Special feature Q&A: Dennis Hamley talks about SPIRIT OF THE PLACE

 

"The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book ... the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story."

Dennis Hamley's first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published in 1974. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 2021. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

Spirit of the Place is now reissued by Writers Review Publishing. First published in 1995, the novel was described by Philip Pullman as "a marvellous story, put together with great ingenuity. Dennis Hamley seems to have got right inside the eighteenth century (one of my own favourite places to visit), heroic couplets and all. It made me want to go out at once and build a Grotto in the garden."

Dennis lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist. Here he answers questions from Linda Newbery.

LN: Congratulations on the reissue of this marvellous novel! I loved it on reading it soon after its first publication, by Scholastic, and am delighted to see it reissued as the fifth title from Writers Review Publishing. It struck me as very different from anything of yours I'd read before. What was the sparking point?

Dennis Hamley: I remember the first tiny inklings of the novel. We (my first wife and I) lived at the time in Hertford. Three miles away, in Amwell, on the outskirts of Ware, was John Scott’s grotto, built in the eighteenth century. Scott owned Amwell House. Once it was part of a great estate, now it is built over and the grotto exists almost by accident. Scott was a Quaker and a poet. His anti-war poem shows both qualities:

    I hate that drum’s discordant sound
    Parading round and round and round.
    To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields
    And lures from cities and from fields.

His grotto, open to the public on Saturdays in summer, is a magical place. A gatehouse, underground passages with walls lined with quartzes, glass, and shells which shine eerily in the light of your torch or your ancestors’ lanterns. You emerge into the daylight feeling that you have experienced a marvel.

Well, I did, anyway, and knew I must write a story about a grotto. And, as there seemed a connection between grottoes and poetry, I had to have a poet to go with it. Thus Nicholas Fowler was born. I saw him in eighteenth-century gentleman’s costume, a small figure, green jacket, blue waistcoat, beige breeches and hose encasing withered legs, walking across his estate, supported by a gold-topped cane.

The great poet Alexander Pope built a grotto in his garden in Twickenham and wrote a poem about it. So my Nicholas Fowler must do the same.

    What secrets are exposed by human toil?
    What great new work replaces sullen soil?
    A thing of beauty forms for all of time.
    Its epithet is clear. It is sublime.

LN: The novel uses a split structure. Can you explain about that?

DH: I think this came to mind as a necessity even as I emerged from Scott’s Grotto. Here was I, standing in the twentieth-century having just had an eighteenth-century experience. The centuries had to be merged.

Fowler is the novel’s main character. The poetry he writes is eighteenth-century in style. I am imitating the heroic couplets of Pope, Dryden and a host of lesser poets.

Spirit is a time-slip novel and present-day characters are equally significant. Chief among them is Lindsey Lovelock, a university student. Lyndsey has chosen Nicholas Fowler as the subject for the long study she must write for her degree in Philosophy and Literature.The ‘Now’ part of the novel is seen though her eyes. She comes to consciousness in hospital but with temporary amnesia, injuries she can’t explain, and with Kath Welland, a detective-sergeant to pull the extraordinary truth out of her. For Lindsey’s boyfriend Rod is in police custody, accused of breaking and entering Coswold, a mansion house once Nicholas Fowler’s home, now owned by the University and let out to a big pharma company doing secret research. Rod, a science student, longs to know what that research is: something to do with genetics. His garbled evidence suggests that he doesn't need the police, but a psychiatrist.

LN: The novel deals with big subjects. Can you explain how you made thematic use of them?

DH: Well, first of all there’s Jack, Lindsey’s microcephalic brother. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student, going to the university just up the road because she and her mother are his sole careers.

Quite apart from that, great changes are coming to our world. The implications of the human genome project, the dawn of cyberspace and AI might (or might not) seal humanity’s mastery of nature. But in the eighteenth century Man was seen, as Fowler puts it, ‘God’s viceroy on Earth’, whose purpose was to improve on nature, discover its laws, find the great principles and driving force of His power. In effect, these aims are the same.

Fowler doesn’t see himself merely as a poet. He is a scientist. He learned from Priestley, who discovered oxygen, how to build a friction machine which can trap a strange power, enough to make a needle swing seemingly of its own volition. The first hint of electricity. A vision vouchsafed to humanity by God himself? Yes, thinks Fowler. This new hubris will have grave consequences for him.

LN: Class distinctions are very important in the ‘then’ chapters.

