‘I should often be sad, if I did not know God cared for England, its people, and its commons’.Footnote 1 Thus Octavia Hill, one of the nineteenth century's most prominent open space campaigners, revealed in 1878 the irreducible connections between her Christianity and her work to open the English countryside for the recreation of the nation's people. A year earlier, in 1877, Hill's fellow Anglican and open space campaigner, Reverend H.R. Haweis, declared that ‘religion and recreation . . . meant to a certain extent the same thing – both meant to be born again’.Footnote 2 Two prominent Victorian church people thus proclaim the centrality of religion to arguments about preserving the English countryside for recreation. Yet despite their claims, and despite the importance of religion to Victorian society in general, religion and theology are strikingly absent from most explanations of the Victorian open space movement. If orthodox religion is mentioned in discussions of nineteenth-century recreation, the two are generally presented as competitors if not antagonists.Footnote 3 This essay attempts to bring together two hitherto separate bodies of literature, namely that on secularisation and that on the open space movement, where they intersect around the topic of recreation. It considers the place of religion and theology in the Victorian open space movement with particular reference to the Commons Preservation Society from 1865 to about 1880, when it was involved in the battle to save Epping Forest, which was won with the Epping Forest Act of 1878, and to the management and use of the forest in the subsequent two decades.
Religion, secularisation, and the Victorian open space movement
Most analyses of the Victorian open space movement ascribe its initiation and success to anti-modernism and nostalgia,Footnote 4 although an increasing minority sees it as modern, democratic, and progressive.Footnote 5 Many from each camp agreed that the preservation of significant landscapes, which were overwhelmingly rural, was linked to a changing understanding of national identity.Footnote 6 But these explanatory factors, of nostalgia, modernity and national identity, are generally interpreted in modern ways, which take no account of the ‘sense of the divine rule and governance in life which through much of the nineteenth century was almost instinctive with a vast number of people in this country, of whatever class of society’.Footnote 7 Many nostalgics mourned a lost golden age of faith, religious certainty, and the parish as the cornerstone of a healthy and stable community.Footnote 8 Modernists saw a future of spiritual fulfilment as well as freedom from material want,Footnote 9 while for many Victorian Britons national identity encompassed knowledge that theirs was a Christian nation, its history a narrative of divine providence, and its future to be made in a Christian image.Footnote 10 Most analyses of the open space movement, however, exclude the religious content of the explanations which they offer for it.
There are several possible reasons for this. One is that the most influential contemporary account of the early preservation movement, George John Shaw Lefevre's English Commons and Forest (1894), is written from an entirely secular point of view.Footnote 11 Another is that even in 1860 Octavia Hill commented on her contemporaries’ ‘tendency. . .to think our faith cramps our labours and narrows our hearts’, so that the religious content of any open hearted and liberal work might go unremarked at the time and hence later as well.Footnote 12
Among later historians the main reason for the exclusion of religion from analysis of the open space movement may be the ‘secularizing trend which lies behind any discussion about [nineteenth-century] leisure patterns’, including open air recreation, and because ‘the values associated with secularised mass entertainment eventually triumphed’ over those associated with religion.Footnote 13 The end of Victoria's reign also saw the ‘discrediting of socio-religious work’ which had tried to civilise the Victorian poor by providing them with uplifting leisure activities, including those carried out in the open air.Footnote 14 While histories of leisure and the civilising mission have not, in consequence of secularisation, ignored religion, histories of the open space movement generally have. It is true that religion's decline roughly coincided with preservationism's growth, and that urbanisation and industrialisation, which were associated with secularisation, also underlay the open space movement, by providing the threat against which open land needed to be defended, and the city dwellers and factory hands who needed it for recreation. Urbanisation and industrialisation made it possible for bodily exercise out of doors to be regarded as transcendental in a way rarely encountered in societies where people depended on such exercise for their living.Footnote 15 However, it does not follow that secularisation was necessary to preservationism, or that orthodox religion should be excluded from discussions of it.
In practice, however, it is, and with some justification. ‘Nature-worship’ was for some a substitute for orthodox Christianity, being ‘embraced by members of a generation that was losing its Christianity but retaining a conditioned need for metaphysics’.Footnote 16 Thus, on the individual level, Leslie Stephen renounced orders in the Church of England in favour of the ‘ethics of Wordsworth’:Footnote 17 and at a wider scale ‘social citizenship’, which included open space arguments, ‘filled the vacuum left by the increasingly obvious fact that the churches and chapels were never going to evangelize the urban masses’.Footnote 18 Patriotism or socialism, which included elements of preservationism, were other possible substitutes for orthodox Christianity, ‘the religion of socialism’ being actively proclaimed in the 1880s and 1890s for example.Footnote 19 A revalorised nature could be antithetical to Christianity: Wordsworth's capacity to evoke a potent (quasi) religious feeling in response to nature declined as he embraced orthodox religion;Footnote 20 and, on a more general scale, religion opposed on principle or feared as a competitor the leisure activities which went with revalorised nature.Footnote 21 Where organised religion used leisure, including open air leisure, as a secular means to spiritual awakening, the means frequently became the end.Footnote 22 A loose chain of argument thus emerges: preservationism relied on a revalorisation of nature; the revalorisation depended on industrialisation and urbanisation; industrialisation and urbanisation were associated with a decline in religion; the decline in religion left a gap in people's time, which could be spent on leisure, including that spent out of doors, and a vacuum in their hearts and language, which could be filled by a spiritualisation of nature itself, or of country or people understood in part as linked to nature.
By contrast, Avner Offer argues that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘The root source of the moral valuation [of nature] was religious impulse’, partly because ‘Middle-class sensibility learned to react to the outdoors with religious arousal between 1780 and 1830’, and partly because the natural rights argument from Rousseau onwards claimed land as a gift from God.Footnote 23 During that period questions about the ownership of, use of, and profit from land were therefore religious, and works about them contained a religious message which is ‘concealed from our generation but perfectly audible to [the writers’] own’.Footnote 24 Moreover, while secularisation is indisputable, it is also true that the English preservation movement began when Christianity was vibrant and has continued into a time when some claim it has proved surprisingly tenacious.Footnote 25 This raises the question of whether orthodox religion was just a bystander in the early open space movement and a casualty of its success, or whether it was the mainspring of activism for some preservationists. When nature is described as transcendent or as a ‘sanctuary’; natural places are called ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’ or ‘desecrated’; visits to natural beauty spots are ‘pilgrimages’; nature is ‘teacher’ or ‘companion’; or when nature is to be ‘saved’ by a ‘deliverer’, were the writers or speakers regarding nature as a substitute for Christianity, or as part of an orthodox Christian worldview?Footnote 26 This essay considers the case.
