1 Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Images of the Rural
In the summer of 1931, Walter Benjamin was to be found on the French Riviera in Antibes. He begins the collection of fragments titled May–June 1931 (1999: 469–486) with the resolution to save his remaining paper for a diary project; in his description, this pursuit takes on the appearance of a suicide note. The next entry veers onto a different track altogether. A reverie about Hemingway dovetails into something like a diary proper: a description of days, places, meetings with friends, conversations, and private contemplations. In the latter half of this collection of fragments, Benjamin begins to turn his critical gaze to the countryside around him:
Every gnat that hums in his ears, every gust of wind that makes him shiver, everything near that strikes him gives the lie to his dreams, but every distance rebuilds them again. They spring to life at every mountain ridge in the dusk, or every lighted window. And the dream appears at its most perfect when he succeeds in removing the sting from movement
itself, in translating the trembling of the leaves above him into the top of a tree, the flitting and darting of the birds above his head into a flock of migrating birds. To command Nature herself to stand still in the name of faded images-this is the black magic of sentimentality. But to utter a call that will freeze it anew is the gift of poets. (1999: 474)
Nature appears, in this fragment, as an essential point of contact between experience and an alternative temporalization of history. This chapter pursues this point of contact as a methodological tool that is of particular importance to geographic studies of rural sites and landscapes. The narrativized beauty of a comprehensible nature appears in Benjamin’s fragment as phantasie (2004: 115). It is present in the dream of a sting that can be removed and the flock of birds whose movements indicate migration. Benjamin is describing the de-formation of apparently natural forms that render the methodological contributions of reflexive consciousness futile.1
Phantasie as a concept is explicated at length in the prologue to Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928): it glows with a particular lucidity in the non-urban context of this so-called “diary project.” The deformation that phantasie stimulates in the form – “gnat that hums in his ears, every gust of wind that makes him shiver, everything near” – alters not the given form itself but the temporal scheme in which the form exists. This is the “black magic of sentimentality” that encloses forms in the time of human meaning. By which I mean a comprehensible teleological order: indeed, the translation of “the trembling of the leaves above him into the top of a tree.” The temporality of complex origin and unknowable ends is covered over by this narrative, and contingency – the ability to call into question the narrative of progress – is foreclosed in its absence.
Benjamin states here that it is the poet, not the sentimental nature lover who holds the potential to touch the phantasie image on its own terms, rather than in the guise of nature. The methodological and epistemic orientation of the poet is receptive to “the objective interpretation of phenomena” (Hanssen 812). Apparently natural forms reveal themselves through the poet’s method as phantasie: they “freeze themselves anew” in a dialectical image.
Later in his diary project, Benjamin writes of taking a trip to the city of Saint-Paul de Vence with his friend, the writer Wilhelm Speyer. Benjamin describes the city with a droll but characteristically dialectic gaze. His tone changes, however, as the friends linger on the ancient ramparts that encircle Saint-Paul de Vence as it blooms over the Provence countryside:
In the even light, all the lines that human labour had incised in the landscape emerged more starkly. Hedges and furrows idiosyncratically drew their lines and angles. But one would have had to know all the plants by name in order to be able to decode their geometry. Indeed, faced with this supremely cultivated landscape, the untutored townsman stands baffled, like a Westerner confronted by a page of Chinese script. To think that such ignorance is the only common foundation of the majority of descriptions! In most cases, the further apart these Provincial farms are, the more admirably they are built, and the more you realize how snugly they fit into the landscape and how natural their forms are, compared to the inexorably geometric lines of the groves, beds, and fields. (1999: 476)
With the strange benefit of what Freud would call nachträglichkeit – translated as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup, afterwardsness; precisely that “mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of … traumatic meaning to earlier events …” (Freud 282) – the rural flashes up in this fragment as an oppressed element within Benjamin’s historical materialism. Benjamin’s reformulation of Freud’s trauma theory moves away from the interior of the individual towards the production of perspective more generally. In Benjamin’s theory of history, as formulated in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” singular linear narratives cover over the plurality of placed experience, much like a monocultural field oppresses the histories of the labor and destruction that were necessary to create it. The revolutionary potential of Benjamin’s temporal schema is exemplified in the tendency of these oppressed histories to flash up in decontextualized images; Benjamin’s method relies on noticing these flashes and using them to illuminate supposedly familiar phenomena with a dark light.
