1. The following discussions of the concept of improvement provided a basis for our own: Raymond Williams Key words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, (London, 1976), pp. 132–3; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, (London, 1973), pp, 108–19; Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels, (Baltimore, 1971); Asa Briggs, The Age of improvement 1783–1867, (London, 1963), pp. 1–3, 222–3, 435–45; Susanne Seymour, ‘Eighteenth century parkland “improvement” on the Dukeries’ Estates of North Nottinghamshire’, unpublished Ph.D. (University of Nottingham, 1988). pp. 8–128.
2. The best recent general accounts of country house and park building are Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Property and Landscape: A Social History of Land Ownership and the English Countryside, (London, 1987), pp. 116–56; David Jacques, Georgian Gardens: The Reign of Nature, (London, 1983); Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House, (New Haven, 1978), pp. 181–244. Still essential is Hugh Prince, Parks in England, (Shalfleet Manor, 1967).
3. ‘Landscaping for a manufacturer: Humphry Repton's commission for Benjamin Gott at Armley in 1809–10’;Daniels;Jnl. of Historical Geography,1981
4. This has been the subject of a growing literature in the last fifteen years, pioneered by John Barrell's The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare, (Cambridge, 1972), and The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840, (Cambridge, 1980). See also David Solkin, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, (London, 1982), Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860, (Berkeley, 1986), and Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape, (Cambridge, 1988) especially Chapters 3–6.
5. Seymour, ‘Eighteenth-century parkland ‘improvement’, pp. 12–17, quotation on p.12. See also James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, (London, 1983); C. V. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1980); Nigel Everett, Country Justice: the Literature of Landscape and English Conservatism, unpublished Ph.D. (University of Cambridge, 1977); John Barrell, English Literature and History 1780–1880: an Equal Wide Survey, (London, 1983), pp. 51–109.