Old Virginia
The Pursuit of a Pastoral Idea
By William M. S. Rasmussen
And Robert S. Tilton
2003 Softcover, NEW
252 Pages, profusely illustrated, indexed
No marks or tears
List price -$60.00 (hardcover); $40.00 (softcover).ISBN 1-57427-139-3
In two previous collaborations, William M.S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton have examined
Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend (1994) and George Washington: The Man behind the Myths (1999).
In this third effort, the authors turn their attention to the concept of "Old Virginia" and all the images and
emotions that arise. The advertising synopsis reads: "The authors delve beneath the competing mythologies of
Old Virginia as either a bucolic world of moonlight and magnolias or an infernal region of suffering to examine the
attempts by the Virginia gentry to create and then defend a pastoral sphere in which the pursuit of virtue and honor
was one's greatest ambition." In their introduction, Rasmussen and Tilton write that "the European ideal of the pastoral,
and its associated ideas of simplicity and rural virtue, became linked to what is a largely imaginative entity" (p. 11).
The authors clearly state that their focus is on the gentry's viewpoint, well aware that this
focus ignores the vast middling farms and urban areas.
In the chapters, the authors explore the roots of the pastoral ideal, the rise of the gentry
in the eighteenth century, the decline of Virginia's political and economic power before the
Civil War, the intense nostalgia of the postwar period, and the institutionalization of the pastoral
myth in the 1920s and 1930s. The pastoral ideal is rooted in the works of the Roman poet Virgil,
and Rasmussen and Tilton offer a useful review of the Virgilian-related literature that was prevalent
in English writings of the early colonial period. Sons of wealthy Virginians studied in British
schools and forged such close ties with British culture that Virginians transplanted British ideas
about society to Virginia. The acceptance and presence of slavery, however, prevented Virginians
from achieving an ideal pastoral culture. Agricultural failure in Tidewater Virginia and expansion
of the United States territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains shifted population and political influence
from Virginia. Industries developed in Virginia and threatened the perceived benign pastoral landscape.
Novelists, such as John Pendleton Kennedy, Mary H. Eastman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who set their
books in Virginia, added to the tension between the pastoral ideal of harmony and the reality of discontent and dissent.
The numerous illustrations, most of which are from the impressive collection of the
Virginia Historical Society, are the strength of Old Virginia. The visual representations of Virginia
throughout the nineteenth century informed the mind of the broader audience and reinforced the literary
depiction of Virginia as a harmonious society. With few exceptions, the makers of the paintings, sketches, and many
prints studiously ignored the uglier reality of Virginia or cast it in a positive light.
—reviewed by Barbara C. Batson, Exhibitions Coordinator