In our current moment, the dual images of the impending climate crisis and the rise of authoritarian political regimes pull the poles of the rural – the “natural” and the technological – into tension. We are, at present, in a moment of danger. In the past century, yields of agricultural crops increased more than ever before in human history and, as a result, the twentieth century was a time of great plenty. As a global society, we had more food than we needed, though we did not distribute it evenly. The great wealth and decadence enjoyed by some, predominantly in the global north, was fueled by the introduction of a technological agriculture that has driven degradation of land productivity, water resources, and soil health, as well as biodiversity loss at multiple spatial scales, ultimately compromising the sustainability of food production systems. Native habitats, such as forests and grasslands, have been transformed into large-scale, monocultural agricultural systems. With new pesticides and fertilizers these systems have developed the ability to wipe out all growth in an area, apart from the profitable crop: nature appears to have been denatured.
An oppressed past gestures. Contemporary rural battles simultaneously operate within and against “nature,” and outside and within ourselves. They demand a critical analysis of the rural as a site of complex histories and contingent futures. We are, at present, in a moment of danger. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, arable land prices have steadily risen in anticipation of predicted growing food shortages resulting from a combination of population growth and climate change. In addition, rural areas across the world have been correlated in geographical research with the growing success of the right-wing, populist, and nationalist movements that have outperformed the established center right and social democratic parties in ballot boxes since 2016 (Manley et al.; Rodríguez-Pose; Coleman; Los et al.).
From Benjamin’s observation of “the inexorably geometric lines of the groves, beds, and fields” that he gazes down upon in France in May 1931, a crystal formed within my doctoral research into the Fen landscape of Eastern England. I had conducted over 30 interviews with a range of farm and field
In what follows, I discuss the specificity of the Fen landscape, not only the progressive tale that has been constructed to cover this landscape but also the disruptive and anarchic forces that are revealed to be at play when the Fens are viewed through poetic, indeed dialectical images.
2 Reclamation and Rurality
Water escapes me yet makes me and there is not a thing I can do about it. (Ponge 51)
The Fen landscape in the East of England is a swathe of “reclaimed” wetland that curves from Boston in Lincolnshire, through Cambridgeshire and past Kings Lynn into Norfolk. It shares parts of its history and its contemporary form with other drained wetland landscapes such as areas of Kent, Essex, and Suffolk. Since the introduction of intensive agriculture in the Victorian period, this area has developed an idiosyncratic set of spatial characteristics: the islands and areas of high ground that functioned as settlements prior to drainage retain their island form. Market towns like March, Wisbech, Chatteris, and Whittlesey in the Fenland district in the North of Cambridgeshire now appear as isolated satellite market towns. They hover over a mire transformed from a wetland teeming with biodiversity into an agricultural monoculture. The local economy is organized around low-paid work in food production in fields and factories. There are few traditionally middle-class service roles in this place outside of local government, health, and education. The local authority struggles to fill these roles.
This crescent moon-shaped area first appeared to me on the electoral heat maps following the 2016 referendum, in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. It flashed up as an area disproportionately in favor of leaving the European Union. Later in the research process, this shape appeared repeatedly in thematic maps representing high levels of migration following
Monoculture here is simultaneously the image and its undoing that brings into view the temporality of divine violence – that covered-over element of disordered origins and contingent ends. I propose that the monocultural image demands an aporetic dialectical approach that constellates cessation and movement with the temporality of an interminable trauma that repeats endlessly but without a predictable rhythm. In Derrida’s terms, the Fen landscape is understood here as
a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself … (39)
There is extensive evidence of landscape management, including drainage projects from the Bronze Age onwards (Oosthuizen; Pryor). The Romans referred to this sickle-shaped network of wetlands as Metaris Æstuarium. The latter word, Æstuarium, describes the area as an estuary and the former, Metaris, alludes to pastoral intentions, the full name imagining the area as a zone of arable potential that will be harvested. It was, however, the political theology of the Elizabethan commonwealth that drove the first state-initiated large-scale drainage program in the latter years of the sixteenth century. New approaches in natural philosophy, influenced primarily by Francis Bacon, imagined the human as separate from all other living beings in their ability and, following Aristotle,2 subsequent obligation to understand and control the natural world. This was a period of arcadian aspiration that sanctioned great violence in the name of ends. It set in motion a process of weeding that is active in the present Fen landscape, an ethics of eradication of all life that exists in the present but not in the envisioned future.
