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[Rural life in eighteenth-century English poetry]
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After reading John Goodridge's Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, one's first sense is that there is nothing left to be said on the subject. The two parts of the book deal first with Thomson, Duck, and Collier and then (much more extensively) with Dyer's The Fleece, when Goodridge seems to come into his own. More than half the book is on sheep: a solidly old-fashioned piece of work that does not trouble itself very much with the argument about the politics of pastoral in spite of Goodridge's frequent citation of John Barrell. Indeed, the book has a strangely deracinated quality, not only in the partiality of the authors selected but in the absence of the argument about georgic and pastoral that had been raging in Britain at least since More's Utopia.
There is, for example, almost nothing about the extensive legal literature that (in England) derived from John Fitzherbert's Boke of Surveyeng and Improvmentes (1543), was augmented by the Digger debates of the Commonwealth, and made a canonical subject in Locke's Two Treatises on Government. The seventeenth-century writers on agriculture -- Samuel Hartlib, William Coles, Ralph Austen, John Speed, Richard Weston, and Samuel Worlidge -- all contributed to the debate about proper agriculture that continued into the early eighteenth century in the editions of Bradley and Harris and in the arguments of Swift, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. None of these authors' works on husbandry and nature is cited by Goodridge, nor are such writers on agriculture as Samuel Collins, Edward Laurence, John Cowper, Richard Neve, William Mackintosh, Robert Maxwell, or even Jethro Tull.
Richard Greene's book on Mary Leapor was published in 1993 -- early enough, surely, to have drawn attention to her importance for a study of this kind. Would not Richard Savage's The Wanderer have been a...