“the turning point at which modern history failed to turn”

“Over Constable‘s canvas [The Hay Wain] the Just Stop Oil activists taped an updated version, in which the winding river Stour, in the artist’s native Suffolk, is replaced by an asphalt highway. Fossil-fuel consuming jets festoon the sky, and smokestacks line the horizon. ‘You can forget your green and pleasant land,’ one of the protestors, the twenty-three-year-old Hannah Hunt, proclaimed, ‘when further oil extraction will lead to widespread crop failures. So yes,’ she added defiantly, ‘there is glue on the frame of this painting but there is blood on the hands of our government.’ Hunt was quoting from ‘Jerusalem,’ the short poem in which William Blake (an admirer of Constable) warned that the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ of the Industrial Revolution posed a threat to ‘England’s green & pleasant Land.”*

*This excerpt is from Christopher Benfey‘s essay Constable’s Quiet Tumult published in The New York Review of Books, Volume LXX, Number 15, October 5, 2023.

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The title of the blog is taken from the quote “the year 1848 was the turning point at which modern history failed to turn,” by George Macaulay Trevelyan in his 1922 book British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782 – 1901).