By this point, the drained Fens had matured into the largest swathe of high-grade agricultural land in the country and, though industrial production methods were introduced to the farmlands of the Fens, democracy was not.4 The franchise was not extended to landless rural workers until 1918. This disparity regarding the civil rights of urban and rural workers is due, at least in part, to the spatial arrangement of drained English arable land which was often owned by absent landlords and managed by tenants who sourced labor through gangmasters from small, insular communities. Revolt and revolution from these communities was unlikely, and improving conditions for these workers would
The technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution supported the increasing demands of a rising urban population. These new tools and practices are known as the “high farming” system, referring to the “high input” including but not limited to the intensive use of imported artificial fertilizers, high calorie “oil cake” animal feed, and machinery to sustain the phantasie of very high yields. The Fen region was at the forefront of these agricultural changes and was acknowledged widely during the late nineteenth century as the birthplace of “modern” farming. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, most of this fertile land had been converted to arable, farming wheat and potatoes. The old silt islands housed orchards and soft fruit farms, where cooking apples and plums were grown to be sent to the North of England or used in local jam factories.
The Fen fields of the current moment grow cereals (wheat and barley), root crops (potatoes, pumpkins, carrots, and sugar beet), and brassicas (sprouts, cabbages, and cauliflowers). Thirty-seven per cent of England’s outdoor vegetables, twenty-four per cent of England’s potatoes, and seventeen per cent of England’s sugar beet are grown here. This drained landscape is home to an
In the summer of 2018, I walked with John, an ecologist, along the River Nene, from March to Chatteris in Cambridgeshire. He stopped suddenly in the expanse and turned around, scanning the horizon. As we began to move again, he spoke:
What you see here is a biodiversity desert. This is a man-made remote place. It is weird, because in some ways it is wilder than actual wild places. Even time feels funny, it feels like it is moving slower. There is no aspect here. There is no perspective, no height, no timeframe.
When, as is the case here, a place has no biodiversity it is impossible to work out what happened and when. It removes perspective.
John describes a space in which all contingency is crossed out. This is analogous with Benjamin’s concept of natural history as precisely a violent process stimulated by the desire to sustain phantasie, that narrativized idea of a comprehensible and controllable nature. Natural history appears here as the forcibly imposed stabilization of phantasie time through an interminable discourse of progress “that knows no holiday” (Benjamin 2005: 260). Indeed, the drainage of the Fen landscape is commonly celebrated as a great feat of engineering, a successful step forwards towards the golden age of farming. It was, however, a process marked by recurrent failure.
The Commonwealth state’s drainage projects of the Early Modern period aimed to transform this landscape of interconnected wetlands into a singular landscape of arable productivity. However, the material conditions of this land proved difficult to transform. For example, in 1650, major drainage channels were cut in order to drain the southern fens. These channels formed the celebrated engineering feat of the New Bedford River (also known as the Hundred Foot drain) that runs from near St Ives in Cambridgeshire to Downham Market in Norfolk. By 1673, this land was flooded once again. Whilst the northern silt lands, always more stable, were held somewhat in check by “dreins and gotes,” keeping the loamy soils of the wetlands free of water proved more complicated. This soil, consisting of waterlogged, partly decayed plant remnants, is incredibly rich and fertile. However, it decays rapidly when it is drained. Put simply, the drainage schemes dried out this soil and decomposed, shrank, and lowered the water table, making the land liable to flood once more. The more
Not only was the land made more liable to flood but the decay of soil that lowers the land and entices water back onto the surface is literally the destruction of the very rich soil that the drainage aims to make use of. It is very difficult to harness the extraordinary fertility of the Fen soils without destroying them. A nature reserve site manager, Harry, described this to me during an interview in 2019:
When these soils are drained of water they quickly shrink and when you replace the water with air, it is like putting a log on a fire, it just oxidises away to nothing.
