0:00:05 > 0:00:08For thousands of years,
0:00:08 > 0:00:12the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain have been just geography.
0:00:13 > 0:00:20But in the late 1700s, they became something much more - the face of our nation.
0:00:20 > 0:00:23Our countryside became our country.
0:00:23 > 0:00:28When homesick travellers thought fondly of Britain,
0:00:28 > 0:00:32they thought of their landscape - most of us still do.
0:00:32 > 0:00:38And it was, for the first time, a landscape of ALL the British nations -
0:00:38 > 0:00:42the wild places of Wales and Scotland,
0:00:42 > 0:00:47the Peaks of northern England, rediscovered, relished, mapped.
0:00:48 > 0:00:55For centuries, going to the country had meant, for the gentry, a stroll through a manicured estate.
0:00:55 > 0:00:59An Arcadia as drowsy with sunshine as an Italian afternoon.
0:01:04 > 0:01:11But in the second half of the 18th century, there was a sudden change in the weather.
0:01:11 > 0:01:16The more adventurous Britons had enough of make-believe sunshine.
0:01:16 > 0:01:21They wanted the real thing. They wanted it rough and were prepared
0:01:21 > 0:01:28to go to places no-one in their right mind a generation before would have dreamt of setting foot.
0:01:28 > 0:01:30Those who clambered up the crags
0:01:30 > 0:01:35weren't just out for thrills. In the wild places, they thought,
0:01:35 > 0:01:39might have survived Britons who'd stayed miraculously untouched
0:01:39 > 0:01:46by the evils of town life, its corrupt politics and diseased bodies.
0:01:47 > 0:01:51If we could somehow learn from their childlike innocence,
0:01:51 > 0:01:56we could become like them and recapture what it meant to be free,
0:01:56 > 0:01:59to be a natural born Briton.
0:01:59 > 0:02:06Nature, in the last decades of the 18th century, came to mean something far more important
0:02:06 > 0:02:13than gardening or hiking. A love of nature became code for a crusade, a revolution even.
0:02:13 > 0:02:18And this time the crusaders weren't going to be in chain mail.
0:02:18 > 0:02:23They would be poets, painters, hack journalists -
0:02:23 > 0:02:29men and women who sensed a great change coming and were rushing to embrace it.
0:02:29 > 0:02:33What they saw was dark and dirty weather.
0:02:33 > 0:02:40Britain was about to be hit by an immense political cyclone - across the Channel, a revolution in France.
0:02:41 > 0:02:48The boldest of the poets and pamphleteers longed for the storm to strike here, too.
0:02:48 > 0:02:55More anxious souls were afraid that, where there was lightning, there would also be fire and destruction.
0:02:59 > 0:03:03In the end, Britain would weather the storm.
0:03:03 > 0:03:07But as the Duke of Wellington once famously put it,
0:03:07 > 0:03:14"It was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life." Just how near run? Wait and see.
0:03:48 > 0:03:50The journey to the guillotine
0:03:50 > 0:03:54and a world war would start with the dreams of a philosopher.
0:03:54 > 0:03:57But not any old philosopher.
0:03:57 > 0:04:04Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was buried here at Ermenonville just outside Paris,
0:04:04 > 0:04:11reshaped a generation's mental habits, turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling.
0:04:11 > 0:04:17Before him, the highest compliment you could pay anybody was to say they were reasonable.
0:04:17 > 0:04:22After him, the compliment became, "Il a de l'ame." He has soul.
0:04:22 > 0:04:27And the British couldn't get enough of it.
0:04:29 > 0:04:32In the spring of 1766,
0:04:32 > 0:04:35Rousseau, on the run from enemies -
0:04:35 > 0:04:38real and imagined -
0:04:38 > 0:04:40pitched up in Staffordshire.
0:04:40 > 0:04:47Richard Davenport moved out of his country house in the village of Wootton
0:04:47 > 0:04:54so that the great man could have a comfortable asylum in which to commune with nature.
0:04:57 > 0:05:02Rousseau could have been forgiven for expecting a warm welcome.
0:05:02 > 0:05:04His two most famous books, Emile -
0:05:04 > 0:05:10a manual on education, no books before 12, disguised as a novel -
0:05:10 > 0:05:17and the weepy of the age, the New Heloise, with forbidden love between tutor and pupil,
0:05:17 > 0:05:21were smash hits among the sobbing and sighing classes.
0:05:24 > 0:05:28At a distance, Rousseau may have been popular
0:05:28 > 0:05:31but he was a paranoid - in Derbyshire,
0:05:31 > 0:05:36he became convinced the servants were putting cinders in his soup.
0:05:36 > 0:05:40In 1768, after more imagined slights, he left England.
0:05:41 > 0:05:44But his ideas stayed
0:05:44 > 0:05:48and put down deep roots among the book-crazy gentry.
0:05:48 > 0:05:53Men like Brooke Boothby, one of his Derbyshire neighbours,
0:05:53 > 0:05:57who had himself painted by the local genius Joseph Wright
0:05:57 > 0:06:01as a man of feeling, in tune with the rhythms of nature.
0:06:03 > 0:06:08What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces
0:06:08 > 0:06:16was Rousseau's belief that urbanity - the graces and fashions of metropolitan life -
0:06:16 > 0:06:21were symptoms of everything that was rotten about the old world,
0:06:21 > 0:06:28the cosmetic mask which hid the poxy disfigurement of a deceitful, vicious, terminally ill culture.
0:06:28 > 0:06:35The antidote was to scrub away the mask and restore grown men and women to their true nature -
0:06:35 > 0:06:38the simplicity of a child.
0:06:40 > 0:06:46Childhood was where Rousseau's revolution began.
0:06:46 > 0:06:50If it was to be properly preserved, the true nature of children
0:06:50 > 0:06:54had to be nourished from the breast.
0:06:54 > 0:06:59Since babies took their moral as well as their physical sustenance
0:06:59 > 0:07:04from their mother's milk, it had better BE their own mother's milk.
0:07:04 > 0:07:10Wet nurses might contaminate them with vice and disease.
0:07:10 > 0:07:14So the virtuous, wholesomely patriotic life
0:07:14 > 0:07:17began at the nursing nipple.
0:07:19 > 0:07:27Another lesson from Rousseau - forget about book learning. Cramming little heads with facts
0:07:27 > 0:07:33did terrible damage to their animal high spirits, their instinct for freedom.
