The Pastoral Midlands

More than the mountains or the beach, the English pastoral landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century served as a repository for social, cultural and eventually national values. Although culminating in the early twentieth century, the process of creating a national image of England as a green and pleasant land began after mid-century. Bedford’s photographs participated in this process. Taken primarily in the Southwest, Northwest and the Midlands, Bedford’s photographs addressed several concerns and behaviors of the urban populace. The question of human relationship to nature, addressed in different guise in Bedford’s other regional photographs, the relationship between city and country, the relation of the present to the past and inquiries into the nature of change were topics of current interest incorporated into the photographs. Urban perception of the countryside as different led to a desire to understand this simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar rural place and culture. This in turn instigated cultural tourism in search of “eternal truths” and shared English values both on an individual and communal level. While his pastoral photographs satisfied a wish for contact with difference, they did not require, anticipate or provide comprehensive knowledge of pastoral landscape and rural society. Bedford’s interpretation emphasized traditions and continuity, shared elements in landscape, and optimistically, shared ideas embodied in the landscape. Stylistically, his formal decisions supported his choice of subject, demonstrating what was considered a desirable synthesis of form and content. Style and subject united to underscore the symbolic more than the economic significance of the pastoral landscape while the “reality” of photography buttressed an urban faith in an idealized rural world.