Theology, nature, and Romanticism
There are several reasons why interesting connections might exist between Christianity and the Victorian open space movement. In the Victorian empire, religion meshed with science and utilitarianism in a complex ideological mix in debates about the exploitation and/or conservation of nature, and the same might be true at home.Footnote 27 Although histories of British Victorian religion ignore preservationism, they routinely state that Romanticism, to which the experience of nature as transcendental was central, transformed religious thought, language, and practice in the century.Footnote 28 This is particularly associated with the Tractarians, Christian Socialists, and those high and broad church Anglicans whose central doctrine was the incarnation (Christ's taking of human form). This, they believed, had sanctified the whole of creation and it underlay their use of flowers and plants to decorate churches, their use of natural metaphors to describe religious life, and their sacramental understanding of nature expounded notably in John Keble's very widely read Christian Year of 1827.Footnote 29 Keble's theology of nature relied not on the transcendence of nature but on the immanence of God. He believed nature to be a force for good not so much in itself, but for the Christian lessons it embodied and the opportunity it gave for grace. Nature was a visible symbol and sign of the invisible world and offered Christians a grace akin to that of the sacraments.Footnote 30
It is often suggested that Romanticism and the consequent revalorisation of nature played a far smaller role in Victorian evangelical theology and practice. Enjoyment of nature threatened Sabbath observance, and the use of natural materials to decorate churches seemed ‘pure heathenism’.Footnote 31 Since the atonement was their central doctrine, many evangelicals saw the world, including open space, as sinful, and as a source of temptation or at least distraction. The idea of harmonious natural beauty sat ill with the image of life as struggle with evil, while emphasis on the word made evangelicals less moved by nature's visual richness, and less convinced by arguments for a sacramental view of nature.Footnote 32 By the later nineteenth century, however, evangelicalism had been touched by a Romantic appreciation of nature. For some evangelicals, nature gained sanctity by association with religious experiences. For others, it gained importance as an analogy for life in its God-given fullness, or as a fitting stage for the performance of the sanctified life.Footnote 33 The evangelical Keswick movement preached natural sanctity and personal holiness from within the quintessential Romantic landscape.Footnote 34 Evangelical Bible women distributed flowers to the poor, believing that flowers had intrinsic religious value as gifts from God and manifestations of God's promise to his people.Footnote 35 The poems and hymns of Frances Ridley Havergal awakened the sensibilities of many evangelicals to nature.Footnote 36 Evangelical historicist premillennialists, who looked forward to the ‘restitution of all things’, rejoiced in the natural world as a foretaste of a glorious renovated earth.Footnote 37 Since post-Romantic Christians of so many stripes found in nature a model of, a means to, or a foretaste of, salvation for individuals and society, it is reasonable to hypothesise that Christianity significantly affected Victorian attitudes to nature and its preservation.
As well as being affected by Romanticism, nineteenth-century English Christianity developed an understanding after about 1830 that the kingdom of God was to be built on earth, not experienced only after death. The right ordering of society thus became a pressing religious and sometimes theological question.Footnote 38 Since many open spaces were saved for the recreation of the urban poor, whose plight lay at the heart of the condition of England debate, it is reasonable to hypothesise that many Christians saw the problem, their response to it, and the solution as religious. Moreover, however far fetched they might seem to the non Christian, the theologies sketched above gave at least some Christians what secular arguments for open space lacked, namely an explanation of how nature was to solve the problem of the poor. Secular arguments routinely claimed that the experience of nature would improve the poor, but Nature's alleged capacity to uplift often rested on presumptions that, once poor people had seen middle class people in an open space, they would emulate them, or that poor people indulged in ‘low and debasing pleasures’ only for want of rational and wholesome alternatives.Footnote 39 In the first case, nature was reduced to a space for observation and for the operation of an ill-defined ‘kind of mimicry’ or ‘cultural osmosis’,Footnote 40 and, in the second, nature became effect rather than cause: that is, spending time in nature or gardening was the effect of an inherent preference for rational pursuits, nature based activities being inherently no more praiseworthy than other improving pastimes.Footnote 41 Set against these ill argued secular hopes that nature would improve the poor were well founded fears that unrespectable recreations blossomed in open spaces.Footnote 42 In urban parks, shrubberies harboured prostitutes and homosexuals; lawns enabled the drunken, verminous, and dissolute to stretch out and sleep; and along avenues flirting or soliciting were rife.Footnote 43 At the seaside misrule and immorality constantly threatened,Footnote 44 while the countryside invited mixed sex bicycling and rambling by the immodestly dressed.Footnote 45 While later open space campaigns were concerned with remote places which attracted mainly bourgeois visitors and where in consequence such moral concerns were less pressing, the earliest campaigns focused on preserving metropolitan commons for the poor, which spaces presented the same moral dilemmas as did parks and seaside. In the face of these moral dangers, Christian theology, unlike secular arguments, supplied for some believers a mechanism by which time spent in nature might redeem the poor.
