"This volume makes a bold and highly sophisticated contribution to Victorian cultural studies as it explores the historical interrelations between Victorian aestheticism and liberalism. . . . Extremely ambitious."--

In examining how the laboring people of nineteenth-century England saw their social order, this text looks beyond class to reveal the significance of other sources of social identity and social imagery, including the notions of "the people" themselves.

The relationship between landscape and identity is explored to reveal how Englishness encompasses the urban and rural, and the north and south.