“Policy, polity, politeness, urbanity, civility, derive their names as well as their nature from city life, while the terms rustic, savage, heathen, pagan, indicate the rougher and more backward tendencies of the herdsmen and cultivators of the ground,” was the considered view of the Liverpool architect and Victorian city booster Sir James Picton. By contrast, in his lurid 1844 pamphlet, “On the Need of Christianity to Cities”, the Paddington curate James Shergold Boone struck a different tone: “Cities are the centres and theatres of human ambition, human cupidity and human pleasure … the appetites, the passions, the carnal corruptions of man are forced, as in a hotbed, into a rank and foul luxuriance.”

Raymond Williams’s 1973 book The Country and the City is an ambitious attempt to unpick the historical, cultural and imaginative context behind such sentiments, as expressed through centuries of English literature. In its remarkable range of literary sources and historical sweep, this deeply confident work reveals Williams’s powers as fiction critic, cultural theorist, Marxist ideologue and urban thinker. Above all, it is a beautifully written account of one of the abiding themes of European culture: the construction of the virtue of the rural and the vice of the urban. Rural idiocy versus urban civility. Or as the poet Juvenal put it: “What can I do in Rome? I never learned how to lie.”

Central to Williams’s intellectual project – evident in Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) – was a sustained attempt to overturn a conservative cultural consensus, handed down by what he regarded as a hegemonic ruling class. “My primary motivation in writing [Culture and Society] was oppositional,” he explained, “to counter the appropriation of a long line of thinking about culture to what were by now decisively reactionary positions … It allowed me to refute the increasing contemporary use of the concept of culture against democracy, socialism, the working class or popular education, in terms of the tradition itself.” Whether it was language, culture or the nature of education, Williams’s ambition was to reposition and reinterpret: he wanted to liberate multiple strands of English culture and thinking from their traditionalist embrace and, in turn, offer more progressive and democratic alternatives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Town and country become tragically interwoven … Nastassja Kinski in Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979). Photograph: Allstar/Columbia

He sought to do just that through the gaze of English literature. In the Restoration comedies – with their focus on marriage, society, court and property – Williams finds “no simple contrast between wicked town and innocent country, for what happens in the town is generated by the needs of the dominant rural class”. The raising of a family and the inheritance of an estate bring the concerns of landed and mercantile together. Similarly, William Cobbett’s tramp through the lanes and fields of early 19th-century England, Rural Rides (1830), reveals how in the aftermath of the agrarian and Industrial Revolution, “the essential connections between town and country … reached a new, more explicit and finally critical stage”. Most iconoclastically of all, Williams seeks to unpick Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and collapse any distinctions between internal ruralism and external urbanism. “Tess is not a peasant girl seduced by the squire; she is the daughter of a lifeholder and small dealer who is seduced by the son of a retired manufacturer. The latter buys his way into a country-house and an old name.” So town and country become tragically interwoven.

Williams’s tool for elucidating these unexpected inter-relationships is the so-called “structure of feeling” of any given period – described by his cultural studies ally, Stuart Hall, as “the way meanings and values were lived in real lives, in actual communities”. How did people conceptualise their present state, what was the material and intellectual underpinning behind it, and how did it structure their feelings? Or as Williams himself explained: “The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period is this felt sense of the quality of life at any particular place and time; a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuart Hall, Williams’s cultural studies ally. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

In The Country and the City, Williams places his own personal story of being “born under the Black Mountains, on the Welsh border, where the meadows are bright green against the red earth of the ploughland, and the first trees, beyond the window, are oak and holly”, front and centre of the work. But having known the grind of rural poverty, Williams the globe-trotting don, at ease in his Jesus College rooms or a BBC studio, was never a pastoral nostalgic. He regarded the romantic idealisation of settlement as nothing less than privileged indifference to most people’s needs. “At home we were glad of the Industrial Revolution, and of its consequent social and political changes.” He refused to indulge in any metropolitan disdain towards the liberating, everyday essentials of plumbing, Austin cars, aspirin, contraceptives or canned food. The wretched alternatives were “dirty water, an earth bucket, a four-mile walk each way to work, headaches, broken women, hunger and monotony of diet”. But what growing up amid the Black Mountains also provided Williams with was a keen sense of hybridity – natural, artificial and literary. It explains his particular interest in Hardy country – “that border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change”. It also attracts him to DH Lawrence’s landscape of mining villages amid farming country, “a queer jumble of the old England and the new”. Lawrence himself hated the ugly ambiguity of Nottinghamshire. “Nottingham is a vast place sprawling towards a million, and it is nothing more than an amorphous agglomeration. There is no Nottingham, in the sense that there is Siena.”