It is important to elaborate what is meant by ‘religion’, ‘religious people’, and ‘Christian’ in this essay. Public observation of religion was so widespread at the time of the early preservation movement that it is not used here to distinguish Christian from non Christian, although it usefully reveals denominational allegiance or theological preference. Similarly arguments are not here considered religious simply because Christians advanced them. If a Christian claimed that time spent in nature improved the morality of the poor, this is here considered a secular argument unless a specifically theological mechanism was posited for the improvement, notwithstanding any further hope that morality might at least prepare the ground for religious conviction. Nor does the use of religious language here by itself qualify an argument as being religious: expedience, habit, or the simple lack of a convincing alternative to religious language for the discussion of non material matters led people to co-opt God in support of what were really secular arguments for preservation.Footnote 46 The Romantic aesthetic argument, for example, that a beautiful and characteristic country place should be enjoyed almost as an act of worship, was the essentially the same whether a Christian described the area as a manifestation of God's bounty or a means of grace; a nature spiritualist described it as place sacred to Nature; or a nature patriot described it as the wellspring of national or regional identity.Footnote 47 Similarly, the argument that beautiful spaces needed state protection from what Canon Rawnsley described as ‘private greed, miscalled enterprise’ was the same whether made by secular socialists railing against capitalism, or Christians who regarded such greed as a sin, who thought ‘beauty and the sense of it [came] from God’, and who considered caring for beautiful spaces a Christian duty. In this essay, therefore, people are cited as ‘religious’ or ‘Christian’ only if their rationale in preservationist arguments was consistently and explicitly based on scripture or Christian doctrine, and if it incommoded or demanded changed behaviour on the part of the middle classes as well as of the poor. ‘Church’ is used here to mean the Church of England, as opposed to non conformism. I have found no involvement by Roman Catholics in campaigns for preservation, although in areas where that church was better represented, particularly among the elite, Roman Catholics might well have been involved and this would bear further enquiry. ‘Poor people’ here encompasses the rural poor in villages in Epping Forest and the much more numerous urban poor of East End parishes from which Epping Forest was readily accessible. They and their role in the campaign to save Epping Forest are analysed at length elsewhere and not discussed here.Footnote 48
The Commons Preservation Society and Epping Forest
The Commons Preservation Society, the earliest British preservation society, was founded in 1865 to keep commons open for public recreation.Footnote 49 One of its earliest successes was at Epping Forest, extensive wooded and semi-wooded tracts of land which were the remaining wastes of the one much more extensive royal forest of Essex. The preservation of Epping Forest became a popular campaign in the 1860s and 1870s when attempts to enclose it for urban development gathered pace. Being accessible from the East End of London, it was heavily used by East Enders for recreation. Since those East Enders epitomised the nation's degraded poor, the campaign to save the forest for their use took on a national character. After a protracted battle in the law courts, parliament, City meeting rooms, local town halls, and in the forest itself, the forest was secured as open space in 1878 and its management vested in a board of conservators largely appointed by the Corporation of the City of London. The Corporation had campaigned with the Commons Preservation Society to save the forest and, under the Epping Forest Act of 1878, was required to buy all open forest land which it did not already hold, and to manage it in the public interest.Footnote 50
The Commons Preservation Society was founded by George John Shaw Lefevre, a London barrister and Liberal Member of Parliament, who had ‘no known religious opinions’.Footnote 51 He was joined by John Stuart Mill, whose upbringing had famously excluded any religious elements; Henry Fawcett, whose ‘politics owed nothing to religion’ and who seems to have been a non believer; George Grote, Mill's pupil, who fought to keep clerical influence out of education at University College, London; and T. H. Huxley, the self identified ‘agnostic’.Footnote 52 This not a promising start to the argument that religion was important to the open space movement, and there was indeed a strong utilitarian, that is, rationalist and secular, element to the Commons Preservation Society. Many utilitarians had favoured enclosure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing for ‘improved’ agriculture to feed a growing and urbanising population. However, by the 1860s, with free trade in food and an increasingly urbanised population, the utilitarian argument swung towards preserving land unenclosed, especially near cities, for mass recreation. Many who joined Shaw Lefevre in the Commons Preservation Society were free traders and some were members of the Cobden Club.Footnote 53 Many also promoted reform to land tenure, taxation, and use, considered in secular, rational ways.Footnote 54
However, Romanticism and emotion crept into the arguments of even the most rational Commons Preservation Society members. Shaw Lefevre's pronouncement that happiness was greatest where ‘no class was divorced from the soil’, and his and Commons Preservation Society member Robert Hunter's evocation of a Saxon golden age of equity and commonality before the imposition of the Norman Yoke, ‘the original sin of conquest’, owe more to emotion than reason.Footnote 55 Many Commons Preservation Society members were also members of the Alpine Club, which epitomised the ascription of transcendental values to nature.Footnote 56 For some Commons Preservation Society mountaineers, such as Leslie Stephen, nature was a substitute for conventional religion; but for others, such as Edward North Buxton, Philip Lawrence, and Robert Hunter, it was fully compatible with it.Footnote 57 When Hunter, a lifelong devout churchman who in youth had considered taking orders, declared that ‘spiritual health’ was fostered by experiencing nature, he evidently intended this health to be fully compatible with religious faith.Footnote 58
There were several other influential members of the Commons Preservation Society whose Christianity was far from nominal. A survey of the Commons Preservation Society in 1868–9, at the height of the Epping Forest campaign, shows that the president was William Cowper (later William Cowper-Temple), a moderate evangelical, and the chairman was Andrew Johnson, a very committed churchman. The executive committee included the brothers Edward North and (Thomas) Fowell Buxton, devout evangelicals; Thomas Chambers, a low church sabbatarian; Thomas Hughes, a Christian Socialist; and Charles Pollock, an active churchman. The secretary was James Hole, a non-sectarian Christian. The Archbishop of Canterbury lent his support as a committee member.Footnote 59 These men carried more weight in the Commons Preservation Society, which recruited selectively among the influential, than they would have done in a mass movement;Footnote 60 but to make the case that religion was important to the early open space movement we must go much further than simply adducing the religious life of some Commons Preservation Society members. The writings of Commons Preservation Society supporter Octavia Hill provide an important insight.Footnote 61 Hill had been shown her social mission by F.D. Maurice, founder of Christian Socialism, who declared that ‘society is not to be made anew by arrangements of ours, but is to be regenerated by finding the law and ground of its harmony, the only secret of its existence, in God’.Footnote 62 Hill had deeply imbibed this message and, whether in essays, lectures, or letters, assumed that her audience shared a Christian worldview.Footnote 63
A single theology underlay her work in housing, for tenants, and for open space. It rested on the centrality of the incarnation, which sanctified the whole of creation, and on two passages from scripture. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ prescribed the Christian's duty to all people, a duty which would transform neighbour, self, and the society in which both existed. ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ made it part of that duty to bring beauty, including natural beauty, into the lives of all, particularly, although not exclusively, the poor.Footnote 64 Hill's essay on ‘Open Spaces’ invites the reader to observe a squalid inner London court, describing the degraded residents and their surroundings with a frankness and precision born of familiarity. Something must be done about this not because the underclass challenges public health or public order, but because ‘every one of those living beings. . .is a child of God’.Footnote 65 Wealthier Christians must thus attend to their material and non-material wants, the latter being primarily for open space. Such open space may be in urban churchyards, where the bodies of the dead ‘mingle quietly with the dust and feed the trees and the daisies, keeping the resting place of the dead one also for the weary and the poor’.Footnote 66 Or it may be in the commons. Here any:
Separate right is subordinated to the good of all. . .which when owned together and stretching away into loveliest space of heather or forest becomes the common possession of the neighbourhood, or even of the Country and Nation. . .. It will give a sense of common possession to succeeding generations. . . It will be a link between the many and through the ages, binding [all] into one solemn joyful fellowship, which neither time nor outward change can destroy.Footnote 67
Nature and people, rich and poor, living and dead are creatures of God, one in God, and in fellowship with each other; the bodies of the dead feed the living plants; living and dead people rest in the same sacred, natural space; the poor take their place as of right alongside the rich as inheritors of the earth and in the fellowship of the saints. The preservation of open space for recreation is for Hill, then, a theological matter of establishing the kingdom of God on earth and specifically in England, and rejoicing in the fellowship of the saints.
