“Equall freedome, equall fare” The Illusion of Egalitarianism in the Country House Poem Abstract

Jim Casey

This essay challenges the common critical reading of the country house poem as an accurate historical representation of the “harmonious” social utopia supposedly found within the country house; it refutes the assertion that the genre works to promote a kind of early modern proto-egalitarianism and demonstrates that the country house poems actually serve to reify rather than subvert the underlying social hierarchies of the period.  Beginning with G.R. Hibbard’s foundational ideas regarding the country house poem, this essay deconstructs the illusion of The Idealized Place, the false dichotomy of Use versus Show, the myth of The Utopia of the Open House, the metaphysical paradigm of Everything in Its Place, and concludes with a discussion of Enclosure, Leveling, and Pruning.