Similarly, when looked at closely, the fêted golden ages of Victorian farming were not a success story. Rather, this was a system of farming with large outlays and high risks; it seems in retrospect that the management of the land using imported fertilizer and pesticides was largely inefficient (Perry). The narrative of success associated with this period is also one of agricultural inefficiency covered over by inflated food prices, a process that increased international imports of cheaper food. In short, a phantasie.
The Fen landscape is still liable to flood. The probability of widespread flooding increases as rising global temperatures raise sea levels and intensive agriculture keeps these soils on a techno-chemical life support system. These soils keep producing whilst they erode and the land sinks and shrinks. The work of picking and weeding these fields is still back-breaking, poorly paid, and managed by combinations of legal gangmasters and illegal slave traders. As in the period prior to the initial drainage schemes, the main holder of this land is the state. The county councils of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire own and lease out the largest County Farms Estates (CFE s) in the country. These council-owned small holdings date back to the late nineteenth century. Between the mid-1920s and the late 1970s, these estates were an integral part of a stability-seeking Keynesian economic project in which state-owned enterprises made work for the population. Between 1977 and 2017, the country-wide acreage of CFE s halved in a wave of disposals. Thatcherism and its austere wake de-regulated the sale of local government assets and allowed local authorities to plug their deficits through the disposal of land and property. Unlike most other areas of the UK, the CFE s of the Fen region did not dispose of any of their land assets during this period. From the inception of CFE s up to the time of writing, Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) – home
Due at least in part to the obscuration of data regarding land ownership in Britain, little is known about CFE s as financial assets or state apparatus (Prince). This concealment has been facilitated by a chronic lack of opposition in local government in the wider Fen region. In 2019, the Electoral Reform Society published data concerning both the Councils where the highest number of councilors will be elected without voting taking place, and the Councils which held the highest number of guaranteed councilors7 for one party before any voting has taken place. Drained wetland districts with large CFE s were disproportionately represented as lacking democratic choice and abundant in “safe” Conservative seats. The report refers to areas hosting councils elected without democratic competition as “democracy deserts”; this phrase resonates with the term “biodiversity deserts” that John the ecologist used to describe the Fens fields. Both images intensify when considered in light of the council ownership of a large portion of this arable land.
The myriad resonances and allusions in this landscape raise methodological questions for geographical research. Primarily, what theoretical and practical tools can be used to understand the ghost of a landscape flashing up on a map? And, more specifically, what methods and means can be used to understand how this constructed monocultural arable landscape appears as an area defined by issues relating to a lack of diversity, not only in its ecological systems but in the social, political, and economic structures that it is home to as well? Are these elements related, or distinct? If they are related, is it possible to locate the cause, or causes? Furthermore, what would be the ethical risks in attempting such an analysis? In short, is it possible to attempt to understand this phenomenon without succumbing to the pitfalls of environmental determinism?
3 “It Was the Closest I’ve Ever Come to Time Travel”
… every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.
(Benjamin qtd. in Arens 51)
One afternoon I was digging in a barrow, near the McCain factory, I found Bronze age lamb bones in a small depression. The archaeologists said they were the remains of sacrifice.
As I cupped them there was a flip. It was the closest I’ve ever come to time travel.
Pete is referring here to a moment that occurred during the Must Farm excavations (2015–2016), which took place in the brick pits of the Fenland town of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. Whittlesey is a town in the north-west of Cambridgeshire, underlain by a subsoil of Oxford Clay. This fact led to the development of brickworks in the town, a contingent industry within the Fen landscape. The rupture in the monocultural fabric of the fen landscape occasioned by the brickworks protected, and later revealed, an exceptionally well-preserved settlement dating to the Late Bronze Age (1000–800 BC). The extensively drained and intensively farmed fields that surround this site mean that the finds here, however rich, are stripped of their wider geographical and historical context; their perspective is obscured. The brickworks had not been subjected to drainage or intensive agricultural management and so the artifacts of the Bronze Age settlement in this place had been held in anaerobic conditions that prevented decomposition. Pete’s image is partly of a concealed history preserved in a spatial-temporal arrangement, in this case the brickworks, that simultaneously obscures them.