Hill's radical interpretation of Christian obligation entailed both social justice and a reverence for nature: ‘if you try to accept the duty [to your neighbours] as our Lord showed it. . .all God's children will be dear to you, and His earth sacred’.Footnote 68
Hill is now notorious for her support of the Charity Organisation Society which approved only that charity which conduced to bourgeois morality,Footnote 69 but a close reading of her work shows her to have had a strikingly radical and subversive conception of charity in the Christian Socialist tradition. She described as ‘thoughtless charity’ the giving of doles which left the rich easy in the enjoyment of the bulk of their money, free from further care about the recipients, the relationship between them one of patronage and dependence. Such charity degraded donors as much as recipients, while thoughtful charity elevated both. The example she cites of this transformative, radical charity is the open space movement. Having besought the rich to abjure giving thoughtless doles she asks:
Are there no great gifts of open spaces to be made for the rich and poor to share alike in the time to come – spaces which. . .will come to [the recipient] as an inheritance he possesses as a Londoner or an English child; most likely being taken, like light and air, straight from God, and not in any way tending to remind him of men's gifts, still less to pauperise him.Footnote 70
This is radical stuff, since the rich are asked to give in a way that will not earn them the gratitude of the poor, and will bring rich and poor into a relationship of equals. For Hill open space is a gift from God. Its right use brings rich and poor into right relation under God as his equal children, and into contact with each other since they are to ‘share alike’ the open space. Its possession as of right, by all, is part of a vision of a Christian Britain, coming as it does as in her essay ‘A word on good citizenship’.Footnote 71 There are in Hill occasional hopes that the experience of nature will conduce to some intermediate, secular good, such as sobriety.Footnote 72 But these should not obscure her much more fundamental theology of nature, or the fact that it was so radical. The same theology produced the same social and environmental vision in other Christians. For example, the headmaster of Clifton College in Bristol, Reverend J. M. Wilson, explained his mission to the poor, as part of which open space was secured for recreation, with the simple statement: ‘We had clear social ideas for the Church. . .[a] belief that the Kingdom of God might be brought very near’.Footnote 73 The same understanding of land as a gift of God rather than any human intermediary led evangelical Edward North Buxton to refuse to have his name commemorated in Epping, Hatfield, and Hainault forests which he was instrumental in saving for recreation.Footnote 74 This vision of a harmony between God, people alive and dead, and nature, contrasts with the secular characterisation of nature where the ruling principle was one of competition, where people were locked in struggle with one another and with the rest of nature.Footnote 75 Both views could lead to involvement in open space campaigns, as Commons Preservation Society members Hill and Huxley epitomise, and both need considered treatment in discussions of that movement. Similarly the religious theological view that natural places were the equal inheritance of rich and poor, to be shared equally by rich and poor, differs strikingly from the view that natural beauty belongs to the right sort of people (the enlightened middle class) and should be preserved for them as a refuge from the wrong people (the degraded poor).
The campaign to save Epping Forest
In his influential book, which set the tone for most subsequent discussions on commons preservation, Shaw Lefevre presented the campaign to save Epping Forest, like other commons battles, as a triumph for the Commons Preservation Society's rational argument and steady legal and parliamentary work.Footnote 76 This was true, but the campaign also rested heavily on emotion, aesthetics, and morality. Those who advocated enclosing Epping Forest claimed that the use of the forest for both material goods, such as pasture and firewood, and recreation made it the locus of dangerous working class independence and lack of restraint. The forest had traditionally been vilified as the haunt of suicides, criminals, loafers, prostitutes, and gypsies.Footnote 77 It was the setting for nude or semi-nude mixed bathing in its many ponds and for Sunday evening parades of flirting young people.Footnote 78 On bank holidays and fair days, trains and horse brakes full of working people arrived bent on unrestrained enjoyment. In short, it was the place for indecencies ‘shocking to contemplate’.Footnote 79 Happily, enclosure would ‘check. . .irregular and. . .demoralising tendencies’Footnote 80 and ‘waste’,Footnote 81 as well as ending unprincipled attacks on the rights of property owners to do as they chose with their own land.Footnote 82
On the side of enclosure, and voiced by churchmen among others, were thus various moral arguments, but although ‘Popular Protestantism. . .identified the Christian ethical ideal with the moral inhibitions of the middle classes’,Footnote 83 these moral arguments had no theological or properly religious basis. Many prominent enclosers, like the rector of Loughton, Reverend J. W. Maitland, were members of the Church of England, and unsurprisingly so, since both clergymen individually and the church as a whole were dependent on rents. This class aspect of the church was picked up by John T. Bedford, the City of London's most public and, according to his own accounts, most influential advocate of preservation, who regularly expatiated on the churchmen and church bodies who, along with temporal peers, wanted to rob ‘the people’ of the forest. He was not anti-religious, being elsewhere content to adduce religious arguments for preservation, and neither was his argument: rather he saw himself as the people's champion against ‘great men’, including church dignitaries.Footnote 84
On the preservationist side, a few voices adduced materialist arguments for keeping open the forest: the rural poor depended on gathering fuel and grazing animals there. Such voices included parish priests who knew the material needs of their poor parishioners, as well as John Maynard, a local working class radical and son of a Baptist minister, who wrote a blistering attack on enclosure.Footnote 85 These local voices were, however, lost in the national clamour to save the forest for the aesthetic, health, and spiritual/religious benefits it brought to the urban poor.Footnote 86 Since working class involvement in the campaign was limited, the motivation of local bourgeois preservationist ‘champions of the people’ was particularly pertinent, and these champions included a remarkable share of devout Christians who regarded the question to a significant extent as religious.Footnote 87 Some local champions were also Commons Preservation Society members, so this local campaign was not wholly separate from the national one, but its methods, tactics, and language were quite different.Footnote 88