0:07:35 > 0:07:37Get 'em outside. Let 'em romp.
0:07:38 > 0:07:42But in an age of high infant mortality,
0:07:42 > 0:07:47making a heavy emotional investment in your children
0:07:47 > 0:07:50could rebound on you.
0:07:53 > 0:07:57As Rousseau's disciple - Brooke Boothby - discovered
0:07:57 > 0:08:01when his daughter Penelope died at the age of five,
0:08:01 > 0:08:07romantic feeling could be as intense in sorrow as it had been in happiness.
0:08:08 > 0:08:13"She was in form and intellect most exquisite.
0:08:13 > 0:08:18"The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark
0:08:18 > 0:08:21"and the wreck was total."
0:08:23 > 0:08:28The poignant memorial speaks of the terror of loss,
0:08:28 > 0:08:33of joy glimpsed, felt, experienced, and then cruelly destroyed.
0:08:33 > 0:08:39And that was the romantic vision of Britain, too - a paradise in peril.
0:08:49 > 0:08:56When men of feeling got off their high horses and left the sanctuary of their fantasy parks,
0:08:56 > 0:09:00what they saw was the ugly reality of the countryside.
0:09:02 > 0:09:07With the explosion in population, many thousands were leaving the land
0:09:07 > 0:09:13and becoming dependent on the machines of the new industrial revolution.
0:09:15 > 0:09:22Poets, like Oliver Goldsmith, were oppressed by a vision of deserted villages.
0:09:24 > 0:09:26Sweet smiling village
0:09:26 > 0:09:30Loveliest of the lawn Thy sports are fled
0:09:30 > 0:09:33And all thy charms withdrawn
0:09:33 > 0:09:37Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen
0:09:37 > 0:09:40And desolation saddens all thy green
0:09:42 > 0:09:46One only master grasps the whole domain
0:09:46 > 0:09:50And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain
0:09:50 > 0:09:55Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey
0:09:57 > 0:10:00Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
0:10:04 > 0:10:09In 1769, the year that Oliver Goldsmith was writing his poem,
0:10:09 > 0:10:14a military officer with a social conscience, Philip Thickness,
0:10:14 > 0:10:21published a horrifying account of four persons starved to death in a poorhouse at Datchworth.
0:10:22 > 0:10:25To most complacent Britons,
0:10:25 > 0:10:32this was supposed to happen in rat-infested corners of the Continent, not in Hertfordshire.
0:10:36 > 0:10:41For those with eyes to see beyond the railings of their parklands,
0:10:41 > 0:10:48two painful questions presented themselves about the real state of the British countryside -
0:10:48 > 0:10:51what was to be done and who was to blame?
0:10:51 > 0:10:54Was it the responsibility of the church?
0:10:54 > 0:11:01Had the church grown too fat, too respectable, too indifferent to its duties towards the unfortunate?
0:11:01 > 0:11:05Or was it a matter for the absentee landowning gentry
0:11:05 > 0:11:10whose estates were run by men with an eye to profit?
0:11:10 > 0:11:14Or was it wrong to think in terms of what had once been?
0:11:14 > 0:11:21Was that just applying a coat of whitewash to a building that was rotten from top to bottom?
0:11:21 > 0:11:25Was the answer not charity, but politics?
0:11:26 > 0:11:29Thomas Bewick certainly thought so.
0:11:29 > 0:11:37As a child outside Newcastle, he didn't need Rousseau to tell him about the freedom of fresh air.
0:11:37 > 0:11:40He had played truant from school
0:11:40 > 0:11:44and instead of filling his slate with improving knowledge,
0:11:44 > 0:11:52he'd filled it compulsively with drawings, finding his way instinctively towards his vocation
0:11:52 > 0:11:57as the first great illustrator of British natural history.
0:11:59 > 0:12:04And Bewick's pictures weren't just meant for a gentleman's library.
0:12:04 > 0:12:12Ordinary people wanted a book packed with images of the birds and animals of the British Isles.
0:12:20 > 0:12:24But Bewick was looking at something else, too.
0:12:24 > 0:12:29Between the plover and the waxwing, was a portrait of HIS world -
0:12:29 > 0:12:36rain-soaked Northumberland, a tough, dark, gritty place, a world in a lot of pain.
0:12:40 > 0:12:43In his churchyards, dogs snarl.
0:12:45 > 0:12:50By his roadsides, poor bastards break rocks.
0:12:50 > 0:12:53In his garrets,
0:12:53 > 0:12:56blind old paupers slurp soup.
0:13:01 > 0:13:05All this made Thomas Bewick very angry.
0:13:05 > 0:13:09All this made Thomas Bewick a radical.
0:13:13 > 0:13:18In Newcastle, he mixed in debating clubs with men like himself -
0:13:18 > 0:13:25educated artisans, tradesmen and professionals, passionate in their devotion to liberty.
0:13:25 > 0:13:31"It is by the good conduct and consequent character of the great mass of the people
0:13:31 > 0:13:34"that a nation is exalted."
0:13:37 > 0:13:42And what fired Bewick's radicalism wasn't just anger.
0:13:42 > 0:13:45It was an emotion new to politics - sympathy.
0:13:47 > 0:13:54What moved him was an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering.
0:13:54 > 0:14:00A recognition that, deep down, we're all bonded by our shared human nature.
0:14:00 > 0:14:05It was a call to action, echoed in pulpits up and down the country.
0:14:09 > 0:14:12How could you feel the suffering of others
0:14:12 > 0:14:18and not do all in your power to remedy it? For the first time,
0:14:18 > 0:14:23there was a politics of suffering, one that could not turn a blind eye
0:14:23 > 0:14:27to the plight of children, the aged, the sick and the poor.
0:14:28 > 0:14:32Yet bigwigs DID turn a blind eye.
0:14:32 > 0:14:40They believed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 sent James II and his Catholic despotism packing
0:14:40 > 0:14:45and had given birth to a land of the free. In 1788, the 100th anniversary,
0:14:45 > 0:14:51how tempting it was to continue patting themselves on the back
0:14:51 > 0:14:55as being the most enlightened country in the world.
0:14:55 > 0:15:01But for Bewick and his friends there was nothing to be complacent about.
