ABSTRACT
The landscape parks of Georgian England impress us with their composure – a quality that distinguishes many aspects of polite Georgian culture – but landscaping was a more contentious practice than these impressions may suggest. In a culture in which appearances codified social attitudes and relationships to a remarkable degree, 1 there would be as much argument about the design of a park as there was about the details of personal dress, bearing and expression. Debates on the style oflandscape parks were not just about their formal aesthetic qualities. In a period when the gentry were at the height of their power, the landed estate was seen as a metonym of English society and changes to its landscape raised social issues, especially the moral questions of rights and duties. 2 This essay investigates the varying and often conflicting ways that Georgian writers on landscape gardening formulated the relationship between aesthetic values and moral values. It focuses upon the work of Humphry Repton, a practising landscape gardener who also wrote at length about this relationship, and in particular, analyses his commission at Sheringham in Norfolk, where, at a time of acute class tension, he designed a landscape to improve both the appearance and social relations of an estate.
