editions of the work that ‘incorporated Linnaeus’s taxonomic system and binomial nomenclature, [and] brought Evelyn’s advice up to date’ (Hartley, 2010: p. 233). In this case, in aligning Forest Scenery with Evelyn’s text, however subconsciously, Gilpin is already engaging with a pre-existing and ongoing network of arboreal conversations; at the very least, the repeated textual signposting to Silva situates his own tree-writing in the context of one of the most influential arboreal works ever written.

Subsequently, there is also evidence to suggest that Gilpin’s work was being read by such notable environmental figures of the time, with varying responses. For example, the Royal Society fellow Robert Marsham writes about this work (in a somewhat scoffing tone) in a letter to Gilbert White, and this statement is recorded in The Natural History of Selborne (1789):

I presume you have seen Gilpin’s Book of the Views in the new Forest, & noticed […] where he says the chestnut on M.AEtna is 204f. in circumf. Which he unluckily writes Diameter: as if the Tree was not large enough!

(White, 1877, 2:274–277)

Gilpin mistakes (or is misinformed of) the circumference of the tree in this instance, and is criticised subsequently for a lack of attention to such minutia and detail in his writing. However, as Gilpin’s own comments suggest, he never intended to be a naturalist in his own right; yet, there is a tension here as he directly and indirectly engages with this discourse throughout Forest Scenery. Much more than this, in subsequent tree-writing and catalogues into the nineteenth century, Gilpin himself features alongside these writers as an authority. As early as 1827, Gilbert Thomas Burnett even went as far as to call him a ‘natural historian’ in his own right (1827: p. 4; quoted in Hartley, 1996: p. 154). Moreover, as this chapter will highlight, Forest Scenery is referenced in the environmental works of Jacob George Strutt, John Claudius Loudon, Rebecca Hey, William Howitt, William Stephen Coleman, Charles Alexander Johns, Robert Tyas, and Mary Roberts. Even across the pond in Walden (1854) Henry David Thoreau consults ‘Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes’ for a discussion of forest borders (Thoreau, 2008: p. 257).

Figure 1.1 Anon. (1823) A Gnarled and Hollow Old Oak Tree (Quercus robur L.) Sheltering a Shepherd and His Sheep [Etching after J.G. Strutt]. Photograph courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Beyond general and formal aspects of trees in Forest Scenery, Gilpin catalogues the ‘principal characteristics of picturesque beauty, in most common [deciduous and evergreen] trees we have in England’ (Gilpin, 1794, 1:105); multiple specimens are discussed in terms of their appearance, qualities, and use, and are assessed according to the picturesque writer’s principles. The oak, ash, and elm are considered to be superior trees because they ‘are both the most useful, and the most picturesque’, they are visually appealing species in themselves and utilitarian in terms of their timber production too (1794, 1:45). As Gerry Barnes, Toby Pillatt, and Tom Williamson suggest, these three trees in particular predominate both physically and in the aforementioned tree-writings during this period, and ‘[two] main factors ensured their popularity: an ability to thrive in a wide variety of contexts and the wide range of uses to which their timber or wood could be put’ (Barnes, Pillatt, and Williamson, 2017: p. 103). For Gilpin, these trees unite picturesque and utilitarian ideas physically and notionally in a single entity; this is nowhere more apparent than in their branch ramification and spray wherein ‘industry and activity pervade every part’ (1794, 1:107). The appearance of the branches and knots is both aesthetically pleasing, and suggestive of a kind of productivity in the tree’s natural formation.

Though Gilpin admits that ‘many circumstances will make a difference; soil and climate especially’ (Gilpin, 1794, 1:116), the ramification and spray ...