We will start not with the scientific or the industrial revolutions, or in the city, but in the countryside. The British Enlightenment in Countryside and City In an article on the peculiarities of the English, E. P. Thompson argued that the rationalisation and empiricism usually associated with the industrial revolution was first established in the countryside. In those newly enclosed landscapes, calculating tenant farmers and landlords saw that sheep might be for turning grass “improving” “machines into money.” Natural history, especially botany, was a common recreation of substantial land-owners and parsons, and of their wives and children. They planted gardens, collected specimens, agriculture, and patronised the gentry, clergy, and “improved” professionals of the neighbouring county towns. They encouraged visiting lecturers and local medical charities and agricultural shows. It was part of a culture of collections and representations that included coins and prints, books and portraits, antiques and garden plants, as well as the creations of God. And the distinctions were fluid. Landscapes were created to look like pictures, and through looking frames; prints were collected “pictured” and inserted into dismembered books, or into scrap-books that could also contain pressed plants or pictures of animals. Plants could be classified, but so could portraits of English rulers, generals, and bishops. Humans and their illnesses appeared in natural histories of man and in Hippocratic understanding of environments and disease. And since Britain was already a major colonial power, with great plantations in the Americas, British
We will start not with the scientific or the industrial revolutions, or in the city, but in the countryside. The British Enlightenment in Countryside and City In an article on the peculiarities of the English, E. P. Thompson argued that the rationalisation and empiricism usually associated with the industrial revolution was first established in the countryside. In those newly enclosed landscapes, calculating tenant farmers and “improving” landlords saw that sheep might be “machines for turning grass into money.” Natural history, especially botany, was a common recreation of substantial land-owners and parsons, and of their wives and children. They planted gardens, collected specimens, “improved” agriculture, and patronised the gentry, clergy, and professionals of the neighbouring county towns. They encouraged visiting lecturers and local medical charities and agricultural shows. It was part of a culture of collections and representations that included coins and prints, books and portraits, antiques and garden plants, as well as the creations of God. And the distinctions were fluid. Landscapes were created to look like pictures, and “pictured” through looking frames; prints were collected and inserted into dismembered books, or into scrap-books that could also contain pressed plants or pictures of animals. Plants could be classified, but so could portraits of English rulers, generals, and bishops. Humans and their illnesses appeared in natural histories of man and in Hippocratic understanding of environments and disease. And since Britain was already a major colonial power, with great plantations in the Americas, British