0:15:01 > 0:15:05The real problem of the Glorious Revolution, the radicals argued,
0:15:05 > 0:15:12was that it had been hijacked by scoundrels who'd perverted it to satisfy their greed and ambition.
0:15:12 > 0:15:19They'd packed Parliament with sycophantic placemen and sold their vote to pay their tailor's bill.
0:15:19 > 0:15:26The real, forgotten lesson of 1668 was that the people were entitled to resist, to change their government,
0:15:26 > 0:15:33entitled to the kind of sovereign that understood the reality of a limited monarchy.
0:15:37 > 0:15:42If the memory of that first revolution was to mean anything,
0:15:42 > 0:15:47a second revolution of justice would have to make good on its promise.
0:15:48 > 0:15:51Then, in Paris on July 14th 1789,
0:15:51 > 0:15:56the world would learn just how limited a monarchy could be.
0:15:56 > 0:16:00The Bastille fell and nothing was the same again.
0:16:00 > 0:16:04Though the fortress had just eight prisoners in it,
0:16:04 > 0:16:09its grim towers and its cannon pointing into the heart of the city
0:16:09 > 0:16:15was an emblem of everything detestable about the old monarchy.
0:16:15 > 0:16:22In Bewick's world, toasts were drunk to the dawn of a new age of real liberty and the fall of despots.
0:16:24 > 0:16:28And it was noticed that it had been ordinary people,
0:16:28 > 0:16:33armed with muskets and slogans, who had stormed the citadel.
0:16:33 > 0:16:39The inspiring moral was that the people, if pushed too far,
0:16:39 > 0:16:45could and would take back their rights. Monarchy would be demolished.
0:16:46 > 0:16:52So, when Doctor Richard Price, from his Unitarian pulpit in London,
0:16:52 > 0:16:58congratulated King George III for recovering his sanity, he had the cheek to warn him
0:16:58 > 0:17:05that unless he came to his political senses he, too, would go the way of Louis XVI.
0:17:05 > 0:17:11"May you be led to such a sense of the nature of your situation
0:17:11 > 0:17:17"to consider yourself more properly the servant than the sovereign of the people."
0:17:18 > 0:17:24To the young, dressing down a king in the name of liberty was a heady pleasure.
0:17:24 > 0:17:30William Wordsworth had been born in the Lake District, near Beswick.
0:17:30 > 0:17:34He, too, had grown up in love with nature.
0:17:34 > 0:17:39Now that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity.
0:17:42 > 0:17:49In 1790, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, at the age of 19,
0:17:49 > 0:17:52Wordsworth found himself in France.
0:17:52 > 0:17:55What he saw there he described as,
0:17:55 > 0:17:59"human nature seeming born again."
0:18:01 > 0:18:06"Unhoused beneath the evening star, we saw dances of liberty
0:18:06 > 0:18:11"and, in late hours of darkness, dances in the open air.
0:18:11 > 0:18:14"We rose at signal given and formed a ring
0:18:14 > 0:18:19"and, hand in hand, danced round and round the board.
0:18:19 > 0:18:25"All hearts were open. Every tongue was loud with amity and glee.
0:18:25 > 0:18:28"We bore a named honoured in France.
0:18:28 > 0:18:33"The name of Englishmen. And, hospitably, they did give us hail
0:18:33 > 0:18:37"as their forerunners in a glorious cause."
0:18:45 > 0:18:49But not everyone felt as blissfully as Wordsworth.
0:18:49 > 0:18:55Edmund Burke, the eloquent Irish MP who'd been the militant friend of the Americans,
0:18:55 > 0:18:59now had a change of heart about revolution.
0:19:00 > 0:19:06He too had lifted a glass to toast the dawn of liberty in July 1789.
0:19:06 > 0:19:13But when the lynching started, Burke decided the revolution was, above all, an act of violence
0:19:13 > 0:19:19and he denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections On The French Revolution.
0:19:21 > 0:19:27"Amidst assassination and massacre and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated,
0:19:27 > 0:19:31"they are forming plans for the good order of future society.
0:19:31 > 0:19:39"They act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men and women lost to shame."
0:19:40 > 0:19:44It's hard to know which was more painful -
0:19:44 > 0:19:51the fact that Burke's savage denunciation came from an erstwhile friend of liberty and reform,
0:19:51 > 0:19:57or that it flung back into the teeth of the radicals some of the mushier platitudes about nature.
0:19:57 > 0:20:04They had taken it as read that nature filled your bosom with the love of mankind,
0:20:04 > 0:20:08that nature was fraternal, was cosmopolitan.
0:20:08 > 0:20:14Rubbish, said Burke, nature is rooted in place. It teaches you to love YOUR birthplace,
0:20:14 > 0:20:18YOUR language, YOUR customs, YOUR habits. Nature is a patriot.
0:20:19 > 0:20:26What Burke hated most of all was the naivety of well-meaning Whig politicians,
0:20:26 > 0:20:30like his old friend Charles James Fox,
0:20:30 > 0:20:37putting a few slogans into the heads of people not educated enough to understand what they were wrecking.
0:20:39 > 0:20:44"Democracy? Mobocracy more like," said Burke.
0:20:45 > 0:20:47Heads stuck on pikes,
0:20:47 > 0:20:49the law of the lynch mob,
0:20:49 > 0:20:52we don't want that here.
0:20:53 > 0:20:58But for one unrepentant enthusiast, this was a travesty.
0:20:58 > 0:21:05Tom Paine, whose book Common Sense had supported the Americans in THEIR revolution,
0:21:05 > 0:21:09now took on Edmund Burke.
0:21:09 > 0:21:13In 1791, he published his counterblast, The Rights Of Man.
0:21:13 > 0:21:17It was a brilliantly calculated reply.
0:21:17 > 0:21:23Burke had used flowery language to describe the mob's assault on the queen of France,
0:21:23 > 0:21:31so Paine in contrast used the earthy, direct, street talk of ordinary people.
0:21:31 > 0:21:35The kind of people Burke referred to as "the swinish multitude".
0:21:35 > 0:21:42And what Payne's message was was that nature fought on the side of liberty.
0:21:42 > 0:21:46At our birth, he said, we had certain natural rights
0:21:46 > 0:21:51which no government, no sovereign could violate and expect to survive.
0:21:52 > 0:21:55When Paine shouted, people listened.
