Скачать или смотреть Dr Ben Cowell - 'From Great Estate to the Great State'

This presentation was given at 'Working-class identities & the country house', the first in the inaugural season of INTERVENTIONS seminars. The seminar took place on 26 January 2021.
INTERVENTIONS is convened by Lucy Brownson (University of Sheffield) and Louise Calf (University of York), with generous support from the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). Visit www.interventionsseries.wordpress.com or find us on Twitter @Interventions_S.

In 1912, the Essex landowner the Countess of Warwick collaborated with H.G. Wells, her tenant, on an edited volume of essays, Socialism and the Great State. ‘The Great State’ here referred to the world as it might be after a Socialist revolution. Lady Warwick’s contribution to the volume imagined a countryside transformed, with workers living contentedly in market towns free of overcrowding and pollution.

Lady Warwick had announced her conversion to socialism in 1904 and remained faithful to the cause until her death in 1938. She put her beliefs into practice through the management of her Essex estate. Warwick invited men from the Salvation Army’s Hadleigh colony to camp in her park at Easton Lodge while they worked on a new garden (to designs by Harold Peto). She established a workshop to train local girls in needlework, and founded a school and an agricultural college. She envisaged that Easton Lodge might eventually become a workers’ college, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to give it to the Trades Union Congress and to the Labour Party.

How could such a wealthy landowner adopt a political cause that was so clearly set against the interests of her own class? H.G. Wells, who became Lady Warwick’s tenant at Easton Lodge in 1910, traced a more subaltern view of the great estate in the opening chapters of his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay. This paper appraises the Countess of Warwick’s revolt against tradition, and compares it to Wells’ own depictions of country-house life.

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Dr Ben Cowell‘s PhD at the University of Nottingham (1998) was on the landscape history of late 18th and early 19th century estates in England. His subsequent published work includes a history of the heritage movement, The Heritage Obsession (2008), a biography of the theorist of the Picturesque, Uvedale Price (with Charles Watkins, 2012), and Landscapes of the National Trust (with Stephen Daniels and Lucy Veale, 2015). He has co-edited (with Elizabeth Baigent) a volume of essays on the life and work of Octavia Hill (2016), and wrote a biography of another of the founders of the National Trust, Sir Robert Hunter. Ben is the Director General of Historic Houses, which represents 1,500 of the UK’s historic houses, castles and gardens, all independently owned. You can find Ben on Twitter @Ben_CowellDG.