Pastoral in Victorian Literature

Victorian pastoral literature and culture represents a significant period of a long-standing tradition. In its many forms, it did not simply replicate existing pastoral tropes and conventions, but instead found new ways to use, adapt, and complicate them in order to reflect the complexities of a period of rapid, unprecedented change in the British countryside and in the United Kingdom as a whole. To understand the particularities of Victorian pastoral, it is necessary to firstly consider the tradition as a whole. Because there is no critical consensus about what pastoral is, it has been conceived in a range of ways that reflect its diversity, endurance, and significance within literature and wider culture. It has existed throughout literary history; is strongly evident across European, Middle Eastern, and modern Western cultures; and has gained a global footprint. While some conceive of pastoral narrowly as a poetic genre (originally centered on imagined singing contests and conversations within herding communities), others regard it as a broad cultural mode present in many forms and media. Narrowly conceived as genre, pastoral is an ancient, widespread poetic form, rivalling the epic in importance. Framed more broadly, it is at least as significant, consisting of an enduring but evolving suite of conceptual and representational tools; a set of attitudes and perspectives; and a means to articulate anxieties and aspirations about (1) human relationships with/attitudes to environment, (2) our place within modernity, and (3) human societies and social relations. Defined most broadly, pastoral encompasses all attempts to represent peopled environments, thus distinguishing it from the wilderness mode (which represents environments allegedly absent of humanity) and the apocalyptic mode (which represents the destruction of environments, societies, and worlds—and, in postapocalyptic forms, their aftermaths). Whatever approach pastoral scholars have taken, they repeatedly draw attention to two key structural oppositions: rural versus urban, and past versus present. Traditional, conservative forms of pastoral generally valorize the rural and/or the past, but these oppositions were complicated, challenged, or even overturned in more radical forms from the later eighteenth century. Other oppositions sometimes used to codify pastoral include nature versus art and the simple versus the complex. Pastoral’s earliest iterations created idealized versions of the countryside and/or charted the loss of idyllic environments: both impulses indicate pastoral’s urban roots. Ironically, pastoral, the form par excellence of country writing, became conceivable and necessary only because of the rise of city cultures. The pastoral is related to Georgic and Bucolic traditions (which can be seen as distinct from, or part of, a broader pastoral category), and is also divided into a number of subgeneric forms (idylls, elegies, Utopias, and anti-pastorals). Subsequent sections reflect these divisions. Pastoral has been reevaluated to reflect the socio-environmental contexts of every period, more recently becoming an important preoccupation within the environmental humanities, reflecting its ongoing relevance, and leading to attempts to create or classify new pastoral forms. In this article, Victorians engaged widely and productively with an inheritance of pastoral literature, drawing on older traditions in ways that often involved developing, challenging, and complicating them.