The Country and the City

Citation

Williams, R. (2016). The Country and the City. Vintage Classics. (First published 1973; with an introduction by Tristram Hunt.)

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Williams's book studies how English literature since the sixteenth century has pictured the country and the city, and what those pictures have said about social and economic change. The publisher describes it as casting country and city as central symbols for the changes associated with capitalist development. Williams grew up in the Welsh border country and found that the images of rural life taught at Cambridge did not match what he had known. Two ideas organise the book. The belief in a vanished rural golden age is, in his phrase, "a myth functioning as a memory", which hides conflict and exploitation. And novelists and poets record what he calls "knowable communities" and a "structure of feeling", the lived sense of a time that institutions do not record. The book has twenty-five chapters and an appendix, and the 2016 edition runs to 512 pages.

Chapters 1–2: Country and City; A Problem of Perspective

The opening chapters set out the two terms and Williams's own starting point. Chapter 2 examines the belief that an ancient, continuous rural life has only recently ended. Writers of each generation place the lost order in their own childhood, and the claim can be traced back through Langland and Pope Innocent III, so each retrospect needs analysis in its own terms.

Chapters 3–8: Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral; Golden Ages; Town and Country; Their Destiny their Choice; The Morality of Improvement; Nature's Threads

The chapter titles indicate the long early stretch of the book: pastoral poetry and the writing that answered it, the idea of golden ages, and the relations of town and country, estate and improvement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a Guardian essay on the book, Tristram Hunt observes that Williams finds in Restoration comedy no simple contrast of wicked town and innocent country, and that he places the problem of property in land at the centre of the history of the English countryside.

Chapters 9–13: Bred to Till the Earth; Enclosures, Commons and Communities; Three around Farnham; Pleasing Prospects; The Green Language

These chapters take the story into the agrarian changes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "Three around Farnham" is Williams's chapter on Jane Austen and William Cobbett; Hunt reports that he reads Austen's novels as the product of a society caught between agrarian capitalism and urban mercantilism, and Cobbett as a more direct critic. "The Green Language" gives John Clare's poetry a place of special sympathy.

Chapters 14–19: Change in the City; People of the City; Knowable Communities; The Shadowed Country; Wessex and the Border; Cities of Darkness and of Light

The focus moves to the nineteenth-century city and the novel. "Knowable Communities" is the chapter where Williams develops his claim that novelists show people and relationships in ways that can be known and shared. "Wessex and the Border" concerns Hardy; Hunt says Williams challenges any firm division between inner ruralism and outer urbanism there. Chapter 19 is titled "Cities of Darkness and of Light", and Hunt identifies Dickens as the interpreter of Victorian London whom Williams values most.

Chapters 20–25 and Appendix: The Figure in the City; Surviving Countrymen; The Border Again; The City and the Future; The New Metropolis; Cities and Countries

The last chapters carry the argument into the twentieth century and out to the world. Hunt notes that Williams treats empire as rebuilding the relation of city and country on an international scale and that he reads writers from postcolonial societies, including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and R. K. Narayan, for familiar tensions of landlords, debt and capital. Williams ends by offering the book's meanings to others "in the many countries and cities where we live".

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–8

• Myth functioning as memory: the claim that a vanished rural golden age has been placed in each generation's childhood and conceals conflict.
• Pastoral and counter-pastoral: the poetic convention of an idealised country, and the writing that answers it.
• Property in land: the problem that, in Williams's account, runs through the history of the English countryside.

Chapters 9–19

• Improvement and enclosure: the agrarian changes of the period, set beside the writing that registers them.
• The green language: the phrase attached to John Clare's poetry.
• Knowable communities: novelists' presentation of people and relationships as communicable and known.
• Structure of feeling: the lived sense of a period that Williams traces in the writers he reads.

Chapters 20–25

• Country and city on an international scale: the extension of the relation through empire.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Range of evidence. Marshall Berman, quoted by the publisher, praised the book for showing the language, assumptions and class biases of hundreds of writers, major and minor, with immense erudition.
• A generous critical spirit. John Mullan in the Guardian called the book written with the energy of political engagement yet critically generous, leaving space for readers to disagree.
• A personal starting point. Philippa Gregory, quoted by the publisher, found the narrator's charm so strong that the book reads at times like a love letter to the country of his childhood, which makes a long argument approachable.
• A connected history. Chapters on specific writers sit inside a single story of land, property and capitalism, so the book teaches how literary form and social change can be read together.

Limitations

• One tradition, with gaps. Williams himself called the inquiry limited, concerned with the country and the city within a single tradition. Hunt notes that it has little to say about the literature of suburbia, Garden Cities and New Towns, ecological fears or the interwar rediscovery of English nativism.
• Material explanation. Hunt observes that the book often explains literary developments through shifts in material relations in a determinist vein, a position readers outside Marxist criticism may want to question.
• Wide knowledge assumed. The argument moves among many writers and presumes familiarity with English literary history and with the novels discussed.
• Long. At 512 pages, the book needs time, and readers interested in only one period will find the relevant chapters embedded in a longer argument.

Where It Fits in the Course

Williams's book is a work of argument, not a survey. Andrew Sanders's The Short Oxford History of English Literature is a single-author narrative history from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, and Carter and McRae's The Routledge History of Literature in English is a one-volume history written with students in mind. Either supplies the authors and periods that Williams assumes. Jonathan Bate's English Literature: A Very Short Introduction is a shorter, personal account of what English literature is.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature provides primary texts, and the Norton Critical Edition of Middlemarch, a novel of provincial life, suits a reading with Williams's questions in mind. Read Williams after a survey, and when you want to practise historical criticism that ties literary form to social change.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students in English, and readers in history, geography and cultural studies. A survey course in British literature and some knowledge of English social history are the best preparation.

Read Chapters 1 and 2 first for the argument and the starting point. Then choose by interest: Chapters 3 to 8 for pastoral and the early history of land, Chapters 9 to 13 for enclosure and the early nineteenth century (Austen, Cobbett, Clare), Chapters 14 to 19 for the city and the Victorian novel (Dickens, Hardy), and Chapters 20 to 25 for the twentieth century and the colonial world. Read the novels and poems with the relevant chapters, and finish with the last chapter for Williams's summing up.