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Hello, I'm Mike Cannon, and this is conversation. Alistair Duck Worth is professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the University of Florida. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh and his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert on Jane Austen.

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He has written a book about her life and work entitled The Improvement of the Estate, and one of his persistent interest has been the relationship between literature and landscape, including houses and their contents. And last summer he spent three weeks visiting 30 different country houses in Britain, and in February of this year he participated in a symposium in Washington, D.

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C. Which coincided with the national exhibition in the National Gallery of the Treasure Houses of Britain. This has been a record breaking exhibition for the National Gallery, attracting more than one million visitors between November of last year and this month. The exhibition closed yesterday after a month's extension, and now tonight, thanks to Alistair Duckworth's we'll have a tour of those same country houses called also the Treasure Houses of Britain.

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When I return in a moment conversation from the University of Florida a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Michael V. Gannon, professor of history and ethics and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Yeah, my guest is Alistair Tuck Worth, Alistair. Welcome to conversation. Good evening. I look forward very much to this tour, and may I ask at the outset two questions. What is a country house? And then when? Or how did a country house get the name Treasure House?

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Well, the answer to the first question is really very difficult, because country houses come in all shapes and sizes, and they're built in many different kinds of material. Brick, stone, wood and plaster. No two country houses are alike. Um, at the height of the country house era in the 19th century, there were about five country houses in Britain, and, as I say, no two of them were like.

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It's easier to say what a country house is not than to say what it is. All right. May I ask, what is a country house? Not country house is not a castle. It's not a castle like body. Um, Castle in Sussex, of which I think we have a view here.

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All right, let's take a look at bullying, and you can use that, if you will. Is your start off point for our tour podium? Castle was built in the early 14th century during the 100 years' War against France. It was built in Sussex against a possible raid from the French, and clearly its main purpose for being is defense.

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So I would separate the country house from a fortified structure like this. On the other hand, the country house is not simply a house in the country, and Thomas Hardy's cottage endorse. It might show us what a charming house in the country is like. This is the thatched house that Thomas Hardy lived in near a forest.

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He based the return of the native on that forest. But a country house is clearly something different from this. It's much more, even though that itself is a country house. It's a house in the country. It's a house in the country. Now we see on the screen a true country house.

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Well, hardly typical. But this is perhaps the country house that many people will associate with the name The Country House. It's Castle Howard in Yorkshire, and it was used in Brideshead Revisited, the adaptation of Evelyn Wars novel. It's a superb house, an example of English Baroque architecture.

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It's huge. This is the South front, and the South Front is more than 600 ft in length. It was designed by Sir John van Breda, and in about 1700 it was his first building. And prior to building Castle Howard, he had done nothing in architecture. He'd been a dramatist and a man about town.

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Um, Swift. I was amazed that he could produce such a structure as this, and he came up with a little verse about it, he said. Vans, genius without thought or lecture is hugely turned to architecture, and indeed this is a huge house. And how does it take its name?

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Howard Howard was the name of the Earl of Carlisle, and the Earl of Carlisle in 1700 was the treasurer of England. And that's where you had the money to build a house like this. Do you know who did the sculpture of the fountain that we see in the foreground?

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I don't know who did the sculpture, but it came from the Great exhibition in 18 51 in London, and it, too, is appropriately Barack. I think that Van Gogh was able to build a house like this because he was aided by a professional architect, Nicholas Hawks More and Nicholas Hawks.

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More is responsible for the most helium in the castle Howard grounds. A magnificent building covering an acre of land and housing. The bones of the Earls of Carlisle from 1700 or so onwards was actually finished in 17 40. It appears Greco Roman in design. Yes, pillars, yes, the the Burlington Ian's at the beginning of the 18th century who were strict, strictly Palladian in their interpretation of architecture didn't like it.

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They thought the pillars were too close together. But most people think it's one of the most magnificent buildings of a funerary kind in Europe. Let's turn to some other architectural styles and building materials. What do we have here? This is a little Morton Hall or the South range of Little Morton Hall in Cheshire and Cheshire didn't really have stone, and so they had to build with oak beams and plaster, and they preserved the oak beams by painting them with pitch.

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And this gives us the black and white color of a half timbered building like this. In some respects, I think it looks more like an Elizabethan Gallion than it does a house, especially with the second story protruding over the first. Yes, it looks like the poop of a man of war, doesn't it?

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Yes, all right. We could look at another house, which would begin to show us the extreme variety of the country house. This is up park on the Sussex Downs, looking over to the English Channel. Influenced by Dutch architecture. It's a late 17th century house with a hipped roof and dormer windows.

