ABSTRACT
Descriptions and evocations of the land abound in the literature of this period, and this profusion of reference dramatically underlines the fact that 'land' is a word embracing numerous shades of meaning. For many Victorians it was automatically associated with concepts of possession and, by extension, of power. The power of land can be used for good or evil, its possessors may prove heroes or villains, but its importance remains paramount. The attitude to land favours a panoramic view of rural life, the Victorian equivalent of the eighteenth-century 'prospect' from the ground in a gentleman's park. Trollope's claim that Barsetshire was 'to its own inhabitants a favoured land of Goshen' is difficult to accept; but readers were outsiders with no immediate experience of agriculture, and for them the vision of an idyllic countryside proved attractive. The variety possible within literature mirrors the variety within nature and the multiplicity of attitudes, in the Victorian period or any other, towards the land.
