Gothic Steam Phantastic : Information : Town and Country

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Town and Country

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In the summer of 2003, the "Nieuwe Kerk" in Amsterdam had an exhibition "Town & Country" with 19th century paintings; an overview of how artists like Van Gogh, Mondriaan, Breitner and Mesdag looked at the town and the countryside in the 19th century, and how this view changed with the years. This article is a result of my visit to the exhibition.
The exhibition showed mostly the Dutch town and country, depicted by Dutch painters. Holland's largest town, Amsterdam, did not have as much as 125,000 inhabitants at the start of the 19th century. Talking metropolis and cities would be a bit out of league when comparing Amsterdam to cities as Brussels, London, Paris or Berlin.

At the end of the 18th century, "country" was not in high esteem. "Nature" was something to be afraid of, the place where many dangers lurked between rocks and plants. There were some illiterate farmers around, and real life took place in the city. Pictures of the countryside show us picturesque landscapes, with deformed trees and mysterious grottoes. The mythical and mystic are never far away. This is the landscape one has in mind when reading the average fantasy-novel.
The garden, the ideal landscape where men could be god by creating their own world, changed from the formal French gardens with its "outdoor rooms" into a recreation of nature, with self-made mountains -including caves and cascades-, and pounds that were made to resemble natural lakes, and many ornaments that had the goal to make the garden look like an Arcadic landscape, a tamed wilderness like the biblical Garden of Eden.

Meanwhile, the towns changed. The industrial developments pulled many poor people to the towns. Towns grew and the traditional larger towns started to loose their meaning as centres of the society when smaller towns gained significance with new industries. People started to work in a different way: in a factory, and no longer at or near home, where bosses told you what to do, only driven by profit.
There was more need for transport to get the labourers from home to the factories, and back, and the products and goods from the factory to the customers. And to get the labourers from the countryside to the city.
The towns became busy, crowded and dirtier than they had been before. A very good reason to idealise nature, the stuff that could be found in the country. And a good start to study the pure life of those unaffected by the cities: the peasants.

Meanwhile, art has gotten a better eye for the natural, and the naturalism became a movement at the start of the 19th century. Literature started to write about normal humans (Hildebrand's "Camera Obscura") as a kind of "noble savage", operas (Carmen, La Bohème) were written about the men and women in the street, and the painters started to paint images to show life itself instead of the glory of god or that of the ones who could afford paintings.
The development of photography may have played a role too. It became easier and easier to make snapshots of daily life. It was no longer necessary to study painting techniques and sit hours in the outside to make a good and expensive image of the surroundings.

Everything outside the town was seen in a different way now. No longer was travelling a necessary nuisance, and the first tourists made their debut in the 19th century to go out and discover the exotic lands behind the city walls and beyond their safe estates - and all out of pleasure and curiosity. This is reflected in many novels written in that time (Heine, Eichendorff, Turgenev).

The paintings in the Nieuwe Kerk showed a line of landscapes, starting with the picturesque and grotesque, and ending with windmills in the landscapes, fishermen on the shore, children playing in the sand, farmers working on the fields.
So changed the pictures of the city. Where there were pictures of picturesque streets at the beginning of the exhibition, it changed to paintings with more drama, that showed the city at night, in autumn storms, that showed how people were working and living in the city as well.
Of course, more drama in the pictures was with impressionism and expressionism a natural development, as these not too realistic technics lived by showing some motion and emotion.

There is a line of development to see in the relation between town and country: First, the town was the centre of society and the keeper of culture, while the countryside as delivering materials and food, and was dangerous, wild, and uncultivated. Then, the town changed into a crowded, dirty place, and nature was idealised as the new Eden. City air made no longer free - many labourers where the slaves of the industry. Later, in the 20th century, the towns became an asphalt jungle, where nature is protected like a holy place that is worth fighting for (Green Peace). Now in the 21st century, plan-makers have visions of the cities as safe havens, where nature will deliver us recreation - nature as a product.

Escape to the country

What struck be in many steampunk settings, is the fact that there is no countryside. Many steampunk settings I have seen have taken "The Sprawl" -the endless, industrial, megalopolis'- into a Victorian culture. Enormous and impressive buildings rise up in crowded streets, skyscrapers and chimneys fight for a place in the smog ridden sunlight. In some settings "the rich" have something like a mansion on an estate with a good garden, but this is not much more than an extended back-garden of the city-dwelling.
Nature is sometimes something that happens far away, in the colonies or at least in an exotic place where there are beasts and monsters to fight, and your average undiscovered tribe to be discovered, together with their treasure-hoards.

What kind of face should the countryside have in a steampunk setting? Should it still be rural and "natural", like a backdrop for a fantasy-setting? Apart from some interesting story-plots, one should not forget that the settlements in rural area's in large parts of Europe haven't really changed since the Middle Ages until about 1950. Does a steampunk city influence its rural environment? I guess it does, but it is up to the inhabitants of the setting how it works out...
Or is it the holy place naturalism made of it? In this case, how do you build on the conflict between the polluting town and the polluted countryside; how is the production of raw materials (iron ore, coals) seen, as well as their transport to the cities factories? This offers many plot-ideas on intrigues and political conflicts between the owners or protectors (priests?) of the rural area and the owners and stockholders of the cities industries.
In a real dark steampunk-setting, one could see the countryside as a totally polluted area that is abused for the production of anything the city needs, from its raw materials to its former inhabitants.
More bizarre settings can take place in a city that is sieged by nature, where nature is fighting it's way back into the stone and the smog, and where the cities become part of the country again.

The countryside just offers too much to steampunk to let it be just out there. Stuck with plotting steampunk games or stories? Escape to the country!

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