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Beautiful red brick, Um, and more like a doll's house, I think, than any other country house that we're likely to see very different from another house. We can look at Barton, also late 17th century, but influenced by French architecture. Um, the owner of Barton was the duke of Montagu, and he was the ambassador to Paris.

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And in the late 17th century, as you know, the edict of Nantes was revoked and many Protestant architects and craftsmen came to Britain, including Daniel Moreau, who may have been the architect of button. It's still lived in, lived in by the Duke of a clue and Queensbury.

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And it looks more like a French chateau, I think, than what one would think of as an English country house. And here the building material appears to be stone. Whereas in the previous two houses we saw brick and timber. Yes, indeed, yes. Was there a studied intention to make every house different in building material?

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Well, originally, I think the building material dependent upon the indigenous material so that in Derbyshire, for example, you get a lot of limestone houses. But in Cheshire, where there wasn't a stone, they had timber and plaster. Also in Suffolk they had timber and plaster. Sussex. Sometimes they used Flint.

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All right, let's look at another Chatsworth, perhaps the greatest of English country houses again. Late 17th century again, Barack and again, an indication of the statue of the owner, the Earl of Devonshire, Um, was one of those wig magnates who invited William the third over after the deposition of James Second in 16 88 and as a consequence of his political success, he decided to rebuild his house at Chatsworth, and William Tallman was his architect.

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What is the river? The river is the Derwent and the bridge. There is later the bridges by pain, and the landscape is also later. The landscape is by capability Brown, the great 18th century landscape artist. That's a wonderful name. This name. Yes, he he would come to a place and say this place has immense capability and persuade the owner to allow him to improve it.

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And frequently his improvements, as here at Chatsworth, involved the getting rid of villages, which blocked the prospect something a little totalitarian about some of his landscapes. I think you have a view of the fountain. Chadwick. Yes, this is the Emperor Fountain looking, um, towards the south front of Chatsworth.

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And it's set in a canal, which was actually dug in the early 17th century by London and Wise, who were formalist garden designers. But the Emperor Fountain was built by Paxton in the 18 forties. It was actually built for a visit from Czar Nicholas of Russia.

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That's why it's called the Emperor Fountain. Unfortunately, Czar Nicholas never came, but the fountain remains. It's a magnificent fountain. It can throw a jet of water almost 300 ft in the air. That's a powerful pump. I wonder how it was powered. It's powered from a from a pond up on the hill, a huge pond which they dug at the top of the hill.

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And that's what powers it. Mm. Now we come to a manner that has Jane Austen associations, Yes, and it's also an extreme contrast to Chatsworth. This is shortened manner house from the Jacobean period, with those Jacobean Gables, red brick and ivy. It's a very unpretentious house.

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It's a house that seems to signify tradition and heritage. And not surprisingly, perhaps it's the kind of house that's had an influence on our own campus here. Yes, a collegiate Gothic. Would you call it being Jacobean collegiate style? A whole, like Ross Hall, which has almost been surrounded by Turlington.

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Hole now is rather like this. It's a charming house it belongs to, or it belonged to General Sessions Brother, who was very lucky. He was adopted in his teens by Kinsman who were childless, and they left him this house and they left him another house God mushroom park, which we also have a view of.

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Let's take a look at it also has Jane Austen Association. Yes, this was his other house. This is a much larger house, a much more architectural house. It's Palladian in style. The painting here is by Rex Whistler, who was a painter of country houses in the 19 thirties.

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And it shows Robert Mr and Mrs Robert Triton. Mrs. Robert Triton was an American areas who bought the house from from the nights. This kind of picture is called a conversation piece. It's a very late example of that. What do we mean when we use the term Palladian?

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Well, Palladian architecture is a very pure architecture based upon the designs of Palladio, who himself based his architectural style on Vitruvian us. And in the early 18th century, the Earl of Burlington, who lived at Chizik and who had a house Burlington House in London, which is now the Royal Academy.

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Um undertook to purify English architecture to make it less potentials, less Barack. He didn't like van bro. He didn't even like Ren, and so he built very pure kind of architecture is characterized by very simple lines, very simple lines, very regular defenestration intervals between windows and so on Yes.

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All right, let's move on to our next A picture in our next house. This again shows the great variety of the English country house. It's a mistake to think that the English country house was not built in recent years. This is actually from 1928. It's a house by luncheons prompted place in Sussex, and it's a good example of his fondness for vernacular motif.

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So if you look closely at the house, you can see that it It combines stone, brick and oak, timbering and those tiles to have a vernacular look to them. It's beautifully cited. He also designed the garden and created the lake there. Um, it's an example of a country house in the 20th century, as is the next view that we have of our kin.

