Search Results

Thomas Webster, the first ‘professional geologist’, published his earliest geological observations by commission in Sir Henry Englefield’s Description of the Isle of Wight (1816), a work concerned as much with Gothic architecture and picturesque landscape as with geology. This chapter shows how Englefield’s broad three-part agenda fostered the development of Webster’s specifically geological competence and sensibility. As a professional draftsman and architect, Webster was especially well equipped to translate Englefield’s architectural and picturesque idiom into a more geological register. Their collaboration also illustrates how well the style and content of local history—a traditional literary and learned genre—could be applied to geology. For Webster, the image of ruins was essential for representing the historicity of geological phenomena. By attending to a new set of ancient ruins, this chapter shows how strongly the traditional language and research questions of antiquarianism continued to shape geology even as it became a professional specialization.

This chapter considers the geographical conditions and jurisdictional arrangements that made English islands hard to govern. It examines the tension between concerns of central authority and insular assertions of privilege and exemption. The Isle of Man, with its Gaelic roots and Viking heritage, had claims to be an independent kingdom ruled by the earls of Derby. The Isles of Scilly were part of Cornwall, the Isle of Wight was politically attached to Hampshire, and Anglesey was a county of Wales, yet each behaved as if it were partly autonomous. Aristocratic proprietors such as the Stanleys, the Godolphins, the Oglanders, and the Bulkeleys vied for dominance with the central government and with island populations

This chapter deals with the remarkable year-long imprisonment of King Charles himself on the Isle of Wight, after his defeat in the English civil war. It examines the conditions of the king’s confinement in Carisbrooke Castle, his relations with his captors, and his attempts to escape from the island that a contemporary cartoonist called ‘the Ile of Wait’. The Isle of Wight became a centre of national attention during this fatal twilight of the Stuart regime. Aided by royalist intriguers, including his servant Henry Firebrace and the spy Jane Whorwood, the king sought to outwit his keeper, the parliamentary governor Robert Hammond, without success.

The Introduction locates major islands in the seas around England and indicates how their relationships to the rest of the kingdom reflected legacies of history, jurisdictional peculiarities. constitutional arrangements, foreign wars, and commerce. It previews island involvement in the stresses and struggles of English history associated with state formation, Reformation, Revolution, Restoration, and modernity. The Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man and other offshore territories were difficult to administer and sometimes prone to neglect. Yet their strategic positions gave them value and importance that far outweighed their size. Though English governments saw the islands as appurtenances or dependencies of the state, the islanders more often regarded their homes as privileged places.

England, England (1998) is a fictional study around issues such as the creation of the past, the re-fashioning of an imagined national community, and in particular the telling and selling of England. It explores the relationships between heritage and commercialism, history and exploitation, imitation and reality. It is a fantasy, but one that has many recent echoes and real-life parallels. Its central story is that of a powerful businessman who plans to turn the Isle of Wight into a colossal theme park so that tourists will not have to traipse from Dover to London to Stratford-on-Avon to Chester. It counterposes the pomp of Sir Jack Pitman's service-sector magnate with Martha Cochrane's everyday scepticism.

The quintessential concert documentary, Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) created the filmic form that most fully represented the rock festival’s utopian social aspirations. Just as the fans “liberated” what had been initially conceived as a commercial undertaking, so the filmmakers, themselves part of the same cultural community, collectively produced a documentary that combined the sixties’ most radical innovations in filmmaking to present the music and the social context that nurtured it. In its narrative of communal self-production and its spectacles of musical performance (especially Santana and Sly and the Family Stone), it remains one of the great achievements of the musical film. After this apogee, the counterculture’s internal contradictions and the decay of its ideals were becoming apparent in festivals where social conflict, even between musicians and fans, escalated into chaos. Conceived to refute Woodstock’s optimism, Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (Murray Lerner, 1997) displayed the counterculture’s decline.

Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’ (1860) offers a lyrical and dramatic re-inflection of an ill-fated investment made by the poet in the early 1840s. In this chapter, Tennyson’s poem, which frames a marital colloquy about financial misdealings with a resonant evocation of coastal scenery, is contextualised by reference to the nineteenth-century literary figure of the ‘confidence man’. The sociological ‘philosophy of money’ propounded by Georg Simmel and the Benjaminian concept of ‘caesura’ inflect this reading, while attention is also paid to the poem’s evocation of place as resonating with Tennyson’s response to the local coastal features of the Isle of Wight. This neglected text, the author suggests, is marked by what Angela Leighton more generally characterises as those Tennysonian ‘drowning places, of cavern and stream, of rumours, moans and melodies’ – places which offer a potent counterpoint to the poem’s overall theme of fiscal impropriety and compassionate forgiveness.