Alongside his rural inheritance, Williams’s socialist heritage was equally influential in his writing. Together with Richard Hoggart and Dorothy and Edward Thompson, he was a key figure in the New Left politics of the 1960s. Through publications such as the May Day Manifesto (1967), theirs was an almost Ruskinian attempt to inject some romance and culture into what they regarded as the calculating and technocratic socialism of Harold Wilson. Part of that ambition finds its way into The Country and the City as Williams crafts a radical narrative of English national identity founded on a mix of the rural and urban. In contrast to a deep English conservatism promulgated by the likes of HV Morton and JB Priestley, Williams posits a much more democratic alternative stretching back through the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Diggers and Levellers, Thomas More to John Ball’s radical lament:

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?

In language reminiscent of EP Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and its account of the immanent class conflict embedded in the history of rural England, Williams looks to the literature of country houses – the extended manors; the neoclassical mansions – and urges us to “stand at any point and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labour and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale.” Here was a very different way of thinking about the timeless English landscape – the vistas of Capability Brown, the architecture of Robert Adam, the writings of Evelyn Waugh – and the human cost of its stability.

In the course of their own writings, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would explore how topics as diverse as the development of the nuclear family, the plays of Shakespeare and novels of Honoré de Balzac, the Newtonian revolution in science, and the Protestant Reformation could only be understood by appreciating the material realities behind them. Williams is equally convinced that “the specific histories of country and city, and of their immediate interrelations, have been determined, in Britain, by capitalism”. Capitalism’s social relations, its criteria of growth and of profit and loss, altered the country and created the city. In an often determinist vein, The Country and the City seeks to explain literary developments through the shift in material relations. “The true history of the English countryside has been centred throughout in the problem of property in land, and in the consequent social and working relationships,” explains Williams, in his chapter on the novels of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. “An estate passed from being regarded as an inheritance, carrying such and such income, to being calculated as an opportunity for investment, carrying greatly increased returns.” For Williams, the plot of Tom Jones is based on a desire to link by marriage the two largest estates in Somersetshire; Clarissa is a similar exercise in consolidating bequests and upping rank.

Dictating so much of this change was the agrarian revolution of the mid-1700s, with its system of enclosures, clearances, depopulation and exploitation of smallholders – “a story of growth and achievement, but for the majority of men it was the substitution of one form of domination for another: the mystified feudal order replaced by a mystified agrarian capitalist order”. And, in turn, this quickening of the capitalist pace within English society gave rise to a more confident urban order. In the aftermath of the agrarian revolution and Industrial Revolution, rural and urban had to be understood as one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady (1778). Illustration by Thomas Stothard. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

It is this fluidity between country and city that provides the setting for Williams’s masterful critique of Jane Austen and Cobbett in the chapter “Three Around Farnham”. An appreciation of an early 19th-century high-bourgeois society – caught between agrarian capitalism and urban mercantilism – is essential for understanding the narratives of Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. The confusion and change of these novels, the relentless misunderstandings and angst, is the product of “an openly acquisitive society, which is concerned also with the transmission of wealth, trying to judge itself at once by an inherited code and by the morality of improvement”. Cobbett, by contrast, is altogether less subtle as he lambasts the “nabobs, negro-drivers, generals, admirals, governors, commissaries, contractors, pensioners, sinecurists, commissioners, loan-jobbers, lottery-dealers, bankers, stock-jobbers”, and all the other cronies of “the Thing” (that opaque mix of urban and mercantile corruption) for undermining the rural virtue of his native Hampshire.

But it would be a mistake to think that Williams is only concerned with the “great texts”. Indeed, one of the strengths of The Country and the City is its ability to position the contribution of such major authors as Austen and Cobbett within a much broader cultural canon. From poetry to drama to novels, Williams’s reach as a literary critic is apparent as he mixes obscure with celebrated authors to create a masterful account of literary development. However, there are clearly some authors he enjoys more than others. Not least, John Clare:

From dark green dumps among the

dripping grain

The lark with sudden impulse starts

and sings

And mid the smoking rain

Quivers her russet wings

The “green language” of Clare’s poetry calls to mind for Williams something of his Black Mountains upbringing and childhood connection with nature. And, like Clare, Williams is wont to blame “Accursed Wealth! o’er bounding human laws” for the destruction of that pre-capitalist rural idyll, “Where nature’s freedom spread the flow’ry green”. For Williams, “it is not only the loss of what can be called a piece of ‘unspoiled’ country. It is also, for any particular man, the loss of a specifically human and historical landscape, in which the source of feeling is not really that it is ‘natural’ but that it is ‘native’.”

At the urban end of the spectrum, Williams is equally enthusiastic about Charles Dickens, rightly accounting him Victorian London’s most gifted interpreter of its inter-relationship with capitalism. It was an ability to create a sense of urban consciousness from the myriad atoms – the random, hurrying unconnected individuals of city life – that was Dickens’s brilliant achievement. In Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son and Bleak House, “the city is shown as at once a social fact and a human landscape. What is dramatised in it is a very complex structure of feeling.” London, as Hardy wrote in 1887, “appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody conscious of themselves collectively.” Dickens provided that literary consciousness and, in turn, shaped our own understanding of what the 19th-century London of railways, exhibitions, empire, domesticity, commerce and poverty could mean.

