Like Spear Smith, Catley was intensely self-conscious, sought to create an identity founded on ruralism, and had cultural aspirations (in his case literary rather than artistic). While Catley was no more successful as a poet than Spear Smith as an artist, at least in his younger years his engagement with rural landscapes appears to have brought him more satisfaction and peace of mind. In part, this was because Catley’s ruralism fostered rather than replaced social relationships, through walks, cycle rides and, especially, youth hostelling. It may also have been that less was at stake in Catley’s ruralism, allowing him to take a more objective interest in rural landscapes and, paradoxically, to find more emotional fulfilment in them. Certainly Catley explored the rural landscapes around his Bristol home both intensively and extensively, offering him rich opportunities for self-discovery and self-development. However, as middle age and domesticity came upon him, the vital and life-affirming role landscape had played in his younger days receded into the past.

This chapter positions Thomas Hardy, and to a lesser extent his Wiltshire-born contemporary, Richard Jefferies, as case studies by which to assess broader environmental crises in the final decades of the nineteenth century. My central concern is with how the georgic sensibility, far from a passé or patrician enthusiasm in late-Victorian literature, has, in Hardy’s view, great analytical power and relevance. It allows him – especially in The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders – to probe moral attitudes towards, and economic theories about, manual toil in an age of capitalist accumulation. In these novels Hardy interprets georgic motifs, values and sources through his portrayal of the pugnacious ‘corn king’ Henchard and the introverted yeoman Winterborne, respectively. In both texts, I contend, Hardy documents an indigenous land-worker’s increasingly fraught dispute with, and gradual supplanting by, a more ruthlessly hard-headed arriviste.

Torn between Georgic and Pastoral, the British Weald is a landscape regarded as embodying ‘Englishness’, but also geographically ‘on the edge’ of the nation. Richard Jeffries revered the downs and Weald. W. H. Hudson was an evocative depicter of a romanticised version and guidebooks including E.V. Lucas’s The Highways and Byways of Sussex (1904) and Arthur Beckett’s The Spirit of the Downs (1909) coaxed city-dwellers to countryside that was not ‘too country’. The Georgic-Pastoral was treated parodically by Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932) offering a subversive deflation of rural narratives. Despite this, the continuing appeal of landscape narratives is evident in the success of James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life (2015). Drawing on Hudson’s similarly titled book, he locates shepherding within a history of landscape suggesting that images of ‘Englishness’, encapsulated in familiar livestock and gently turning seasonal rhythms, serve a purpose in imagining a national identity poised between Georgic and Pastoral.