0:21:55 > 0:22:00He sold 40,000 copies of The Rights Of Man in a few months
0:22:00 > 0:22:04and the people who bought them were people new to politics -
0:22:04 > 0:22:08men like Bewick, men with grievances to air.
0:22:08 > 0:22:12As they became more vocal and more visible,
0:22:12 > 0:22:19the forces of order, the party of Church and King, began to get distinctly nervous.
0:22:19 > 0:22:25The Prime Minister, William Pitt, barely in his 30s, once hailed as a friend of reform,
0:22:25 > 0:22:32was now firmly in the conservative camp and looked at events in France with growing horror and disgust.
0:22:33 > 0:22:40It was time to batten down the hatches, mobilise the militia, beat the patriotic drum
0:22:40 > 0:22:46and gag the likes of Tom Paine before they made mischief.
0:22:49 > 0:22:52Houses were burned.
0:22:52 > 0:22:55Conspicuous democrats roughed up.
0:22:57 > 0:23:04Tom Paine just got out in the nick of time. He was tried in proxy for treason.
0:23:06 > 0:23:13Those who stayed loyal to Paine came together in solidarity and defiance.
0:23:14 > 0:23:18One place where dangerous thoughts were positively welcome
0:23:18 > 0:23:26was 72 St Paul's Churchyard where Joseph Johnson, the bachelor Liverpudlian printer and publisher,
0:23:26 > 0:23:31acted as kindly uncle to all those he fondly called his "ruffian gang".
0:23:32 > 0:23:38On any given Sunday, you'd find a mix of painters like William Blake,
0:23:38 > 0:23:43agitators for parliamentary reform, celebrity democrats like Tom Paine,
0:23:43 > 0:23:48and you'd find women - articulate, intelligent and impassioned.
0:23:48 > 0:23:54Among the women, the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft.
0:23:54 > 0:24:00She was the spirit of the time. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution.
0:24:05 > 0:24:09Living a hand-to-mouth existence as a writer,
0:24:09 > 0:24:17given a roof over her head by Johnson, Mary burst into print in outrage at Burke's reflections.
0:24:17 > 0:24:23But while she was doing it, she also noticed that the rights of men weren't worth much
0:24:23 > 0:24:27if they excluded the other half of human society.
0:24:27 > 0:24:33So she produced her own amended version - A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman.
0:24:33 > 0:24:38If nature was to be held up as the handmaid of liberty and equality,
0:24:38 > 0:24:43we'd better think about the natural state of women.
0:24:45 > 0:24:51The reason, she said, why women were SO slighted was that, from the time they were little girls,
0:24:51 > 0:24:57their entire being was designed with the sole and sovereign aim of pleasing men.
0:24:57 > 0:25:02She had no time for Rousseau's idea that women, by their very nature,
0:25:02 > 0:25:06could be no more than wives and mothers.
0:25:06 > 0:25:13There was nothing she could see in HER nature which disqualified her from being a true citizen.
0:25:14 > 0:25:19For daring to say these things, Mary was abused as "unnatural".
0:25:19 > 0:25:24Horace Walpole, the essayist, called her "a hyena in petticoats".
0:25:25 > 0:25:28Like Wordsworth before her,
0:25:28 > 0:25:32Mary Wollstonecraft hoped that in the new French Republic
0:25:32 > 0:25:37she'd find like-minded souls with whom to share her radical views.
0:25:40 > 0:25:47But what she landed in was the jumpy, paranoid dictatorship of the Jacobins.
0:25:47 > 0:25:51Rousseau's face and his books were everywhere.
0:25:51 > 0:25:58Slavishly obedient to his dogma, French women who meddled in politics were told to shut up
0:25:58 > 0:26:04and nurse their babies for the revolutionary fatherland.
0:26:04 > 0:26:09Those who dared organise political clubs, were beaten on the streets.
0:26:11 > 0:26:18In August 1792, the monarchy had been overthrown and a revolutionary republic created in its place.
0:26:18 > 0:26:25A month later, when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded from the east,
0:26:25 > 0:26:28the paranoia became bloody.
0:26:39 > 0:26:451,400 men and women held in Paris prisons were demonised as a fifth column
0:26:45 > 0:26:48and butchered in cold blood.
0:26:54 > 0:27:00In the 21st century, we reckon we know all about the split personality of revolutions -
0:27:00 > 0:27:04the transformation from the smiley face of liberty
0:27:04 > 0:27:08into the ugly reality of a terror and a police state.
0:27:08 > 0:27:14But at the end of the 18th century, no-one was reading a Rough Guide To Revolution,
0:27:14 > 0:27:18especially not its most passionate enthusiasts
0:27:18 > 0:27:22who saw first-hand the days of flowers and freedom and fraternity,
0:27:22 > 0:27:27for whom the slogan of liberty and equality was a natural partnership.
0:27:27 > 0:27:33To begin with, Mary shared the company and the optimism
0:27:33 > 0:27:39of expatriate Americans, Irish, English and Scots who met at White's Hotel in Paris.
0:27:39 > 0:27:43In the first flush of revolutionary bliss,
0:27:43 > 0:27:47a little spilt blood wasn't going to spoil the rapture of freedom.
0:27:47 > 0:27:54- Mary wrote...- "Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools."
0:27:54 > 0:27:58But then, as the despotism of the crown
0:27:58 > 0:28:02was replaced by the despotism of a police state,
0:28:02 > 0:28:08doubts began to creep in. Just a few weeks after she arrived,
0:28:08 > 0:28:11Mary saw Louis XVI going to his trial
0:28:11 > 0:28:17and she found herself weeping at the dignity of his composure.
0:28:17 > 0:28:20It wasn't at all what she'd expected.
0:28:23 > 0:28:31Ironically, even the foremost spokesman for radical politics came under suspicion.
0:28:31 > 0:28:37In the summer of 1793, Tom Paine went from being a local hero to a pariah.
0:28:37 > 0:28:43He blotted his copybook some months earlier during the debates over the sentencing of Louis XVI.
0:28:43 > 0:28:50Even though Paine was the most famous anti-monarchist, he'd argued, very bravely and recklessly,
0:28:50 > 0:28:54that since Louis was an irrelevance, why sentence him to death?