DH: Yes. The concept of The Great Chain of Being was at the centre of the class system. As Fowler puts it:

    For in this panoramic scheme
    Each actor’s purpose long has been
    Ordained in mighty plan .
    Green frond to insect, fish to cat,
    Ascending rungs in stairways that
    Lead up to God through Man

Fowler is a gentleman. ‘I am a man of substance, a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge, a member of the Church established and shall succeed to my father’s estate.' A very precise definition, but in the Great Chain of Being nowhere near the aristocracy. As Sir Charles Witherpole, an angry neighbour, says, ‘This is not Blenheim or Woburn. These are the modest estates of Squires, not Dukes.’ Which puts him in his place

Several rungs below on the class ladder is Mr Perry, clerk of works and a salaried man responsible to Mr Landskip Peters, an avatar of Mr Capability Brown. Perry and Fowler are at constant loggerheads.

In Coswold’s kitchen are four characters far below Fowler and even Perry. The cook, Mrs Mundy; Mr Grainger, a handyman and general factotum for the estate; Verity, a serving girl; and the boy, unnamed until the very end. And the cat.

LN: Yes, you made very clever use of that cat – an endearing and important character.

DH: The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book. He appears in different guises throughout, in both ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. He is a sagacious creature with a mind of his own. He is the boy’s only friend. He is the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story.

LN: Nicholas Fowler is very convincing as an 18th Century poet - i.e. you are! Did writing Nicholas's poems come easily to you?

DH: I’m not a poet. But I love capturing the feel of real poets. I suppose you could call it pastiche. Well, yes. But I think it’s something more. I love writing it anyway. Once, I managed about ten lines of T S Eliot’s Fifth Quartet. And once I wrote a Shakespearian play for students to act, The Tragicall Historie of Dogmaticus, Prince of Academe, his fall. I put it about that it was a lost Shakespeare play recently discovered and to my amazement some people believed me! Sadly I don’t have a copy, but I can remember whole chunks still.

LN: Can you tell us about Lindsey's brother and the treatment he receives? I was particularly interested in that, as one of my late uncles was very much involved with Conductive Education as a trustee and fundraiser. Again, you made clever thematic use of this character to link past and present.

DH: Well, Jack, Lindsey’s brother, is microcephalic. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student. In the prelims, I thank the Morrissey family, who live near Galway in Ireland. Their son was microcephalic and though it was a long time ago that we met I shall never forget him. Later on, I met a family whose child had cerebral palsy. It was then that I learnt about ‘Pathways to the Brain’, Conductive Education and the Peto Institute. This was important to the novel because it defines Lindsey’s professional purpose in life.

LN: What was it like returning to your earlier novel to revise it?

DH: It was wonderful. I had already looked at it again twelve years ago, when I brought out a hardback limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed. It was not a very good idea because I’ve got fifty left!  When I came to look at Spirit again I realised I had a difficult task. First of all, there’s a fair bit about computers, nineties technology and speculation about future social media. So I had to bring the technology up to date. That wasn’t as hard a task as I had feared. Then I thought about the novel’s structure. It had been written in alternating chapters. I felt that this wasn’t really suitable. So I divided the book into separate parts. Part 1 –‘Then’, two chapters. Part 2, - ‘Now’, two chapters. I think it makes the story move better and connects the separate themes more clearly. The last chapter deals with Fowler and his end. But when I did the limited edition, I wrote a postscript showing what had happened to Lindsey and Rod. Not good enough I thought now, so I lengthened it and, I think, provided a real ‘sense of an ending.’ Yes, how I enjoyed writing Spirit of the Place. And now I can enjoy it again, somewhat rewritten and radically reorganized.

LN: Thank you, Dennis. I hope this revised reissue will give enjoyment to many new readers.

Spirit of the Place is published by Writers Review Publishing

See also: Dennis's introduction to The Second Person from Porlock

and reviews by Dennis: Possession by A S Byatt

The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe

A roundup of three Booker-shortlisted titles: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Elmet by Fiona Mozley and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light."

Linda Newbery has published widely for young readers and was a Costa category prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, will be one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing this month.

This remarkable book had been mentioned to me so many times that it was about time I read it. First I listened to the audio version, read by Robin Wall Kimmerer herself, then had to buy a copy to keep. Combining poetic observation, botanical knowledge, folklore and social history, it compelled me to note down something from almost every page. It'll be difficult to do justice to this much-admired, wide-ranging exploration of our relationship to the natural world, but I'll have a go.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a tribe of the Anishinaabe people of Canada and the northern United States. She's a professor of biology as well as founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to bring together science and indigenous wisdom to raise awareness, protect ecosystems and create true sustainability. References to 'sustainable food' and 'nature restoration' are everywhere now - but what do those terms truly mean? Can we live and feed ourselves in sustainable ways without fundamentally shifting our perception of nature and our place in it? 