These histories gesture through images. In the case of Must Farm, in 1999, a row of prehistoric posts appeared from the depths of the quarry, disrupting both time and geography. Pete’s image does not only contain the barrow and the dig; in locating himself “near the McCain factory,” he identifies the context that is being disrupted as one of food growth, harvest, and processing
One way of reckoning with the manner in which oppressed histories threaten the teleology of wasteland to arable in the Fen landscape is through a focus on ekphrasis. This term is used in literary scholarship to denote a verbal description of a visual phenomenon: in other words, a dialectic that operates between two representations. Ekphrasis here is used to indicate a specifically Janus-faced form of mimesis that “stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it” (Wagner 13). Following Cosgrove and Daniels, the analysis and understanding of landscape as a “flickering text” has been used extensively to read complex spatial-temporal arrangements. I propose that the notion of ekphrasis presents specific opportunities for a disenchantment of critical theory through designating rural sites like the Fen landscape as ekphrastic. This is a place which is not only a retelling of other landscapes through visual elements – perhaps most strikingly, it is a reiteration of the drained alluvial planes of the Netherlands – but also a visual recital of notional elements, of dreams and prospects of bountiful crops. This methodological orientation allows us to worry the fabric of entrenched narratives of the rural imagination, in other words to interrogate the recitation of images on which rurality is founded and grounded. It is my contention that this attention to ekphrasis facilitates a thoroughly Benjaminian analysis of the rural, one that interrogates how images of the rural alter the relationship between nature and culture as it operates in place.
The Fen landscape asks us to let go of firmly held assumptions of landscape as process (cf. Bell) and to consider it also as the constellation of points of disjuncture. The ekphrastic landscape of the drained Fen presents an opportunity to consider landscape in its symbolization of what literary critic Murray Krieger
This form of analysis requires a methodological orientation that aims to notice moments in place where this constructed landscape “aspires to the atemporal ‘eternity’ of the stopped-action painting” (Steiner 13–14). Another way of parsing this is to say that the rural requires a critical poetic method. In the case of the Fen landscape, we can glimpse images that gesture towards petrified histories in the material of the landscape. Walter Benjamin described spatial-temporal configurations like these as “moments of danger.” The image of the Fen landscape re-emphasizes that these constellations are not only moments of danger but also moments of critical intervention. It is in images like Pete’s that we are confronted with the simultaneously interminable and a-rhythmic – that is to say unpredictable – destruction that accompanies the movements and cessations of agricultural time and the potential for resistance against the “empty time” of capitalist culture that they offer.
4 Conclusion
In his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin interrogates the lost nature of the things that humans attempt to communicate with language:
After the Fall, which, in making language mediate, laid the foundation for its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could be only a step away. Once men had injured the purity of name, the turning away from that contemplation of things in which their language passes into man needed only to be completed in order to deprive men of the common foundation of an already shaken spirit of language. Signs must become confused where things are entangled. The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was enslavement, the plan for the Tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it.
(Benjamin 1996b: 72)
Confusion appears in this essay as a by-product of an epoch shift that allowed humans to create a phantasie of an escape from their enslavement to the world of things – that prehistoric existence that bound humans to their bodies and senses through the actions of a temperamental and unforgiving natural world.
You can sense the past in other landscapes. It is not specific to the fen, but I know it here; not that you can ever really know it.
If you go down Thorney Dyke when it is snowing, there is an emotion. I find it comforting. It covers the landscape in a blanket, taking away the manmade things and making it a wilderness.
We can understand the layers of featurelessness that cover Pete’s landscape as an image of the reproduction of a loss of context that is imposed on rurality under capitalism: blankness is covered over by a white blanket, an unfolding of abstraction. This can be read as the conception of a contrived and controlled nature that appears in “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin 2007: 236–252) as natural law. I am referring here to a mythology that obscures a “more precise critical approach” to the concept of justice and sanctions the use of violence in the name of the phantasmagoria of “just ends.” Just as this concept is active in legal philosophy and theology, so too does it ebb and flow in natural philosophy. In the Darwinist parsing of Benjamin’s moment, a violence of ends is imagined “as the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature” (2007: 239). Following Aristotle, Darwin’s human is imagined as the apex of natural development, an achievement realized through a process of the survival of the fittest.
