The Form of the English Nation: Law, Morphology, and the Poetry of John Clare, Prof Matteo Nicolini

The presentation focuses on the production of rural landscapes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Owing to the impact of the industrial revolution, landowners and capitalists had resort to enclosure to increase agricultural production and support the nascent manufacturing industry. By formalising a new landscape, enclosure gave a new form to the land; it ended commonage and established new legal entitlements to private property. This way of legally creating landscapes stood in stark contrast with more traditional processes of spatial production, likened to the commons and rooted in the social stratification of natural-human interactions. The latter processes outlined the morphology of the land and reflected the ecology of places. The chapter will revisit these processes of landscape production through John Clare’s writings. Clare poignantly criticised the changes brough about by enclosure, which worsened the condition of the labouring class and disrupted the morphology embedding the centuries-old relationships between English communities and their territories.