The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home.

By Peter Mandler (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997. viii plus 523pp.).

Peter Mandler has done a masterful job in examining England's long-standing and complex relationship between its stately homes and its people. It is an intriguing tale which explains how the private homes of the English were embraced and revered by the general public as a reflection of an entire nation's past and present. From the unchallenged admiration in the eighteenth century to the threats of urbanization, agricultural depression, democratization, shifting land markets and changes in land tax laws, the economic value of the country always weighed into the equation of preservation, government intervention and the cultivation of a national attachment to country houses.

Mandler argues that in the eighteenth century, the older stately homes reflected universal values and tastes shared by all classes and were seen as common property rather than private homes. By the late nineteenth century, the new mass audience of England was too diverse and too democratic to view any history or taste as universally shared by the nation. Instead, the society and therefore, the landed estate owner, became concerned with commercial success and increasingly, political and social strife. The cultural value of visiting an aristocrat's home plummeted as class tensions and economic resentments grew. Estate owners withdrew and country homes retreated to the realm of the private once again. After the first World War, country-house visiting virtually ended and many owners, facing new economic challenges in the early twentieth century, closed, abandoned or demolished their homes (4). The English country home now appeared to many as an embarrassment amid the national history of a victorious democratic nation. Only after World War II did the value of the country home reemerge, stripped of its former status and the authority associated with it. In an almost redemptive attempt to reassert the uniqueness and importance of the English nation, the public's interest in its country homes exploded and with it, the aristocracy's ability to exploit, economically and socially, the latest (and ongoing) stage in the relationship between the English stately home and the English people.

For Mandler, there has been nothing if not consistency in the English peoples' attitude toward the aristocratic country life and the stately home since the advent of the modern, industrial age in England. He argues that for the past two hundred years, the English have had a notable "ambivalence towards the aristocratic heritage and a reluctance to take positive steps to preserve it." As a result, "the continuity of English history does not necessarily entail a clinging to tradition; rather, continuity is only made possible by a constant process of gradual modernization." (415) By "steering progress" rather than resisting, Mandler demonstrates that the English elite and the national heritage, like the nation of England, was a constantly changing and complex dance of competing interests: economic, political, and above all, shifting attitudes and standards within an increasingly democratic society. For Mandler, the uniqueness of the English reaction to a cultural and national heritage makes sense only "if we fix our attention on clusters of anxious aesthetes and intellectuals" whom he credits with the "'English tradition' of rural nostalgia." (415)

Mandler marvelously handles the telling of the aristocracy's contribution to the creation of a 'national heritage' in the form of the country house by weaving archival and published material with literary and artistic sources. As a result, this a complex and yet entertaining tale of architecture and design as cultural, social and even economic and political history. There are, as a result, multiple layers of analysis in Mandler's telling of this tale. At one level, this is a wonderful account of the history of the country house: architecturally, artistically, and as the seat of noble families. At another level, this is the story of 'progress' and the evolution of a more demanding and sophisticated public and its perception of what accurately reflected English history and culture. It is also an economic accounting of how landowners fared as England became both the industrial leader and military defender of a free and democratic world - their homes becoming the litmus test in determining their utility in the brave new world of the twentieth century.

Finally, the book is a mirror held up to contemporary society. It asks us to examine our own 'obsession' with English 'treasure houses' and why we associate these former private residences of the rich with the heart and soul of what it means to be English. How we got from there to here is an intriguing and story and one that Mandler tells beautifully, always mindful of the bottom line in both historical argument and country estates:" ... treasures, created and valued by humans, must, like humans, evolve to survive." (418)

Nancy LoPatin University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point