The manuscript of The Invention of the English Landscape c. 1700–1939 was left unfinished at Peter Borsay’s death. Fortunately, the main text other than the introduction, references, and bibliography was complete. Nevertheless, anyone who has written an academic book will know how much work is involved in taking a book from this point to publication. It is hugely to the credit of the editor, Rosemary Sweet, that she took on this selfless task, all the more so as it would have been a serious loss to scholarship had this rich, rewarding study not seen the light of day. Indeed, in my view, this is the best and fullest account we yet have of the emergence of landscape as a broad cultural discourse and practice in England from the early eighteenth century onward, complementing existing studies on more specific aspects such as Paul Readman’s account of the convergence between landscape and national identity in Storied Ground (2018).

The Invention of the English Landscape is informed by Borsay’s deep knowledge of urban history, especially town improvement during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the history of Bath and of Great Malvern in particular. Borsay also knows the rural history literature well. This unusual combination of qualifications saves him from the trap of rural exceptionalism that some previous histories of the English landscape have fallen into: the assumption that characteristic features of rural landscape representation and practice must have been unique to the countryside. However, as Borsay shows, many such features, among them recreational walking, the celebration of antiquities, and the significance of landscape in relation to patriotic and other forms of identity, also pertained to urban landscapes. In this and other ways, Borsay takes further one of the most notable and welcome trends of landscape scholarship since the millennium: the qualification and nuancing of the binary contrasts informing much landscape scholarship in the last quarter of the twentieth century, notably the claims that from about the 1870s landscape became almost exclusively associated with the past, with the rural, and with southern England.

In this context, one among many interesting aspects of the book is the emphasis it places on the nexus between coastal landscapes and the modern (in relation, for example, to iconic structures such as the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea). It is typical of Borsay’s nuanced understanding, however, that he also draws attention to the scope seaside holidays offered for what could be construed as anti-modern impulses, such as immersion in nature through bathing, boating, and coastal walks (especially along cliffs). Hence, the seaside offered many of the same affordances as the countryside.

It is difficult to summarize the argument of such a wide-ranging study. In the broadest terms, the picture Borsay paints is a familiar one: industrialization and urbanization had the effect of extending an aesthetic perception of landscape, previously confined to a narrow elite, to the middle and working classes. Increased disposable income and leisure time and the transport revolution were critical to this, as was the economic marginalization of the countryside, leaving it free to be culturally reconfigured as a leisure space. The rapid pace of change fostered an interest in the past (and to an extent the future) which could be explored through landscape. However, cultural influences, for example Romanticism, had a degree of autonomy: the increasing demonization of the town and idealization of the country during this period owed more to writers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Hardy than to socioeconomic change per se. In the first half of the twentieth century, landscape became increasingly associated with Englishness, although the relationship between this and British and imperial identities was problematic. While this nexus loosened in the postwar years, the conceptions of landscape charted in this book continue, Borsay argues, to exert a powerful legacy.

The Invention of the English Landscape is an example of macrohistory at its finest: informed by an extraordinarily wide range of reading, especially of the guidebook literature, drawing together economic, social, and cultural changes across three centuries into plausible and coherent patterns, and percipient and scrupulous throughout. These last two qualities give the book a sharp and admirable awareness of its own limits. Borsay is well aware that to explain people’s behavior—why they went on walks, for example, or took an interest in old buildings—it is essential to understand their motivations and experiences. He recognizes that it is unlikely there was a simple, one-to-one mapping between published discourse (for example, the tropes of guidebook literature, on which he draws extensively and rewardingly) and private experience. In an attempt to address this problem, he quotes from a few private diaries. But, as he recognizes, quotations used in this way can do little more than illustrate pre-existing assumptions (whether those of contemporary writers or subsequent historians). Illuminating the complexities of personal experience and motivations requires a microhistorical approach, the other end of the spectrum from the panoptic view we are offered here. Hence, to the author’s credit, where the book engages with popular motivations and experiences, it is strewn with disclaimers that acknowledge, for example, that “What is much more difficult to establish is how the tourist actually responded” (83). In the main, then, The Invention of the English Landscape is a study of the sociocultural construction of landscape in England since the eighteenth century; how landscape was actually experienced, what it meant to people, and why it did so lie largely outside the book’s purview.

While the range of scholarship Borsay engages with (and more so the thoughtfulness of this engagement) is impressive, numerous important studies are omitted. Among the major omissions from the bibliography and text are Alun Howkins’s influential essay “The Discovery of Rural England” (in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd [1986], 62–88), Donna Landry’s The Invention of the Countryside (2001), and Harvey Taylor’s A Claim on the Countryside (1997). I mention this in fairness to these and other authors and not in any way as a criticism of Borsay’s work: had he lived to see the text through to completion, given the quality of his scholarship, it is very likely he would have rectified these omissions.