The term 'ecological services', often heard in political discussions of growth and the economy, supposes that the natural world exists purely to support humanity. Indigenous wisdom holds the different view that humans are part of nature, no more important than other species or than trees, rivers or mountains. This fundamental difference, Wall Kimmerer suggests, is apparent in creation stories: the Genesis account of the expulsion from Eden is based on concepts of ownership, rights, permission and exclusion, whereas the Anishinaabe Skymother myth which begins her book emphasises co-operation, acceptance and natural generation - and, of course, femaleness.

Her explorations of language highlight differences in perception. Alarmed to realise how few fluent Potawatomi speakers are left in the world, and how much will be lost if the language dies out - its culture, myths, beliefs, traditions and practices - she sets out to learn. At first, she's exasperated by the lack of precision in nouns; rather than a noun equivalent for 'bay', for instance, the Potawatami word means 'to be a bay'. Then the realisation comes to her that this is part of the animacy of Potawatami language and world vision, with the profound difference that a tree is not objectified by the observer but seen as something with its own life, its being. Felling a tree that's seen as an animate being requires more thought and justification than if it's just an object for human use or disposal.

Central to the indigenous way of life is the 'honorable harvest'. This means taking only what's given and what's needed; being grateful; giving something in return ('reciprocity' is a term that appears often in this book); being responsible about what you take and using all of it, for example when an animal is killed for meat. 'I believe that the principles of the Honorable Harvest have great resonance in an era when over-consumption threatens every dimension of our well-being. But it can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers. What about me, the one who buys what they sell, who is complicit in the dishonorable harvest?' Acknowledging her privilege in living in the country, growing her own fruit and vegetables, buying from neighbours or swapping with them, she takes herself to a shopping mall, far from her 'comfort zone' where, looking at many of the plastic items on sale, she feels no sense of their living origins and is overwhelmed by the power of the market economy. The idea of taking only what you need gets lost when 'our needs get so tangled with our wants.'

'If we are fully awake,' she writes, 'a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own' - (a question that surely can't occur to most consumers of animal flesh). She describes the return of salmon to inland waters to breed and the indigenous ritual of celebration, allowing four days' worth of salmon to swim upstream unhindered before catching any to eat. That way, there will always be fish: 'you never take the first, and you never take the last' is another core principle of the 'honorable harvest'. The bones of eaten fish are placed back in the river, enriching the water with minerals and demonstrating respect and gratitude. This watching and waiting for the year's marker-point is a far cry from the abysmal treatment of farmed salmon, denied their migratory instincts and kept in crowded pens. 

The book is a series of essays, several focusing on particular plant species and what they have to teach us: black ash, red cedars and especially sweetgrass. Why sweetgrass? Because it holds a special place indigenous lore: 'Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth. Accordingly, it is honoured as one of the sacred plants of my people.' It is used to weave baskets and, along with the other three, tobacco, sage and cedar, it provides health and medicinal benefits. Learning from plants is crucial in chapters describing Wall Kimmerer's interactions with students, including camping trips. One student is dismayed to learn that they'll pitch camp miles from medical help or the nearest Walmart: "I mean, what if you need something?" Days in the wild reveal that everything the group needs can be provided by plants: food, building materials, shelter, comfort, kindling for their fires.

A chapter near the end focuses on Windigo, the legendary monster of the Anishinaabe people: a huge, fearsome figure, a terrorising cannibal. The more it eats, the more ravenous it becomes. The metaphor is all too clear. In Donald Trump's second term as President, Windigo is louder, brasher and more wasteful of the natural world than ever before. What chance does indigenous wisdom have of standing up to the brute forces of ignorance and greed? 

'The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable ... we have unleashed a monster.'

Can traditional wisdom save us, or have we already gone too far down the road of exploitation and neglect?

Braiding Sweetgrass is published by Penguin.