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Glass castle in argyle share. This looks like a medieval fortress, but it was actually built by Sir Robert Lorena in the early years of the 20th century. It has those pepper pot towers and bastions, and it looks like a baronial house, something of a rambling design with many irregularities.

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Yes, irregularity was the mark of houses in the 19th century. They wanted to allude to the past to the purse, which was not an architectural purse, not a designed purse, but two buildings that had been built as it were over the years. Were there any houses that might be called in the genuine sense?

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Palaces? Places of power? Yes, indeed, there were. Indeed, some houses are called Palaces Hamilton Palace in Scotland or Bannon Palace in Oxfordshire, and I think, indeed, we come to blame him now. Um, Brennan was built for the Duke of Marlborough by a grateful nation in the early 18th century as a reward for his victory over during the 14th Army at Blenheim in Germany.

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Queen Anne gave him £200,000 which was a huge sum in those days to build a house, and he put another £60,000 in it, and he chose Van Bro to build it for him. So this is the second house by Van Bro that we're looking at, and this is perhaps even more dramatic has more of the castle air than Castle Howard, the Duke of Marbles.

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Wife Sarah hated it, and she hated the bridge that that Marlboro built. Also, let's look at the bridge rather Vanderbilt. I mean, here is the bridge here, flooded by Capability Brown in the 17 sixties. Originally, it had two stories, and the piers had rooms in them.

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And Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, thought that was ridiculous, that a bridge should have rooms in them. When Capability Brown came along, he flooded what had been really quite a small river, and the first story of rooms was put under water. There's another view of the bridge.

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It's said to be the finest view in England. Indeed, when Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston Churchill, brought his American bride, Jennie Jerome, to blame him for the first time, he stopped before the bridge and told her, This is the finest view in England. And she tells us in one of her autobiographical fragments that she said nothing.

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She didn't want to be too impressed. All right, let's move ahead to is another huge house, but it was built in the Elizabethan period. It's a so called prodigy house, Sir John. Some person called a house like this a prodigy house. It was built by Sir William Cecil, who was the treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, who became Lord Burleigh in 15 71.

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And who built this huge house? Um, in order to receive Queen Elizabeth on one of her progresses. This is an example of a house that was built to signify power. And it has lots of rich interior contents and furnishings. We might look at just one example of this.

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The wine cooler, which was shown at the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition in Washington. This is the size of birth tub. It weighs more than £200. It's solid silver, and it was meant to cool wine. But I think more than its use, it was meant to impress.

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It was meant to impress Burley's equals and to intimidate the the inferiors of the family. Actually, this is from from 1700 or so, and I think this is a factor of the country house that one has to remember that it was it was intended to impress.

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It was a condition of power, and it was a consequence of power without the country house who couldn't be a politician. Hardly call which we can also look at is another Elizabethan house, Another prodigy house. I think we go by Tinton Abbey. Yes, indeed we do.

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go by 20 in Abbey. And the point of Tinton Abbey is not to remind us of words with poem so much as to remind us that many country houses were built on the plunder from the monasteries. And the eighth had had got rid of the monasteries when he broke with Rome in the 15 thirties.

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And people like Sir William Cecil and Sir William Cavendish, the origin of the Great Duke of Devonshire family made their money out of plunder from the monasteries, among other things. In fact, they used the stones from the monasteries to build some of their houses is hard.

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We call one such now hardly call was not built from a monastery. It's perhaps the most magnificent Elizabeth in the house that is left in Britain, and it's left in a very, um, good condition. It now belongs to the National Trust. It was given to the National Trust in the 19 fifties by the Duke of Devonshire as part payment of death duties.

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Um, it's an architectural house, which means that it was built by an architect, Robert Smithson, and it is another prodigy house hard. We call more dust than wall. You mentioned death duties. Isn't that one of the reasons why some of these houses have disappeared or fallen into disrepair?

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That the death duties have have been so heavy that the owners of the houses have not been able to pay them? Indeed, yes, in 1950 in the early 19 fifties, when the Duke of Devonshire, um, had to pay death duties because of the death of his father, they were exactly at the rate of 80% on inherited wealth, which was really very punitive.

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Yes, there's a sea dog table at Hardwick Hall, and here it is, Yes. Isn't that a magnificent table? This was also in the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition. It shows cameras supporting the table and resting on the top of tortoises. And there's I think there's an involved Renaissance pun there.

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Festina Lenti. Hurry slowly, very slowly, yes, but that has been in the withdrawing room of Hardwick for for 400 years, ever since it was built in the 15 nineties by Bess of Hardwick. Magnificent houses like Hardwick and burly the prodigy houses very early were criticized by writers and poets, and they were seen to be pretentious.

