I	Sean McWilliams: ‘Stowe Redivivus’
II	Dr Felicity Heal (Oxford): Gentry, Space & Religion
III	OnSite: Baddesley Clinton
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I: Sean McWilliams: ‘Stowe Redivivus’

Eighteenth-century tourists traveled far to experience the spectacle of Stowe, home to one of the greatest political families in England and an estate shaped by the most renowned architects and landscape designers of the period. Yet after the bankruptcy of the second duke of Buckingham in the middle of the nineteenth century Stowe became instead an emblem of aristocratic ostentation and a harbinger of political and economic change. However, in a decades-long campaign to promote Stowe as an icon of English history and culture, modern devotees of the English country house have successfully asserted that Stowe merits fame for its aesthetic beauty, artistic achievement, and political importance. Independently at first, then in reaction to its pop-cultural significance, scholarly historians have not taken Stowe seriously except as evidence of the English aristocracy’s penchant for ostentation, exploitation, and dissoluteness.
The fame that Stowe enjoys is central to its meaning and perpetuated by the complexity of that meaning. Its fame originated in the many ironies that constituted, in the words of Alexander Pope, “the genius of the place.” After all, Pope condemned in gardens the very qualities that Stowe would become known for: hollow magnificence and pretension. The many garden guides published for tourists in the eighteenth century were written by Samuel Richardson, who never visited Stowe. Earl Temple, the head of a powerful political faction in Parliament, never led the king’s government, though family members George Grenville and William Pitt did, in the face of Temple’s disapproval. Even the Stowe Collection, by far the largest collection of English historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library, says next to nothing about the estate by which the papers are identified. My paper, then, identifies and articulates the rich ironies that have made Stowe the quintessential English country house. Although Stowe’s fame is a shadow, it is no less real, no less historical, and much more significant than the house, the garden, and those who built them.

Some Suggested Reading

I suppose I am a cultural historian, and several books were especially useful to me as I thought through how to analyze the cultural force of Stowe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the scholarly literature on country houses and English landscape gardens is vast, these few books analyzed better than most the relationship between production and consumption, physical materials and cultural meaning: John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540 -1880 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
For those interested in conceptualizing the relationship between objects and meaning (which is, I think what cultural history does, or at least ought to do) I recommend reading something old and something new in conjunction: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, edited and translated by C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970) and Gary S Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). It is intellectually stimulating to see how economists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries analyze the production of cultural meaning in very similar ways, but with very different tools. I can’t say that I applied their models in a formal way in my own work, but they provoked me to examine evidence and frame arguments in more penetrating ways..

II: Dr Felicity Heal (Oxford): Gentry, Space & Religion

 

Some Suggested Reading

 

III: OnSite: Baddesley Clinton

 

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