A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealised scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort.

The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources, and features some of the key makers of the ‘South Country’ rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape - indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted ‘the very essence of England’ itself. The countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.