The temporal movement of “natural selection” appears as the manifestation of a seal that moves time forward towards a utopia free from enslavement to the natural world. This seal appears in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1969) – the last major work Benjamin completed – in the form of the class struggle:
… which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations. (1969: 3)
The simultaneous naturalization and mythologization of social and historical forces that appear as fate in Benjamin’s historical method constellate in the drained monocultural landscape of the Fens in an ekphrastic form: this is a place that has been covered over by representation of the rural in a capitalist modality. The architecture of this landscape is a reflection of a desire for endless production, a representation of nature put to work. It is through the intensification of this ekphrastic landscape, through paying attention to images as they flash up that hold within themselves dialectical crystals of loss and rupture, that the opportunity arises to crack the phantasie that life can be sustained without labor. Even in a world where food might be grown without soil, it cannot be grown without toil.
The Fen landscape appears as a manifestation of the desire to make something from nothing, to not only have the power of genesis but to keep the bounty it produces. The metaphysical impossibility of possessing this self-same nothing is also held in the Fen landscape. The ekphrastic image of rurality that we find in this place is a pregnant silence, a moment of danger: this drained place, this industrial agricultural landscape, offers the potential to glimpse the rural as a site of radical contingency.
The tension here resides in matters of the material rather than of consciousness or subjectivity. By which I mean the impossibility of decoding the translation of still images back into organic forms; this futility can be generative in that the material form is frozen in a temporal constellation that also includes repressed elements from contingent histories and materials. I propose that the dialectical image is the site where these alternative formations and deformations might be located.
The neo-Aristotelian notion that the human alone is defined by its rationality – by which I mean the ability to sense the world as it is and make good choices – became hegemonic in the Early Modern period in Europe. This emerged mainly from the Nicomachean Ethics (Ameriks and Clarke).
See Eric H. Ash. It is also worth noting that the area was very much part of the imagined geographies of England and their documented ephemera prior to the Early Modern period, when the area was largely a monastic territory. See Blanton (2005; 2007) for contextual discussions concerning the place of Fen landscape within the English monastic cosmology.
In 1867, following widespread urban discontent and political pressure from Gladstone’s liberal party, the minority Conservative government passed the Second Reform Act, which is widely understood as an actuation of UK democracy as launched through the First Reform Act in 1832. This second act granted the vote to all householders in the (urban) boroughs as well as lodgers who paid rent of £10 a year or more. It did not extend the franchise to the rural working class. This would not happen until nearly twenty years later with 1884’s Third Reform Act, which gave the same rights to men in the counties as were extended to those in the boroughs. However, this was to a large extent a false move. There were still property restrictions on this extension of the franchise and the agriculture-dominated labor market in rural areas like the Fens then as now had not generated a propertied bourgeoisie. Most people who lived and worked in the Fens were agricultural laborers and tenant farmers who were disenfranchised by their lack of land and the franchise was not extended to them until 1918.
See, for example, Deuteronomy 8:7–9.
Following an 1867 report on the labor conditions of agricultural gangs, Mr Fawcett asked the House of Commons:
Were not those counties represented in that House? and how was it they had heard nothing of that before? The hon. Member for Lincolnshire came down to that House and made piteous appeals to the Government to save the country from the murrain which was raging amongst cattle. Why did he not tell them of that which was far more frightful – the sacrificing of the minds and energies of a large class of the people in the country?
In the English “first past the post” electoral system, there are two different ways in which “guaranteed seats” occur. In rural areas, seats can be guaranteed through a lack of opposition, if only one candidate stands for election in a ward. In metropolitan multi-member wards, a lack of competition can result in at least one seat being guaranteed for a particular party, meaning that voters do not have a complete choice.
For a discussion regarding the methods used to harvest these dialectical images, see Jaines (108–112).
Works Cited
Bible. King James Version. HardPress, 2016.
Blanton, Virginia. “Ely’s St. AEthelthryth: The Shrine’s Enclosure of the Female Body as Symbol for the Inviolability of Monastic Space.” Women’s Space: Patronage, Place and Gender in the Medieval Church. Ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury. State University of New York Press, 2005. 467–488.
Fawcett, HC Deb 02 April 1867. vol 186: c 1011–12. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1867/apr/02/agricultural-women-and-children#S3V0186P0_18670402_HOC_50.