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They were seen to be houses that were making a political statement and as a counter to houses like that, another kind of house to house like pencils. Place in Kent was praised. And there's a famous poem by Ben Johnson called to Pence Fist, which was written in the very early 17th century, which took pencil test is the very type of the moral house, Uh, how Pence ist art not built to envious show.

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That's the first line of the poem, whereas places like Burly were built to envious show. In fact, you could say of a place like Princess that it wasn't built at all. It seems to have grown over the centuries, Um, organically. There's no architecture there. There's no sense of design, the revelations, the windows, the chimneys.

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Everything is very irregular. And I think there are some views which have followed. Will will lead us to our own Murphree area dorms. I think so, yes. Here is a view through an arch to the 14th century building at Pence's, and in the next view we see that doorway, a Gothic arch there.

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And if we now look at the Murphy dorm area, I think you can see that that that architecture as well as the the significance the moral significance has migrated to to our own campus, not directly from Pence's probably through the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, but nevertheless bearing the same kind of moral significance we've seen.

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Architecture. May we now look at landscape? Yes, because I think one should recall that the English landscape garden at a place like Star head here, for example, maybe England's greatest contribution to the visual arts. Various people have claimed that Lord Clarke among them. This is an excellent example of the English landscape garden.

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This view, in fact, was taken by a colleague of mine, Bernie Paris, when he was over there. The view may very well be based on a painting by Claude. In years at the lows, you can see that the pantheon is there, and on the left there is the Palladian bridge, which is also echoed in the view.

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Now we come to the 20th century into certain problems that the country houses have faced in our own time. Could you enumerate them? Yes, I think they began in the late 19th century during the agricultural depression, which was in fact a direct consequence of the railways reaching the Midwest in this country.

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They were able to ship grain to the eastern ports and then to Britain, and there was an agricultural depression in the late 19th century. Death duties were introduced in the late 19th century. Originally, they were quite modest. But in 19 oh nine with Lloyd George Lloyd George's people's budget, they were raised considerably.

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And then, of course, the first World War was devastating to the country house. Uh, people left to go to the front. Heirs were killed. In fact, we have a painting by the Hungarian artist Laszlo. Very evocative and poignant painting of James McEwen, who was killed at the battle of the song.

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He was just one of many heirs who were killed. That was one of the bloodiest battles of human history. Yes, 65,000 casualties on the first day, first of 1916, Um, and that had a devastating effect upon upon the country house. So that after the war, after the first World War, this was a site that was seen very often between 18 75 1975 something like 1500 houses were demolished.

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Mm And it was only in 1975 with the destruction of the English Country House exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that people were aware of what was being lost in terms of heritage and value. Are these houses found throughout Great Britain, or only in certain sections throughout throughout Britain and Ireland and Wales and Scotland?

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There may be about 1000 houses left out of a total in the 19th century of over 5000. Many of them are at least about 200 of them are owned by the National Trust, and you have a picture or two which depict ways of surviving. Yes, this is Petra with, um, the home of Lord agreement in Sussex.

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And he gave that to the National trust in, I Think, the 19 fifties, and more recently, he's given the paintings. It has a superb collection of paintings, including Turner's to the National Trust Lord and Lady Agreement still live at Pet Worth, and I think we have one other example, don't we?

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This is Darlington in the 17th century, an example of an English formal garden before capability. Brown made it more natural. That's still there in a kind of formal settings still, and the Jarvis's Ralph Jarvis lives there and manages to keep it going by opening it to the public on a regular basis.

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Yes, that's a question I wanted to ask you, Alistair. What access would I have as a visitor to the houses that you've described this evening? I think you could go to almost all of the houses. There are very few houses now that are not open to the public.

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I would say less than 5% of the houses are not open to the public. And if you were to go to Britain this summer with one of the books that describes the opening, you could see a lot of English country houses in a comparatively short time.

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I would think, and I imagine this is one of the ways in which the house is survived by the admissions that are paid by tourists. Yes, it is. Indeed, the Duke of Bedford was very much criticized after the Second World War for returning his home into what seemed to be a kind of Walt Disney world.

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But almost everyone now, including the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth have turned their houses into attractions for the public. Well, Alister, the magnificent exhibition at the National National Gallery in Washington was extended for one month to accommodate over one million people who, from November to April, went to see the extraordinary, uh, photographs and objects which were on display.

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And thanks to you, we've extended the exhibition for one more day, and I thank you very much. Alistair Doc Worth, professor of English and the University of Florida for being my guest on conversation. Thank you. Mm. No. Yeah. Yeah. Was local broadcast of Wild America is made First Union, National Bank of Florida with six locations in Gainesville.

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Pity the poor gooney bird.