Prominent in the local battle for the forest's preservation, and in its later management, were members of the Buxton family, particularly the brothers Sir (Thomas) Fowell and Edward North Buxton and their cousin Andrew Johnson. They were all local residents, evangelicals, and believers in the ‘practical Christianity’ which underlay much church led social work in the later nineteenth century.Footnote 89 The three were active, for example, in London hospital work and the Abbey Street Sunday Schools, Bethnal Green.Footnote 90 But unlike their conservative evangelical contemporaries, the Buxtons combined practical Christianity with Liberal and later Labour politics and radical views on the relationship of rich to poor, and people to land which spanned generations. The first Sir Fowell Buxton, for example, was the abolitionist who unequivocally stated ‘That the natives [of Africa] have a right to their own lands’.Footnote 91 A domestic servant, Mrs Dora Punchard, remarked of Lieutenant Colonel Edward North Buxton, of Wallsgrove House, Epping Forest, ‘Although I didn't like the attitude of most of the gentry, I did like the Buxtons. Col. Buxton. . .and his wife Sybil [were] so understanding of people. They didn't look down on you.’Footnote 92
Of the Buxtons particularly involved in the Epping Forest campaign, it was said of Fowell Buxton, in a striking echo of Hill's thoughtful charity, that the poor and marginalised ‘were never to him mere objects of pity, but individuals with lives and interests of their own’.Footnote 93 When Governor of South Australia he startled contemporaries by inviting Aboriginal people to official receptions, taking pains to understand their land tenure system and explain it to Europeans whom he exhorted to make amends for injustices. He continued his grandfather's work for black people, slaves, and ex-slaves, and extended his interest to the welfare of colonised Asian peoples.Footnote 94 Edward North Buxton was equally unconventional in his very early advocacy of shooting big game with the camera, not the gun, because of a duty of stewardship to the whole natural world.Footnote 95 Fowell and Edward North Buxton opened their Essex estates, Warlies and Knighton, to the public, at personal cost. In an echo of Hill's scriptural understanding of neighbourliness, Fowell Buxton's ‘neighbours and friends’ were all whom he came into contact with. On:
Winter days on the ice at Warlies. . .his ponds were always thrown open to the public, with the result that his own expert skating was often rudely interrupted by the crowds of skaters from the town. The keeper was sternly forbidden to turn holiday-makers out of his woods, or prevent their picking his primroses. He would invite the trippers on the green at Warlies down into the park or garden.Footnote 96
This is reminiscent of Hill's principle that rich and poor were to share land, even when to do so affected one's personal pleasure. The brothers’ religious understanding of the relation of rich and poor, people and land was demonstrated on their joint golden wedding anniversary when they donated land in Epping Forest for public recreation and gave New Testaments to estate workers, inviting them to a party.Footnote 97
Another prominent local campaigner was Sir Antonio Brady, who in 1871 organised the biggest public protest against enclosure and established the Forest Fund to defend the open forest. He was a devout high churchman for whom ‘it was a great thing to enable [working men] on a summer's evening to enjoy the fresh air of heaven, and, if it so pleased them, to look up from Nature to Nature's God’.Footnote 98 He saw the campaign for preservation as an extension of his East End church mission work.Footnote 99 Brady had earlier worked with Reverend Septimus Hansard, Rector of Bethnal Green and a local champion of the preservation of Epping Forest, to open the Bethnal Green Museum, as part of their Ruskinian vision that the poor would awaken to religion by experiencing beauty, whether man made or natural.Footnote 100 Like Octavia Hill, Hansard was a Christian Socialist and, like Reverend Haweis cited earlier, opposed the Lord's Day Observance Society with its narrow and unimaginative views on recreation.Footnote 101
For some local campaigners religion seems to have been largely a cloak of respectability. John T. Bedford, for example, rejoiced in ‘the enjoyment of tens of thousands of those who, but for Epping Forest, would scarcely know how beautiful God made the world’. But he eagerly pointed out the shortcomings of the clergy and I have found no evidence of his religious attachment.Footnote 102 Unlike Edward North Buxton who scorned a forest memorial, Bedford was always ready to accept recognition and is commemorated in the Bedford Oak in the forest.Footnote 103 However particularly at the local level in Essex, but also at the national level of the Commons Preservation Society, it is clear that many preservationists were impelled by active religion, a conception of Christian duty, and a theological vision of nature and the land. The preservation movement was not a religious movement, and, just as it drew support from radicals, liberals, and conservatives, city and country dwellers, men and women, it appealed to active and nominal Christians, agnostics, and atheists.Footnote 104 Histories of the movement are, however, incomplete if they take no account of religion in the mix of motives for preservation.
Religion and the conflict of access and preservation in Epping Forest
If theology affected the preservation movement in general, religion in a more practical sense was heavily involved in the debate over how Epping Forest, once preserved, should be used and by whom. Conflict was sensed among preservationists between nature and people, although the conflict was in reality between the right and the wrong sort of people. Preservation campaigners regularly claimed to be acting in the interests of ‘the nation’ or ‘the people’, but some people's interests were privileged over those of others. There was an almost unanimous sense among Epping Forest's preservers that nature must be protected from both enclosing capitalists and local village loppers whose activities rendered landscape and trees ‘unnatural’. Both enclosure and lopping were outlawed when the forest was saved and the conservators henceforth had the duty to preserve the ‘natural aspect’ of the forest. There were no middle class religious objections to this, although John Maynard, the radical dissenter, argued forcefully against it.Footnote 105 The split between the religious and the secular at Epping Forest was over its use for recreation. Many preservationists, especially middle and upper class ones, dreaded trippers and excursionists.Footnote 106 Transcendentalism, being ‘individualistic, introspective, escapist and exclusive’ was threatened by mass tourism,Footnote 107 and some preservation societies from the start favoured preservation over access.Footnote 108 Access was to be for the right sort of people who did the right sort of things. ‘A landscaped citizenry. . .depends for its self-definition on a vulgar other, an anti-citizen whose conduct, if not open to re-education, makes exclusion necessary’. The vulgar other was the bad tourist and the archetypical bad tourist was the cockney or East Ender: noisy, vulgar, and dedicated to urban pleasures even in the countryside.Footnote 109 Epping Forest was one of his favourite haunts.Footnote 110
Among those who were at least ambivalent towards trippers were church people, for example Canon Scott Holland who wrote that:
Once a year the vast, blind, welded masses that have coagulated into cities, let themselves loose, to swarm out over sea and land, for the brief rapture of a Summer Holiday. . .Whenever the trip comes in, Wordsworth is gone.
