"Unpleasant, tho' Arcadian Spots": Plebeian Poetry, Polite Culture, and the Sentimental Economy of the Landscape Park

In an essay on Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, the Quaker poet and com mentator John Scott told the following anecdote: "The late Earl of Leicester, being complimented upon the completion of his great design at Holkham, replied, 'It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of giant-castle, and have eat up all my neigh bours.'"1 By the 1770s Scott was one of a growing number of critics who, like the repentant Leicester, found it difficult to see a moral justification for the enormous parks associated with Lancelot "Capability" Brown. This was partly because Brown's ascendancy in the second half of the eighteenth century coincided with a perceived breakdown of paternalistic social relations and an actual decline in the real living standards of rural laborers.2 For Scott, these "fashionable" "improve ments" had been made possible by the accumulation of wealth into fewer hands, a development that, as Goldsmith had sought to show, involved the enclosure of commons; the "demolition," or at least relocation, of cottages; and the engrossment of small farms.3 Landscape parks, in other words, were funded by a highly com mercialized system of agriculture, and this was profiting landlords, pauperizing laborers, and thus eroding the "moral" economy of a once paternalistic rural soci ety. Isolating the country house from the working countryside, parks accordingly became signs of how landlords were abandoning public duty for private pleasure, leaving laborers with "less work, the same wages, and more expence for neces saries." "Pleasure," Scott protested, "may be justly said to have encroached on cul tivation, and the rich to have remotely abstracted from the provision of the poor."4 A supporter of the American Revolution,5 Scott considered the landscape park as proof that the landed classes had become parasitic on the populace they