This quotation from David Franklin's book,
Nature and Social Theory. discusses the landscapes - or waterscapes - associated with working-class angling:
[C]oarse fishing afforded working-class men [...] the opportunity to escape to the countryside to strips of land or water that were effectively theirs by dint of their own collective organisation. However, we can say more than this: the lakes, slow-moving rivers, canals, marshlands, fens and drains became a countryside, a particular form of countryside (Britain's lowland waterways) that they clearly dominated. As such this countryside with its associated natural history has a special place in working-class cultures and although it has not been immortalised in the same manner as the middle class's beloved upland brooks and chalk streams, we should not forget its profound place in the shaping of twentieth-century sensibilities and in particular the popularity of the notion of the countryside, conservation and nature.
Franklin doesn't quite say this but I think there is an aesthetic dimension to his comments - these 'lowland waterways' are not the prototypical spaces of the picturesque and suggest another type of beauty that has its own dynamic and its own advocates. I wrote
here about William Gilpin's exclusion of working people from 'scenes of grandeur' and Massimiliano Mollona's discussion of the snobbery levelled at the 'domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped "brownfields")' in which modern coarse fishing takes place. This is something we should think about. The beauty of canals, the poetry of ponds, the charm of drains, and the sublime sight of the Don as it slides between the brick walls of old industrial buildings leaving the city and heading east. I'm interested in aesthetic categories. Which ones are in play here?
Regent's Canal, London, at dusk - image by Caroline Ford (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http:// creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/3..0/) , via Wikimedia Commons.
I think the aesthetization of fishing by working class men is one of the reasons I am totally obsessed with the project. There is also the linguistic resources people use to describe the experience of fishing - the 'boiling water' Gary observed just before he began to fish in one spot, Terry's 'soft hands' he observed the young lad having, these bits of language are complex and closely observed. One of the reasons I want to do an ethnography of fishing is to look at aesthetic language in the everyday and this is an ideal site to do that. This is a great post, reminds mind of Sillitoe.
ReplyDeleteHere is another excerpt from 'Saturday Night Sunday Morning': 'he cast out his line over the narrow sleeve of still water, with elderberry leaves bending across from the opposite bank and white cloud-edges moving above green branches'.(p. 129).
Again I find it interesting that class-distinctions or values are being naturalized or legitimated through ideas of aesthetics concerning the waterways and landscape.
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