His solution, as a Christian Socialist, was not to exclude the masses, but to show the middle classes how to coexist with them:
Avoid those few chosen spots, consecrated to them: and not a trace will you find of them. Not an ‘Arry will be heard to cry; not a giggle of M'ria will reach you. . .[you will] not even guess that. . .all London is streaming past, with lunch-baskets and bottled beer.Footnote 111
This more resembled apartheid than the ‘sharing alike’ which Hill had advocated, but it was not a wish to exclude ‘the masses’. Many of the most prominent Christian campaigners for the preservation of Epping Forest, however, went much further and unequivocally welcomed trippers, of whom there were huge numbers: 100,000 people on the Whitsun bank holiday in 1903 for example.Footnote 112 Although no doubt many religious people shunned the places where trippers congregated, religious institutions and people led the campaign to open the forest as much as possible to them, even, as we have seen in the example of Fowell Buxton, when this impinged on their own enjoyment.
The campaign over access reached a climax in 1881 when the Great Eastern Railway sought to extend its line through the forest to make more of it accessible by train. Led by evangelical Edward North Buxton, the conservators supported the plan, considering that their statutory duty to facilitate public enjoyment of the forest overrode their statutory duty to preserve its natural aspect.Footnote 113 Buxton's rationale was that the conservators were ‘content to abide by the opinion of the ministers of all denominations resident in the east of London who may be trusted to speak for the children and the poor’, and that opinion resolutely favoured extension.Footnote 114 A petition for railway extension was signed by 700 clergymen, ministers, and representatives of Sunday Schools, Bands of Hope, and temperance societies, in the north and east of London.Footnote 115 The proposal was eventually defeated after opposition from, among others, middle class residentsFootnote 116 and the Commons Preservation Society.Footnote 117 But it showed that some preservationists subordinated class preferences to religious principles to make them remarkably sympathetic to excursionists.Footnote 118 While Edward North Buxton commiserated with those who deprecated the ‘sometimes boisterous mirth of the London contingent’ in the forest, he concluded:
Much as one sympathises with the pursuits of contemplative persons seeking solitude, it was not intended to be kept for their exclusive benefit. Our chief care must be for the single annual holiday of the artisan, his tired wife and smoke-filled children.Footnote 119
The railway extension was therefore welcome.
There were further examples of Christians welcoming all. Edward North Buxton's guide to the forest sought to lead more people to its little known spots, and he hoped, in vain as it turned out, that his book would have a cheap edition so that it was not only the middle class who could enjoy those spots.Footnote 120 To Fowell Buxton, ‘the Bank Holiday trippers in Epping Forest were never “drunk”’ only “amusing themselves”’.Footnote 121 Octavia Hill, generally regarded as ‘inexorably moralistic’,Footnote 122 found bank holiday throngs ‘undisciplined but heartily happy’. Admittedly Epping Forest was crowded, and the throngs carried ‘London noise and vulgarity into woods and fields’,Footnote 123 but rather than condemning them, the middle class should ‘Look at the happy family groups. . .watch the joy of eager children. . .notice the affectionate father bringing out the pot of ale to the wife’, and put themselves in their shoes. ‘To us [middle-class people] the Common or forest looks indeed crowded with people, but to them [working class who live in cramped and greenless conditions] the feeling is one of sufficient space, free air, green grass, and colour’. And she adopts the Christian position of condemning the sin but not the sinner:
In spite of [the throng], and in spite of the really bad sights to be seen at every public-house on the road, in spite of wild songs and boisterous behaviour, and reckless driving at night, which show how sadly intoxication is still bound up with the idea and practical use of a holiday to hundreds of our people, how much intense enjoyment the day gives!Footnote 124
For the Christian Hill these were ‘our people’, not some alien others.
A Christian understanding of nature thus had at least the potential to be non-elitist. For the Christian, God was the ultimate point of reference and, while he might be immanent in nature, people, made in his image, were not to be sacrificed for nature's benefit. Thus, conceding that wild flowers would probably suffer from railway expansion, Edward North Buxton pointed to poor children and, using a Biblical text, said simply, ‘They are more important than the lilies of the field’.Footnote 125 For the secular nature mystic, by contrast, nature, or more often Nature, was the ultimate point of reference, or in the words of secularist Edward Aveling the ‘eternal comforter’,Footnote 126 and for some this justified keeping the masses from desecrating it.
Natural history societies, whose prime concern was with nature. were amongst the most vocal opponents of the railway extension,Footnote 127 and their prioritising of nature foreshadowed spiritualist-geographer Vaughan Cornish's declaration that ‘the quietness of the scene is essential, for only in quietude can Man hear the voice of Nature and receive its message of eternal truth’.Footnote 128 While some secular open space campaigners divided people into citizens, who knew how to behave, and anti-citizens, who did not, some Christian campaigners had their sights on the kingdom of God where all were equal citizens. We should not argue from these examples to a general secular versus religious divide on questions of access, but they do show one influence of religion on the preservation debate.