More reviews of nature writing:

Sarn Helen, by Tom Bullough, reviewed by Alison Layland

Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour, reviewed by Tina Jackson

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf, reviewed by Linda Newbery

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, reviewed by Laura Parker

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Penny Dolan: LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

                            

  

"A delight ... made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lessons in Chemistry did not look like a book I’d choose. For a start, the dust jacket image offers half a woman, in a dated high-heeled stance, carrying a colour television showing an American cookery programme. There are also quantities of – to me - annoying quotes. Nigella Lawson, Nina Stebbe, Rachel Joyce . . . However, as the novel was an important birthday gift, I sighed and opened up the pages.

What a pleasure! Almost immediately, I was swept away by the confident voice and dark wit of the writing. This highly enjoyable novel is – give or take some anguish - such an uplifting read that I forgot my crossness about those quotes.

Set in early 60’s America, Lessons in Chemistry is an almost-fairy-tale. The central character is Elizabeth Zott, misfit and heroine, who shines brightly and positively despite all the sharp injustices, pains, losses and her lack of small talk. As a reader, my heart hurt at her troubles and I rejoiced in her every forward step. (An aside: Garmus did not let me down.)

Not long after the start of the book, the admirable Zott becomes the host on Supper at Six, a daily afternoon TV show aimed at “ordinary housewives”. Dressed in her lab coat, with her notebook, pencil and kitchen knives, Zott explains the science behind the cooking process. Alongside, she tells her audience that they are far more than “ordinary”. She treats the women as intelligent people, reminding them of their own hopes and dreams and insisting, during their busy days, of the importance of making a moment just for themselves. Zott’s show, expected to fail, becomes a success.

However, Garmus, introducing the back story, makes it clear that this is not success to the highly-intelligent Zott, whose dreams have already been broken. She does not see herself as a cook. Zott is and always has been a scientist, ready to pursue a particular theory. Once, for a short pivotal time, such a passion was possible but tragedy struck. Now Zott’s scientific career has become what it always had been, one of picking herself up from one bitter disappointment to another.

Garmus makes clear that the academic establishment has, so far, considered Zott – both her brains and her gender - as challenges to the scientific and social norms of the time. She has been sexually abused, accused of being a slut and denied opportunities. Take this small example. Re-applying for a job at the hateful Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth Zott finds she has been demoted to the role of lab technician. Worse, the smirking boss and “boys” present her with a new lab-coat, embroidered with her initials. E.Z. First time around, being English, I read those letters without American pronounciation. The next time, I understood why she was so upset. You try.

Yet Zott, despite everything, builds a lab in her own home, organises her life and responsibilities as best she can, takes cash in hand from the same staff that dismissed her, and persists. How one longs for her success! But without giving away any spoilers, the plot of Lessons in Chemistry is about much more than nasty bullying or the fame that comes from a tv show.

Yes, there is sadness in the book: the ploys of opportunistic bosses, greedy clerics and the harm of judgemental gossips. Yes, there are moments when my heart cried out for stoical, misunderstood Zott. But yes, there are also moments of delight, humour, affection and quietly happy coincidences. As the story progresses, the lonely Zott attracts a cast of misfit neighbours and self-effacing friends who find themselves standing by and helping her, while others, eventually and unexpectedly, do what is right.

There are three wonderful main characters who are most definitely on Zott’s side: Madeleine, a little girl with a passion for libraries and an imaginative approach to family trees; Six-Thirty, a loving, loyal dog with a vocabulary of over three hundred words and, of course, Calvin Evans, champion rower, scientific genius, grudge-holder and soul mate.

Moreover, between all the conflicts, Bonnie Garmus has laced Lessons in Chemistry with a satisfyingly, mysterious storyline involving mislaid documents, mistaken identities and enigmatic strangers. I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days.

When you find this book, do - if possible - glance at the hard cover beneath the dust jacket. No annoying images, no quotes, almost no words. Simply, unadorned, a pattern made from the Periodic Table. Possibly with poisons.

* * * * * * * * * *

Extract: To the horror of the TV producer, Zott has emptied her studio set of a quantity of homely decorations, clearing her "kitchen" surfaces so they are ready for work. Meanwhile, advertisers are insisting - again - that she shows their products to the audience.

“Hello viewers,” Elizabeth said, “See this?” She held the can of soup close to the camera. “It’s a real time saver."

From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup!

“That’s because it’s full of chemicals,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and eventually they’ll die off, saving you tons of time because you won’t have to feed them any more.”

Lessons in Chemistry is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Penny:

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

THE INVENTION OF NATURE: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Why isn't he as widely acknowledged as Charles Darwin as a key figure in our understanding of nature?"