0:28:54 > 0:28:58He had also said that a really free republic
0:28:58 > 0:29:04owed it even to its worst enemies to protect them against oppression.
0:29:04 > 0:29:09This not only made him unpopular but dangerously undesirable
0:29:09 > 0:29:13and in the summer, the chickens came home to roost.
0:29:13 > 0:29:18Paine was arrested and locked up in the Luxembourg Prison over there.
0:29:18 > 0:29:23He was saved from the guillotine only by a fantastic accident.
0:29:23 > 0:29:30When somebody was about to get the chop, someone came round and marked a cross on the door of their cell.
0:29:30 > 0:29:33In Paine's particular case,
0:29:33 > 0:29:37the door happened to have been open so that the cross was actually made
0:29:37 > 0:29:40on the inside of the door.
0:29:43 > 0:29:47When the door slammed shut, that cross was invisible.
0:29:47 > 0:29:53Paine escaped his date with the national razor, as it was called, by a freak of fate.
0:29:56 > 0:30:00As the arrests and executions started to speed up,
0:30:00 > 0:30:04Mary's natural exuberance began to cool.
0:30:04 > 0:30:10She was scared and despondent, writing to Joseph Johnson.
0:30:15 > 0:30:22"I have seen eyes glare though a glass door opposite me and bloody hands shook at me.
0:30:23 > 0:30:28"I wish I had even kept the cat with me as I want to see something alive.
0:30:28 > 0:30:33"Death, in so many frightful shapes, has taken hold of my fancy.
0:30:34 > 0:30:40"I'm going to bed and for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle."
0:30:57 > 0:31:05By spring of 1793, the war which had broken out between Britain and France had changed everything.
0:31:05 > 0:31:12Instead of being treated as honoured guests, expatriates were suspected of being a fifth column,
0:31:12 > 0:31:19compromised by their friendship with French politicians, guillotined as traitors to the Republic.
0:31:19 > 0:31:25Mary must have felt it would be HER turn any day.
0:31:26 > 0:31:34Salvation appeared in the shape of an American businessman and property speculator, Gilbert Imlay,
0:31:34 > 0:31:37who registered her as his American wife
0:31:37 > 0:31:43and thus free from the taint of being one of the enemies of France.
0:31:45 > 0:31:49Nursing their baby in a quiet garden on the outskirts of Paris,
0:31:49 > 0:31:55Mary the feminist had been saved from the Revolution by motherhood.
0:31:57 > 0:31:59But it was not to be a happy ending.
0:31:59 > 0:32:02As Mary became more devoted,
0:32:02 > 0:32:06Imlay's business trips became mysteriously prolonged.
0:32:09 > 0:32:15When she followed him as far as London, she found a new mistress.
0:32:15 > 0:32:17On a rainy night in October 1795,
0:32:17 > 0:32:24she walked around Putney long enough to make sure her best dress was heavily saturated.
0:32:24 > 0:32:29Then she jumped off the bridge into the Thames,
0:32:29 > 0:32:34leaving a note for Imlay, "Let my wrongs sleep with me."
0:32:34 > 0:32:38But she was not to be allowed her poetic suicide.
0:32:38 > 0:32:41A boatman pulled her out.
0:32:43 > 0:32:49She was 37 and she seemed to have lost everything except her child -
0:32:49 > 0:32:53her faith in revolution, in the virtue of the people,
0:32:53 > 0:32:57her belief in the possibilities of an independent woman's life.
0:32:57 > 0:33:02The goodness of nature must have seemed a cruel joke.
0:33:05 > 0:33:12Some months later, she seemed to get a second chance at happiness in the unlikely form of William Godwin,
0:33:12 > 0:33:17a philosopher she'd met once before at Joseph Johnson's.
0:33:19 > 0:33:26Godwin was notorious for his rejection of romance as well as marriage and private property,
0:33:26 > 0:33:31but Mary's fire burned bright enough to melt his icy principles.
0:33:32 > 0:33:37Though they'd agreed not to cohabit, the sworn enemy of matrimony
0:33:37 > 0:33:42and the feminist were wedded at St Pancras Church.
0:33:42 > 0:33:46And as her months of pregnancy passed,
0:33:46 > 0:33:52the two found themselves relaxing into conjugal cosiness to the point
0:33:52 > 0:33:59where Godwin was prepared, at least privately, to admit the force of emotion as well as thought.
0:33:59 > 0:34:03Which is what made the end so unbearable.
0:34:04 > 0:34:08When the time for her labour came, Mary called a local midwife.
0:34:08 > 0:34:11But after the baby was born, another girl,
0:34:11 > 0:34:16the placenta remained firmly lodged at the top of the birth canal.
0:34:16 > 0:34:23Now, obstetric opinion of the time held that, unless the placenta was promptly expelled,
0:34:23 > 0:34:26there was a lethal danger of infection.
0:34:26 > 0:34:34So a doctor from Westminster Hospital was summoned, and he stuck his hand up Mary and pulled.
0:34:34 > 0:34:41The placenta came away in pieces, as Mary lay in agony, haemorrhaging.
0:34:43 > 0:34:51She had been through so many terrors, so many ordeals, come so close to death and had survived.
0:34:51 > 0:34:55This time, with so much to live for, there would be no escape.
0:34:55 > 0:34:59She died a week later of septicaemia.
0:35:01 > 0:35:04Godwin wrote to a friend...
0:35:04 > 0:35:07"My wife is now dead.
0:35:07 > 0:35:11"I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.
0:35:11 > 0:35:16"I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.
0:35:16 > 0:35:22"I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again."
0:35:22 > 0:35:28She is rightly remembered as the founder of modern feminism,
0:35:28 > 0:35:32for making a statement remarkable for its bravery and clarity,
0:35:32 > 0:35:38that the whole nature of women was not to be confused with their biology.
0:35:38 > 0:35:41But nature, biology, had killed her.
0:35:47 > 0:35:53Beyond her deathbed, the relentless struggle between liberty and repression raged on,
0:35:53 > 0:35:55stopping for no-one.
0:35:57 > 0:36:02Meeting with radicals could now get you into serious trouble.
0:36:03 > 0:36:06Habeas corpus had been suspended.
0:36:06 > 0:36:10Printing presses were smashed, the doors of freedom were slamming shut.
0:36:10 > 0:36:15And no wonder, for the stakes were as high as they could get.
