[This is an excerpt of an original manuscript of a book review published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural and Social History 21, no. 2 (2024): 289-292. The full review is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2024.2328563].
Lifescapes: The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870-1960, by Jeremy Burchardt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 506pp., £30.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781009199872
In his afterword, Jeremy Burchardt admits that he 'began writing [Lifescapes] the best part of two decades ago' (457). This won’t be a surprising admission for the reader, however, because they will already be able to attest that the preceding book has been a particularly well-written, deeply researched and elegantly contemplative work that will surely be of interest to all social and cultural historians of ruralism (and adjacent fields), as well as historians interested in innovative methodologies.
Employing a 'methodology [best described] as comparative biography' (x), Burchardt makes use of eight unpublished diaries written by 'ordinary' people in order to construct an innovative 'close micro-historical assessment of popular ruralism' (10) between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Being 'a historian’s counterpart to the new nature writing' (xiii), some historians might bristle against how Burchardt’s method means his footnotes are largely filled with his extensive primary archival material rather than an engagement with existing secondary literature. Although this would be an unfair critique given the lengthy conclusion, where there is such a detailed engagement. More interesting is how Burchardt provocatively states that 'the approach [he has] taken is closer methodologically to that of a novelist than that of most historians' (xi). This is apparent at moments in the book when, for example, he contemplates why one of his subjects, a Scottish medical doctor based in Bolton called Dr John Johnston, might have grown increasingly attached to the pastime of horticulture: 'For a man who felt so much affinity with the young it must have been hard that his marriage proved childless; perhaps growing and caring for flowers provided some degree of compensation' (250). The efficacy of such a 'psycho-social' (2) approach will undoubtedly be a question of personal judgement. The qualifying term 'perhaps' is demonstrative, however, of the empathetic way in which Burchardt deftly applies this speculative and perhaps controversial tool.
Burchardt’s micro-historical approach successfully demonstrates how each of his diarists became co-constituted through their engagement with landscapes and their contents, whether these be anthropogenic or non-human. Drawing out the character of this co-constitution, he pairs-up his eight diarists and 'develop[s] a rough typology of affective relationships to rural landscapes' (441): 'adherers' who 'valued rural landscapes above all as guarantors of continuity with a cherished past'; 'withdrawers' whose 'lives were marked by a pattern of progressive retreat into the countryside as each attempted to escape from oppressive external and internal circumstances'; 'restorers for whom rural landscapes were a catalyst for personal and ethical regeneration'; and, finally, 'explorers' who '[ventured] out eagerly into the countryside in search of new impressions, sensations and ideas' (4).
[...]
[Lifescapes] is a highly empathetic history of eight individuals and their experiences of landscape, but with a much broader implication than that might seem to suggest at first glance. While of obvious interest for historians of ruralism and landscape, the book is worthwhile reading for any social and cultural historian interested in the identity formations of people in Britain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I have shown, it is also of interest for historians seeking works that grapple with innovative methods.
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