China Miéville: Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton and the 'pictureskew'

Artists and authors have long celebrated the picturesque qualities of the English landscape, but there is a counter-tradition – particularly in children’s literature – that unearths the savage violence of nature

You know the picturesque when you see it. Higgledy-piggledy, a winding country path, overhanging hedgerow, tumbledown cottages. You can point at it, and sometimes that’s the best you can do, because it is evasive when you try to define it. The word, pilfered from Italian pittoresco, has at its heart the likeness to a picture. Pictureness. The picturesque is the framing and formulation of a landscape, and it is in the gaze. Not precisely beautiful, but pretty. Charming. Scenic. But there is an inextricable counter-tradition. Not a contradiction to the picturesque, but its bad conscience.

A 1980 episode in the TV series Hammer House of Horror, Children of the Full Moon, opens with a slow pan of picturesque imagery: a gnarled tree, undergrowth, dense flowers. A child sings “All Things Bright and Beautiful” as she strokes a lamb. When she turns to camera we see her blood-smeared face where she has torn out its throat. A heavy-handed bait-and-switch subversion of the picturesque.

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