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The
Forces of Nature
Tuesday 28 May, 9.00pm, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ TWO
For Britain in the second half of the 18th century, pastoral life
took on a new meaning. Nature came to mean something far more important
than gardening or rambling - it became code for a crusade: a revolution
even. This time the crusaders were not in chain-mail. They would
be poets, painters, journalists.
Britain never had the kind of revolution France experienced in 1789,
but came close to it. In Forces of Nature, Schama explains how "the
romantic generation" discovered the politics of sympathy with
the common man. Jean Jacques Rousseau, says Schama, "reshaped
the mental habits of an entire generation, turning them from creatures
of thought to creatures of feeling."
But the romantic vision of nature exalted blurred the eye to the
reality: Britain's countryside was in fact littered with poverty,
depicted by Thomas Bewick as a lurking danger behind his engraved
images of birds and animals.
Nature was turned into a revolutionary idea by radicals and poets
like Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth and events across the channel
following the fall of the Bastille at first seemed to point a way
forward for Britain. But when the terrifying reality of the French
Revolution set in, opinion was divided. Edmund Burke, the eloquent
Irish MP who had been the militant friend of the Americans, now
had a change of heart about revolution. Thomas Paine fired back
with his The Rights of Man and a voice for women spoke out in the
form of Mary Wollstonecraft, a one woman revolution, who in the
end was herself cruelly betrayed by nature.
Finally, though, the politics of patriotism won the day. Britain
sprang to arms to defend hearth and home against the French, with
William Pitt encouraging the patriotic fervour, and Burke's loyalist
dreams came true. But epic campaigns, the naval victory of Trafalgar
and the Battle of Waterloo bought poverty in their wake, and William
Cobbett rose as a new crusader for peasants' rights. Revolution
was not to be encouraged, though, and the yeomanry turned protest
into a bloodbath at Peterloo. Vote for change could not be ignored,
and the Whigs took office for the first time as the champions of
reform without revolution. Across the oceans, Schama says "slave
rebellions were put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look
like a picnic."
"The
message of the Romantics, we are all brothers and sisters beneath
the skin, we all share, praise be to god, the same nature, could
at least be embraced," says Schama. "In 1834 Britain abolished
slavery and at a time, contrary to some legends, when the market
for its products was becoming more, not less lucrative. It was the
first great 19th century victory for the party of humanity."
Produced and directed by Jamie Muir.
At
participants can try to change the course of history by taking on
the role of Napoleon or Wellington in their very own virtual Battle
of Waterloo.
Budding
entrepreneurs can explore the reality of making it as a cotton millionaire
by facing the crucial choices presented to a Victorian businessman
setting up a factory.
Features
include British anti-slavery, the founding of modern feminism, the
Great Exhibition of 1851, and Victorian technology - with animations
showing how the machines of the Industrial Revolution operated.
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