0:36:17 > 0:36:20Republican France was on the march
0:36:20 > 0:36:24and Britain was vulnerable where it had always been - in Ireland.
0:36:35 > 0:36:41Irish Republicans had been among the friends of revolution at White's Hotel.
0:36:41 > 0:36:45They dreamed of a great uprising against the English.
0:36:45 > 0:36:52But for the dreams to come true, an insurrection had to coincide with a French invasion.
0:36:54 > 0:36:59The French DID come, but they came too late and on the wrong coast.
0:36:59 > 0:37:04By the time they got to Killala Bay in the west in the summer of 1798,
0:37:04 > 0:37:11the rebellion of the United Irishmen in the east had already been crushed by a British army at Vinegar Hill.
0:37:22 > 0:37:26Stranded in the wilds of County Mayo, a long way from Dublin,
0:37:26 > 0:37:32their only Irish help came from an improvised troop of peasants, schoolmasters and priests.
0:37:34 > 0:37:38All the bloody games we know so well started here.
0:37:38 > 0:37:43Masked men arriving at midnight, the stockpiling of arms,
0:37:43 > 0:37:50the mercilessness shown towards anyone even faintly suspected of collaborating with the English.
0:37:52 > 0:37:56Hit-and-run slaughter was not a strategy.
0:37:56 > 0:38:00The invasion stalled and went into retreat.
0:38:00 > 0:38:02Finally, the French capitulated.
0:38:04 > 0:38:10Wolfe Tone, the Protestant Irish Republican leader who'd come with them,
0:38:10 > 0:38:13was arrested and tried for treason,
0:38:13 > 0:38:17but committed suicide in prison before he could be hanged.
0:38:22 > 0:38:27At least 30,000 Irish men and women died in 1798.
0:38:27 > 0:38:33Another of the tragedies that scarred the country's history,
0:38:33 > 0:38:38but one which would be remembered indelibly, though not accurately,
0:38:38 > 0:38:42as a war of the Protestant English against the Catholic Irish.
0:38:46 > 0:38:50For Pitt and the Westminster politicians,
0:38:50 > 0:38:54it had been a close call. The enemy at the gates in Ireland,
0:38:54 > 0:38:58another huge French army camped on the Channel coast.
0:38:58 > 0:39:01A time for sweaty palms.
0:39:03 > 0:39:07And a time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions.
0:39:07 > 0:39:12How could you be a cheerleader for revolution knowing what you knew,
0:39:12 > 0:39:17having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed?
0:39:22 > 0:39:29William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone in the early days of revolutionary hope.
0:39:29 > 0:39:32Now those hopes were turning to doubts.
0:39:35 > 0:39:39By 1798, with the fate of Britain hanging in the balance,
0:39:39 > 0:39:45he was renting a house in Somerset, close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
0:39:52 > 0:39:54Like Mary Wollstonecraft,
0:39:54 > 0:39:58Wordsworth had lost his heart in revolutionary France,
0:39:58 > 0:40:03but his lover and the mother of his child had been a royalist.
0:40:03 > 0:40:10Late in 1792, with war impending, he had to decide between staying - at peril to his life -
0:40:10 > 0:40:14or returning to England. He chose the latter path.
0:40:17 > 0:40:24Being a friend of the people now required him to be an enemy of France.
0:40:24 > 0:40:30Why? Because France, in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte, had abandoned the cause of liberty
0:40:30 > 0:40:38and turned into nothing more than your common or garden tyrant, bent on forcing Britain to its knees.
0:40:41 > 0:40:45Wordsworth's other great love affair -
0:40:45 > 0:40:51with nature - was as strong as ever. Only now nature made him think, not of revolution,
0:40:51 > 0:40:58but of home. Sadder and wiser as he now was, how much of his old fire could he preserve?
0:41:00 > 0:41:05The solution was to abandon political dogma for poetry.
0:41:05 > 0:41:09Hope lay not in the torrents of blood spilled in Paris,
0:41:09 > 0:41:17but in the moral example of country people whose lives were lived in decency close to English nature.
0:41:17 > 0:41:24The work of poetry now was to make audible the voices of the wounded and the destitute.
0:41:28 > 0:41:31"She had a tall man's height or more
0:41:31 > 0:41:34"No bonnet screened her from the heat
0:41:34 > 0:41:37"A long drab-coloured coat she wore
0:41:37 > 0:41:40"A mantle reaching to her feet
0:41:40 > 0:41:43"Before me begging did she stand
0:41:43 > 0:41:46"Pouring out sorrows like the sea
0:41:46 > 0:41:49"Grief after grief on English land
0:41:49 > 0:41:52"Such woes I knew could never be."
0:41:56 > 0:42:00Nature did still have the power to transform lives,
0:42:00 > 0:42:03but not through any kind of political agenda.
0:42:03 > 0:42:06A vote would never make one happy.
0:42:06 > 0:42:11A snowdrop in February or a mother's love for her newborn might.
0:42:16 > 0:42:19He returned to his roots in the Lake District,
0:42:19 > 0:42:22made his home at Grassmere.
0:42:24 > 0:42:29Nature meant something different now to Wordsworth and Coleridge.
0:42:29 > 0:42:35It was no longer something which connected them with the wider world. It detached them FROM it.
0:42:35 > 0:42:41When they talked about liberty now, they no longer meant solidarity,
0:42:41 > 0:42:43they meant solitude.
0:42:43 > 0:42:50Up in the Lakes, the new affection for home might be as innocent as a summer picnic,
0:42:50 > 0:42:56but on the front line of the war, native loyalty meant something far more belligerent.
0:42:56 > 0:43:00Nature had been recruited for patriotic propaganda.
0:43:03 > 0:43:10Each time invasion threatened, this inward, insular sense of Britishness became more emotionally charged.
0:43:12 > 0:43:18Anyone faintly suspected of radical sympathies was branded a collaborator.
0:43:20 > 0:43:23The country had never been so massively mobilised.
0:43:23 > 0:43:30Not just an immense army and navy, but a volunteer militia of 75,000,
0:43:30 > 0:43:36and, in 1803, in case of invasion, another 300,000 ready to spring to arms
0:43:36 > 0:43:42to defend hearth and home against the godless French.