Religion and working class recreation in the forest
Religious attitudes certainly changed how Epping Forest was used for recreation after its preservation. Some types of leisure came into conflict with religion. The national movement against animal cruelty, including cruel sports, drew support from upper middle class Christians who hoped that civilising manners would incline the masses towards religion.Footnote 129 In Epping, Edward North Buxton had an uncharacteristically class specific attitude to animal cruelty. Although he elsewhere advocated that middle class big game hunters should change their ways, in Epping he led the conservators to clamp down on working class poachers, because their small bore weapons left wounded deer to die a protracted death, and to ban the annual Londoners’ deer hunt, while he and his middle class companions shot deer in the forest with large bore weapons as part of a scientific culling programme.Footnote 130 His son Gerald, however, promoted animal welfare with the family's characteristic imagination and sympathy with the poor. Many locals offered donkey rides to trippers and, to counteract the animals’ suspected neglect and overwork, Buxton gave five shillings for every donkey that passed a veterinary examination at the Theydon Bois Flower and Vegetable Shows which were held at Birch Hall, his house in the forest. The effect was dramatic and soon all the donkeys passed. Poor people often complained that middle class animal welfare activists took no account of the fact that they were forced by economic circumstances into treating their beasts cruelly.Footnote 131 Gerald Buxton's solution to possible animal cruelty demanded a change to his own behaviour, in the form of opening up his house to the poor and paying for a vet and for fit donkeys, as well as alterations in the behaviour of the poor. This is something that seems to have characterised religiously inspired behaviour.Footnote 132
Working people often mistrusted attacks on their traditional sports because ‘too rarely were alternative recreations provided which were as attractive as those under attack; humanitarians often disapproved of light-hearted recreation altogether’.Footnote 133 By the time Epping Forest had been saved for recreation, however, Anglican and even some nonconformist churches and chapels had modified or abandoned their Puritanism enough to promote modern, mass alternatives to traditional pastimes.Footnote 134 In the forest this led to the flourishing of the group outing. Such outings often conduced to respectability as the potentially wayward were always supervised.Footnote 135 While trade union, works, or cooperative society outings were common in industrial regions, in Epping Forest outings were commonly led by churches, Sunday schools, religiously inspired charities such as the Ragged School Union, and temperance organisations of a Christian bent.Footnote 136 In the forest such groups were typically provided with a basic tea, use of an earth closet, and harmless recreations such as swingboats, roundabouts, donkey rides, or coconut shies, in ‘retreats’.Footnote 137 These were large, simple, timber or corrugated iron pavilions, mostly erected as commercial ventures which depended heavily, although not exclusively, on church patronage. One, the Shaftesbury Retreat, at Staples Hill in Loughton, was erected for the exclusive use of the evangelically inspired Ragged Schools.
Whether the new group outings were as attractive as traditional recreations was a matter of personal taste. They were certainly used by the middle class, often religious leaders of the organisations, to enforce desirable behaviour: outings to forest retreats were offered as rewards for regular attendance at Band of Hope meetings for example.Footnote 138 Retreats, which did not serve alcohol, compelled their patrons to temperance and in their heyday they took so much trade from pubs that the latter opened temperance tea gardens as annexes.Footnote 139 In 1870 Octavia Hill had ‘feared, all day, they [her tenants on their outing] would wander off to the public house’, but the risk was minimised in the forest after retreats opened.Footnote 140 At least some retreats led by example in Sabbath observance: the Shaftesbury Retreat and the Forest Retreat at Buckhurst Hill were among several Sabbatarian places of refreshment in the forest, although their impact is unknown. While the new mass recreation coexisted with harmless traditional pursuits such as gathering blackberries, apples, and sweet chestnuts,Footnote 141 they became direct competitors with others. Children who were not allowed to go to the traditional Wanstead Flats Fair because of the rough people and fighting there, instead went to retreats for Sunday school outings.Footnote 142 But whatever the respective merits of the new and old leisure opportunities, the new daily tide of mass visitors undoubtedly represented a democratising of leisure and its extension down the social scale in a process in which religious organisations were very important.Footnote 143 Many pavilions could cater for several hundred at a sitting, and William Riggs claimed that, to cope with demand from church, Sunday School, and Ragged School outings, his High Beach Retreat could provide tea for three to four thousand children at a time.Footnote 144 Locals remember hundreds of children coming each day in the summer holidays to the Shaftesbury Retreat.Footnote 145 This was mass tourism indeed, and the tourists were literally the great unwashed, whose bodies ‘were not accustomed to soap and water’, and who left ‘unspeakable deposits of filth and litter’ when they left.Footnote 146
The actions of churches and other religious organisations were often exemplary. For example, six hundred children from the Cripple Department of the Ragged School Union went on a group outing to the forest in 1889.Footnote 147 Yet it is questionable whether group visitors experienced much of what the middle classes understood as ‘nature’. Retreats were actually in wooded areas, unlike pubs which were in villages round the forest, so retreat visitors did at least glimpse nature.Footnote 148 However a distinctly jaundiced retreat proprietor described their ‘paper hats, face-masks, [and] noise-makers’ as they ‘literally crammed’ into the retreats.Footnote 149 There was not much here of serenity and less of solitude. But, as Octavia Hill pointed out in passages cited earlier, it was unreasonable to expect poor people to experience nature in the same way that the middle classes did. She was alert to the fact that, while the middle classes might need time away from their desks to conquer mountains, what poor people needed, engaged as many of them were in unremitting physical labour at home and work, were ‘outdoor sitting-rooms’.Footnote 150 So when poor people simply sat in groups chatting, or stretched out and dozed in easily accessible bits of Epping Forest, and when their children shrieked and charged about in the unaccustomed space, nature was meeting their needs for recreation just as much as it did those of middle class people when they strode about alone and quiet.