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her young adult novel Set in Stone was a Costa category winner; she has published widely for young readers, and is currently working on a new adult novel. Her non-fiction title This Book is Cruelty-Free: Animals and Us will be published in July by Pavilion Books.

What an amazing man Alexander von Humboldt was - one of those driven people who achieves enough to fill ten lives. Yet until I heard about Andrea Wulf's book when it won the Costa Biography prize in 2015, the name Humboldt meant little to me beyond the Humboldt current in the Pacific and the Humboldt penguin. In fact, he has more animals and plants named after him than anyone else – as well as the Mare Humboldtianum, an impact basin, or ‘sea’, on the moon. He was so influential that I’m astonished he isn't a household name, like Charles Darwin, and Wulf's subtitle reflects this: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. 

Born into a wealthy Prussian family in 1769, he loved collecting and labelling shells, insects and plants from an early age. His father, an army officer, died when Alexander was nine, and he was brought up by his rather distant mother, who sent him to study government and politics. Alexander rejected this planned career in favour of natural history, and became a tireless traveller, explorer, collector, writer, observer and interpreter of the natural world.

While still in his twenties he came to the realisation that nature forms ecosystems, such a key concept today. His term for this was Naturgemälde, in which – unlike other naturalists of his day, who focused on identifying, naming and categorising as if species lived in isolation – he saw that natural systems form a complex, interdependent web. Not only that, but as early as 1800 he foresaw that human intervention had the potential to disrupt the climate; he described "mankind's mishief ... which disturbs nature's order".  More than two hundred years later we're still waiting for this to be fully acknowledged by world leaders.

His earliest travels, in his twenties, were in Venezuela, where he climbed mountains and volcanoes, studied vegetation and made detailed notes on climate zones. From then on, he wrote and published copiously, starting with botany, progressing through his seven-volume Personal Narrative, which combined scientific study with travelogue. Through further travels in South America he observed the damaging effects of Spanish colonialism on indigenous peoples. He advised Thomas Jefferson on the likely effects of independence from Spain and how it might affect the United States; throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of slavery. His influence also set Simon Bolivar on his campaign to free south American from Spanish rule. Wulf points out his contradictions, though – while approving of revolution, he served for years as court chamberlain to the German King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. 

His view that nature calls for an emotional response alongside scientific interest  (he wrote like a poet, one reviewer said) inspired the Romantic poets – Wordsworth and Coleridge are known to have read his books, and Byron directly referred to Humboldt in Don Juan. And Charles Darwin had Humboldt’s Personal Narrative in his cabin on the Beagle, ­annotated with his own comments. Reading these, Wulf says, is like eavesdropping on a conversation between the two. For Darwin, Humboldt was such a key influence that he rather nervously sent the older man a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle, and was delighted when Humboldt replied with detailed appreciation. ‘Few things in my life have gratified me more,’ Darwin wrote; ‘even a young author cannot gorge such a mouthful of flattery.’ We’re so used to seeing Charles Darwin as the bearded, venerable grandfather of natural science that it’s intriguing to see him here, responding as any novice author would to praise from a much-admired elder.

Possibly, Humboldt’s ‘web of life’ idea is also behind James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis – that the Earth, as a whole, is a living thing, capable of regulating itself (if not destroyed by excesses of human interference). Certainly it was the impetus behind Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, which elaborated on Humboldt’s idea that humans would have a disastrous effect on the natural world. Marsh even foresaw that animal agriculture and meat-eating would deplete natural resources, and that vegetarianism is far more sustainable. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden also owes much to Humboldt’s writings. and Wulf believes that Humboldt was the first to produce nature writing as we think of it now..

The energy and drive of this remarkable man lasted well into his eighties – when he died, at 89, he was still working on a massive, multi-volume project, Cosmos, which aimed to bring everything – animals, plants, geology, oceans and even the sun and stars into one consummate study.

If you’re interested in nature, exploration, the history of science and how we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this richly informative book as much as I have. Perhaps Humboldt’s ideas, revolutionary in their time, strike us now with a new and pertinent force. 

So why has he slipped from view? Why isn't he as widely acknowledged as Charles Darwin as a key figure in our understanding of nature? Wulf suggests that, firstly, he was writing at a time when generalism in science was being replaced by specialist disciplines; and secondly, that anti-German feeling in Britain and the USA began to play its part. Still, Wulf concludes that "Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly founded in Humboldt's vision - although many have never heard of him. Nevertheless, Humboldt is their founding father."

The Invention of Nature is published by John Murray.

See also: Walden by Henry David Thoreau