There are other Williams favourites, from Joseph Addison and Fielding to George Gissing and HG Wells, via Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf. But there is also much that doesn’t appear in this work. Despite his feel for border countries, Williams has very little to say about the literature of suburbia, in either its Victorian or 20th-century manifestations. Equally, Garden Cities and New Towns, the 1960s “silent spring” fears of ecological collapse or the interwar rediscovery of English nativism do not appear. No matter. I would rather this commanding one-volume sweep of country and city, than a route through every byway and cul-de-sac of urban and rural studies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Regent Street Looking Towards the Quadrant by TS Boys (1842). Illustration: Alamy

But, 40 years after its first publication, why now read The Country and the City? Apart from being an incisive guide to a longstanding faultline in English culture, what hold does Williams’s work have on contemporary debate? Well, in that very Englishness there is perhaps something interesting for our times. As the historic ties of Britishness begin to fray and ever more citizens of the United Kingdom begin to identify themselves more openly as English, Scottish or Welsh (with the Northern Ireland context more complicated), Williams’s account of a uniquely English strand of cultural formation should command our attention. Again and again, he speaks of the uniqueness of the “English experience” when it comes to the agrarian revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and how these historic events configured our particular literary construction of country and city. And he is certainly right that in the writings of Fielding and Daniel Defoe, Addison and Austen, even George Orwell and JG Ballard, there is a consciously English rather than British voice.

But if that strand of English idiom appears somewhat parochial, Williams also has an internationalist sensibility that feels intensely modern. In a manner that would pre-empt much postcolonial literary theory, he explains how with the coming of empire, “the traditional relationship between city and country was thoroughly rebuilt on an international scale”. And from the mid-19th century, “there was this larger context within which every idea and every image was consciously and unconsciously affected”. The hinterland of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and London now extended around the world to Africa, India and Australia; while in Great Expectations and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke the colonial life offered a means of escape from the poverty and misery of Victorian Britain. Imperialism, as the highest form of capitalism, reconfigured the insular nature of urban and rural relations. “New rural societies entered the English imagination, under the shadow of political and economic control: the plantation worlds of Kipling and Maugham and early Orwell; the trading worlds of Conrad and Joyce Cary.” The country-house economics of Austen or James could not be understood without an appreciation of the imperial finance hidden behind them. And, as Edward Said would later argue, the society and architecture of urban England were symbolically framed by colonial interaction: “Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities; and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India or Algeria upon these two imperial cities?”

Not only does Williams suggest that an appreciation of empire shadows, consciously and unconsciously, the development of English responses to country and city, he also extends his gaze to literature in postcolonial societies. In the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Wilson Harris and RK Narayan, he finds familiar themes: “struggles with landlords; failures of crops and debts; the penetration of capital into peasant communities. These, in all the variations of different societies and traditions, are internal tensions that we can recognise as characteristic forms, often from very far back in our history.” In his colonial and postcolonial awareness, Williams provides a compelling preamble to the contemporary literature of Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith. Their mix of metropole and colony, race and urban identity, means that Small Island and White Teeth could fit well within Williams’s English literary narrative.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Williams provides a ‘compelling preamble’ to the work writers such as Zadie Smith. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Finally, the 21st-century politics of urban protest, space and resistance would naturally appeal to Williams’s radicalism. As forms of capitalism have developed, so the manner in which capitalism has shaped the city has evolved. To many critics, the nature of contemporary globalisation has spread the reach of urban capitalism in an almost colonial fashion. Nowhere more so than from what the Edwardians called “the heart of the empire”, and we call a world city. In the words of the urban geographer Doreen Massey, “London is a seat of power – political, institutional, economic, cultural. Its influences and its effects spread nationally and globally. It is a heartland of that sociopolitical formation that goes by the name of neoliberalism … This city stands as a crucial node in the production of what is an increasingly unequal world.” London is a city of internal and external inequalities: great commercial wealth set against global poverty; institutional conservatism amid radical Islamism. And Williams would have enjoyed pursuing this urban interpretation through the pages of John Lanchester’s Capital, Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Perhaps, in turn, the Occupy camps of radical protesters recolonising public space in New York, London and Madrid would have been more realistic and reflexive about their own revolution if they had chosen to read the prose of Williams, rather than the sociology of Antonio Negri and David Graeber?

Be it Englishness, empire or anti-capitalist urban protest, the themes of The Country and the City speak to our present condition. But, more than that, there is a strong sense of tradition, inheritance and national identity knitted together in this classic work. What Williams achieves so successfully is to show that literature remains our finest guide to England’s endlessly complicated, turbulent and mongrel culture of urban and rural.

• The Country and the City is reissued by Penguin Vintage Classics.