0:43:42 > 0:43:49When Napoleon turned history teacher, putting on a show of the Bayeaux Tapestry
0:43:49 > 0:43:54to remind the British that conquests had happened before,
0:43:54 > 0:43:59what he got in response was a rude noise from the back of the class.
0:44:02 > 0:44:09What's more, William Pitt was not about to go down with an arrow in HIS eye.
0:44:09 > 0:44:13His war government mobilised on a scale never seen before.
0:44:14 > 0:44:21When the King reviewed 27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park in October 1803,
0:44:21 > 0:44:25half a million of his subjects cheered him on.
0:44:26 > 0:44:30This was Edmund Burke's loyalist dream come true.
0:44:30 > 0:44:38The territorial urge to defend hearth and home vindicated as the most natural passion of all.
0:44:44 > 0:44:51Wordsworth now added his voice to those who thought nature was not the cradle of democracy,
0:44:51 > 0:44:53but the shrine of patriotism.
0:44:54 > 0:44:58"Save this honoured land from every lord
0:44:58 > 0:45:02"But British reason and the British sword."
0:45:07 > 0:45:14Burke's nostalgia for a merry England, still hanging on deep in the English countryside,
0:45:14 > 0:45:18spawned an extraordinary boom in everything historical.
0:45:18 > 0:45:25Suits of rusting armour were taken out of barns, polished up and set in entrance halls
0:45:25 > 0:45:29to trumpet the patriotic pride of the gentry.
0:45:31 > 0:45:34For more than a decade, the war roared on
0:45:34 > 0:45:38as Britain confronted Napoleon's empire.
0:45:38 > 0:45:44Epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal. A world conflict from India to the Caribbean,
0:45:44 > 0:45:48with spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar.
0:45:50 > 0:45:55During these roller-coaster years, the country's woes were muffled.
0:45:55 > 0:46:01Patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint.
0:46:01 > 0:46:06The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax
0:46:06 > 0:46:09on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo.
0:46:27 > 0:46:30Surveying the carnage the day after,
0:46:30 > 0:46:36Wellington famously said that the next worst thing to a battle lost is a battle won.
0:46:39 > 0:46:43He didn't know how prophetic his words would be.
0:46:43 > 0:46:51Instead of tasting the fruits of victory, the poor and the unemployed were looking for ANYTHING to eat.
0:46:51 > 0:46:58The economy of post-war Britain had fallen into the most terrible slump in living memory.
0:47:00 > 0:47:07Even before victory, Napoleon's success at sealing off European markets,
0:47:07 > 0:47:14together with a war against the United States in 1812, had destroyed demand for British manufacturers.
0:47:14 > 0:47:20Tens of thousands of weavers and spinners were laid off or had their wages cut.
0:47:20 > 0:47:27Then, hundreds of thousands more - demobbed soldiers, munitions workers, makers of uniforms -
0:47:27 > 0:47:30were thrown to the workhouse.
0:47:31 > 0:47:34Misery spilled into violence.
0:47:34 > 0:47:38Machines were smashed in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
0:47:38 > 0:47:45While multitudes were losing their jobs, the guardians of nature were getting them.
0:47:45 > 0:47:48While the crisis was at its worst,
0:47:48 > 0:47:55Wordsworth applied for and got a post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland.
0:47:55 > 0:48:01Come election time, in gratitude, he campaigned for the local earl's candidate against a radical.
0:48:01 > 0:48:05He was the government's most obedient servant now.
0:48:06 > 0:48:11Those who had sat at his feet 15 years earlier,
0:48:11 > 0:48:17when he'd seemed to be the first true poet of the people, were horrified.
0:48:18 > 0:48:23There would be other heroes now. Heroes for unpoetical times.
0:48:23 > 0:48:26William Cobbett for example.
0:48:26 > 0:48:30You'd never confuse William Cobbett with a poet.
0:48:30 > 0:48:36He'd run away from his father's farm at the age of 14 and he mostly educated himself.
0:48:36 > 0:48:43But that was exactly why the kind of language he favoured - earthy, coarse, direct and belligerent,
0:48:43 > 0:48:49language of the pub and barnyard - was such journalistic dynamite.
0:48:50 > 0:48:56"The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig beds.
0:48:56 > 0:49:02"Their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig.
0:49:02 > 0:49:06"Their wretched hovels are stuck upon bits of ground
0:49:06 > 0:49:12"on the roadside where the space has been wider than the road demanded."
0:49:14 > 0:49:21His tuppenny trash, The Weekly Political Register, was a one-man revolution in journalism,
0:49:21 > 0:49:24belching outrage in 50,000 copies a week.
0:49:25 > 0:49:33There's no doubt that, until Cobbett came along, no-one had ever got to the ordinary people of Britain -
0:49:33 > 0:49:37robbed of their birthright by a bunch of social parasites -
0:49:37 > 0:49:41and turned them into political animals.
0:49:44 > 0:49:49Cobbett was capable of mobilising an army of hundreds of thousands of petitioners,
0:49:49 > 0:49:55enough to make the government nervous and start muttering about a new peasant's revolt.
0:49:55 > 0:49:59But at the critical moment, where was he?
0:49:59 > 0:50:05In America, arranging to ship home the bones of Tom Paine.
0:50:06 > 0:50:13But Cobbett's army, the foot soldiers of democracy, didn't need holy relics. They needed a leader.
0:50:13 > 0:50:19What they got instead was a disaster. They hadn't been looking for it.
0:50:19 > 0:50:25The mass meeting that was called in August 1819 at St Peter's Field in Manchester
0:50:25 > 0:50:29was, its organisers insisted, to be orderly,
0:50:29 > 0:50:35even nostalgic, demanding only that the rights of freeborn Britons - habeas corpus,
0:50:35 > 0:50:43free press, the right to honest representation - be restored. It would be a festival for liberty.
0:50:45 > 0:50:52The men of order in London and the magistrates in Lancashire saw it very differently.
0:50:52 > 0:50:57Manchester, with its grumbling, out-of-work cotton spinners
0:50:57 > 0:51:01and over-educated rabble-rousers, was a den of conspiracy.
0:51:01 > 0:51:05It needed a lesson before revolution took root.
0:51:05 > 0:51:09The jittery Manchester yeomanry was happy to oblige,
0:51:09 > 0:51:15cutting a way through the crowds to arrest the soapbox orator Henry Hunt.
