| Eighteenth-century tourists traveled far to experience the spectacle of Stowe, home to one of the greatest political families in England and an estate shaped by the most renowned architects and landscape designers of the period. Yet after the bankruptcy of the second duke of Buckingham in the middle of the nineteenth century Stowe became instead an emblem of aristocratic ostentation and a harbinger of political and economic change. However, in a decades-long campaign to promote Stowe as an icon of English history and culture, modern devotees of the English country house have successfully asserted that Stowe merits fame for its aesthetic beauty, artistic achievement, and political importance. Independently at first, then in reaction to its pop-cultural significance, scholarly historians have not taken Stowe seriously except as evidence of the English aristocracy's penchant for ostentation, exploitation, and dissoluteness.; The fame that Stowe enjoys is central to its meaning and perpetuated by the complexity of that meaning. Its fame originated in the many ironies that constituted, in the words of Alexander Pope, "the genius of the place." After all, Pope condemned in gardens the very qualities that Stowe would become known for: hollow magnificence and pretension. The many garden guides published for tourists in the eighteenth century were written by Samuel Richardson, who never visited Stowe. Earl Temple, the head of a powerful political faction in Parliament, never led the king's government, though family members George Grenville and William Pitt did, in the face of Temple's disapproval. Even the Stowe Collection, by far the largest collection of English historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library, says next to nothing about the estate by which the papers are identified. This dissertation, then, identifies and articulates the rich ironies that have made Stowe the quintessential English country house. Although Stowe's fame is a shadow, it is no less real, no less historical, and much more significant than the house, the garden, and those who built them. |