Conclusion
Although there is much truth in Shaw Lefevre's classic history of the Commons Preservation Society and the Epping Forest campaign which give central place to his radical secular reformism, this is not the whole story. Religion governed the entire public lives of Commons Preservation Society activists such as the Buxton brothers, Andrew Johnson, and Octavia Hill, and in the local campaign to save Epping Forest, which Shaw Lefevre scarcely mentions although he attended some of its meetings, motives were mixed, but religion was highly important.Footnote 151 After the forest was saved, how it was managed, why nature was valued, and how it was to be experienced were all affected by the action of churches and church-related charities, and of the conservators led by Edward North Buxton whose motivations were religious. In other early open space and preservation movements, too, religion seems to have been important. The Kyrle Society, formed in 1875 or 1876 to ‘Bring Beauty Home to the Poor’, was premised on the Biblical notion that ‘man does not live by bread alone’, and was significantly affected by Christianity and Christian Socialism in the persons of Miranda and Octavia Hill, Miranda being its founder. Religion seems to have been much more significant in Kyrle campaigns for open space than in the society's artistic endeavours.Footnote 152 The legal adviser to the society's open spaces subcommittee was Robert Hunter who, as seen above, was a devout churchman. For him, as for Hill, open space work was a contribution to the establishment of a Christian Britain where social justice and natural beauty coexisted. He was ‘a high minded servant of the State, a lover of the people, and a great-hearted Christian gentleman’.Footnote 153 The National Trust was founded in 1895 by Hunter, Hill, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican priest.Footnote 154 Rawnsley saw his preservation work as Christian:
I believe strongly that the law of Christ and the love of Christ should embrace and govern the whole round of active practical life – the social as well as the intellectual, the commercial as well as the political; the life of action as well as the life devotional and doctrinal; the hours of recreation as well as the hours of labour.Footnote 155
The aims of the National Trust resonated with different people for different reasons, but their Christian underpinnings were clear in the minds of the founders. The modern focus on secular motives for the early preservationist movement seems then in danger of having imposed a modern understanding of nature and society on Victorian people whose ‘sense of divine rule and divine presence’ was quite different.
This discussion also supports recent work which stresses the importance of nature for at least some evangelical Anglicans, exemplified here by the Buxton family. They were admittedly atypical evangelicals, but their involvement in preservationism suggests that we should be open to the surprising variety of Victorian evangelical views.Footnote 156
Just as the Buxtons were atypical evangelicals, so Hill, Rawnsley, Brady, Hunter, and the others named here may have been atypical broad or high churchmen and church women in considering their preservationism to be central to their Christianity. To say that Christianity was important to preservationism is not to argue that preservationism was a central plank in Victorian Christianity. Green politics, being to some extent counter-cultural, were central neither to mainstream religion nor to mainstream secular culture.Footnote 157 In all strands of mainstream Christian theology the salvation of people takes priority over the preservation of nature, and ultimate satisfaction is to be found in the creator, not in creation.Footnote 158 Nonetheless, for some nineteenth-century Christians the preservation movement was a tangible expression of the view that Christianity was not ‘an escape into a realm of make believe, but a way of life that relates God to human experience’, including the experience of nature.Footnote 159 Further, a right relationship with God entailed a right relationship with all of creation, that is, with all people and with the natural world.Footnote 160 There was no one Christian understanding of the land, or nature, or its preservation, or the recreation carried out in it, or indeed much else.Footnote 161 Moreover just as Christian advocates of enclosure elided bourgeois respectability with Christian ethics, so Christian preservationists dressed their class based elevation of nature in theological garments. The theology that suggested God was immanent in all creation could not readily explain why he was more immanent in nature than elsewhere. Yet while Stuart Headlam, a Christian Socialist and Septimus Hansard's curate at Bethnal Green, aroused no opposition when he introduced The Christian Year to his parish discussion group or took poor parishioners on country walks, he came to grief with the church hierarchy when he suggested that God was in music halls.Footnote 162
Class and religion meshed in other aspects of the land question. While preservationism was often associated with the elite and to some extent the church, land nationalisation, taxation of unearned increment, and land tenure reform were associated with lower middle or upper working class nonconformists.Footnote 163 This would bear further investigation. Certainly nonconformists were remarkable by their absence in the campaign for Epping Forest and in the Commons Preservation Society and early National Trust, all of which were dominated by people from the Anglican elite.Footnote 164 The only non-elite voice which articulated opposition to enclosure in Epping Forest, that of John Maynard cited above, was from the dissenting tradition and he rested his argument on clear class based lines, both of which factors may explain his surprisingly small involvement in the main campaign for the forest.Footnote 165
Ultimately, the social and spiritual/religious impact of the open space movement was less dramatic than preservationists of all stripes had hoped. The response to nature's appeal proved far from universal. To the bemusement of many middle and upper class open space campaigners, many poor people remained warmly attached to the grubby urban streets which were home, and either declined to spend time in nature, or tried to recreate urban life within it. The East End children who brought hooters to Epping Forest were followed by adults with concertinas and, later, portable gramophones.Footnote 166 The inadequacy of secular arguments for the uplifting effects of nature was in effect admitted by the imposition of seaside bylaws and park regulations to enforce the respectability and civilisation which nature alone somehow failed to bring.Footnote 167 The inadequacy of theological arguments was shown by the many poor people who liked open space but declined to be guided thence to organised religion. Some admitted that the transformatory power of nature had been significantly overstated: ‘It is not, after all, every man or woman who is susceptible to scenery’.Footnote 168 There were also numerous attempts to explain away the, as yet, limited transformation of those people who had experienced open space. Secular commentators suggested that poor people needed more education, or more experience, before they would manifest the appropriate ‘exultation in Nature’.Footnote 169 Religious commentators conceded that poor people who had enjoyed nature did not on the whole embrace organised religion in consequence, but might believe, with Canon Rawnsley, that ‘in the last day the Christ will own as His faithful servants many who never knew Him’.Footnote 170
The optimists, or wishful thinkers, depending on one's point of view, whether secular or religious, who strove to keep nature open for the poor are ultimately more attractive than those who argued that the inappropriate poor did not deserve nature (‘Are these “the people” for whom Epping Forest is to be preserved?’ thundered one such, who evidently thought that the people needed to do better before they were ‘given’ the forestFootnote 171) or that those who had not already been transformed by nature should henceforth be kept out of it (‘The imposition of a small toll [on entry to part of Epping Forest] would be a great safeguard [against contact with the unrespectable poor]’ suggested anotherFootnote 172). Moreover, the testimony to the actions of open space campaigners is the landscape itself. The main point here, however, is not a judgement about success or failure, but the argument that Christianity was a significant motive for many preservationists, and that explanations of the open space movement are incomplete if they take no account of it. Environmental historians have recently drawn attention to the isolation of their subdiscipline from other types of historical enquiry, and have suggested that its explanations can be impoverished and its scope narrowed as a result of such isolation.Footnote 173 This essay attempts to connect the history of the open space movement in Victorian England with histories of contemporary religion, leisure, and secularisation, with the hope of enriching and enlarging the scope of the explanations each offers.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Royal Geographical Society's 2009 conference and the Anglo-American 2010 conference. I am grateful to conference participants and to Keith Snell and Brian Harrison for subsequent comments.