0:51:16 > 0:51:21A small girl was trampled to death under their horses' hooves.
0:51:21 > 0:51:27The field turned into bloody chaos - the enraged crowd surrounding the yeomanry,
0:51:27 > 0:51:34regular mounted troops coming to extricate them, slicing their way through the bodies.
0:51:36 > 0:51:4211 were killed. Hundreds more badly wounded.
0:51:42 > 0:51:47At least 100 of the injured were women and small children.
0:51:51 > 0:51:56This is the way an eyewitness, the artisan Samuel Bamford, recalled it.
0:51:58 > 0:52:03"In ten minutes, the field was an open and almost deserted space.
0:52:03 > 0:52:08"The hustings remained with a few broken and hewed flag staves erect
0:52:08 > 0:52:12"and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,
0:52:12 > 0:52:20"whilst over the whole field was strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls shoes, trampled, torn and bloody.
0:52:20 > 0:52:25"The yeomanry had dismounted. Some were easing their horses' girths
0:52:25 > 0:52:28"and some were wiping their sabres."
0:52:30 > 0:52:36Peterloo struck old-time radicals like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror.
0:52:36 > 0:52:41"Unnatural" was the word which rang through the denunciations.
0:52:41 > 0:52:46The selfish, wicked men who had done such a thing had forfeited for ever
0:52:46 > 0:52:51the right to be thought of as the natural governing class of Britain.
0:52:53 > 0:52:57"They have sinned themselves out of all shame.
0:52:57 > 0:53:02"This phalanx have kept their ground and will do so until, it is feared,
0:53:02 > 0:53:06"violence from an enraged people breaks them up.
0:53:06 > 0:53:10"Or till the growing opinions against such a crooked order
0:53:10 > 0:53:17"of conducting the affairs of this great nation becomes apparent to an immense majority."
0:53:22 > 0:53:29Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of practical action,
0:53:29 > 0:53:33which they embarked on with religious fervour.
0:53:35 > 0:53:41Those who laboured for change did so now, not only in secret political clubs,
0:53:41 > 0:53:48but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions.
0:53:48 > 0:53:53The Church's monopoly. The ban on Catholic voters in Ireland.
0:53:53 > 0:53:58In the manufacturing towns, a hue and cry to have their own MPs.
0:53:58 > 0:54:02Unless these things were done, a revolution, they said,
0:54:02 > 0:54:05would be MORE, not less likely.
0:54:08 > 0:54:15In 1830, a new revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside
0:54:15 > 0:54:19meant the votes for change could not be postponed.
0:54:19 > 0:54:26The Whigs took office for the first time since 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution.
0:54:26 > 0:54:33And the Parliamentary Reform Act they passed in 1832 made good on their word.
0:54:34 > 0:54:41But the English counties weren't the only place where something had to be done to avert bloodshed.
0:54:41 > 0:54:45In Surinam, Guyana and in Jamaica,
0:54:45 > 0:54:49pushed to the edge by hope and desperation,
0:54:49 > 0:54:56there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic.
0:54:56 > 0:55:00# Steal away
0:55:00 > 0:55:04# Steal away
0:55:04 > 0:55:11# Steal away to Jesus... #
0:55:11 > 0:55:17The message of the Romantics - we are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin,
0:55:17 > 0:55:24we all share, praise be to God, the same nature - could at last be embraced,
0:55:24 > 0:55:31not as a cry for retribution, a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade.
0:55:31 > 0:55:39Abolitionism healed old wounds. It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth
0:55:39 > 0:55:43under the same great tent of righteousness.
0:55:43 > 0:55:48# ..Steal away to Jesus... #
0:55:48 > 0:55:55The organisers of the campaign used all the weaponry of the new age of good causes -
0:55:55 > 0:56:02the revival meeting, complete with hymns, the propaganda tour and the travelling exhibition,
0:56:02 > 0:56:05models of slave ships,
0:56:05 > 0:56:10chests full of the merchandise that might be traded instead of slaves.
0:56:10 > 0:56:14# ..My lord, he calls me
0:56:14 > 0:56:21# He calls me by the thunder
0:56:21 > 0:56:23# A trumpet sound... #
0:56:23 > 0:56:29In 1834, Britain abolished slavery, and at a time, contrary to some legends,
0:56:29 > 0:56:35when the market for its products was becoming more, not less, lucrative.
0:56:35 > 0:56:40It was the first great 19th-century victory for the party of humanity.
0:56:43 > 0:56:48So was the place where the regeneration of Britain would happen
0:56:48 > 0:56:53not, as the young Wordsworth had imagined, in the hills and dales,
0:56:53 > 0:56:57but in chapels, churches and town halls?
0:56:57 > 0:57:02He had supposed that our redemption depended on escaping from cities,
0:57:02 > 0:57:09that the best of human nature withered and perished when a hedgerow turned into a street.
0:57:09 > 0:57:16Perhaps it was the end of HIS dream of a return to the childlike innocence of uncorrupted nature,
0:57:16 > 0:57:20but that dream never had a chance of becoming real,
0:57:20 > 0:57:25not in a Britain powering its way to industrial modernity.
0:57:27 > 0:57:35What Wordsworth had wanted was that nature, the British countryside, should be the negation of the town.
0:57:35 > 0:57:39Instead, it had somehow become its accomplice.
0:57:39 > 0:57:44Instead of needing to get deep into the enfolding heart of the country,
0:57:44 > 0:57:52those who could never have made the trip anyway, could now find nature, literally, in their own back yard.
0:57:52 > 0:58:00In garden allotments given to them by railway companies, an echo of the old strips they'd lost to enclosure.
0:58:00 > 0:58:05In their little gardens attached to the terraced house
0:58:05 > 0:58:09which stood in for the cottage lot they had left behind.
0:58:09 > 0:58:15For the first time, a park meant not the private estate of an aristocrat,
0:58:15 > 0:58:20but a public place in a town without barriers of class or property,
0:58:20 > 0:58:24laid out, as here in Birkenhead in the 1840s,
0:58:24 > 0:58:27with ponds and rambles and lawns.
0:58:27 > 0:58:34The kind of place where parents would bring children to give them something of the pleasure of nature.
0:58:34 > 0:58:40It was not, I suppose, sublime, but neither was it at all ridiculous.
0:59:16 > 0:59:20E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk