Little Switzerlands: Alpine Kitsch in England

Thinking more about Shuttleworth’s Swiss Garden after I got home led me into the eighteenth century. And not only to Switzerland, but across the borders of Europe and over to North America, before returning to England. Around 1800, a version of the aesthetic sublime turned sweet, while the pastoral, with its lakes and cottages, morphed into the picturesque: an agreeable aesthetics of landscape, framed or staged for tourists’ pleasure. James Fenimore Cooper’s characters in the novel Home as Found from 1838 complain of the architectural blight of “Swiss Cottages” afflicting the banks of the Hudson, amid a building boom in New York. Cooper had hiked in the Swiss Alps himself, and bemoaned an inauthentic imaginary that was now imitated across the world: for easy, uncritical, and comfortable amusement. The image of Swissness became, to use a German word, kitsch — especially in England during Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian times, when a fashion for “Little Switzerlands” peaked. We no longer had to go abroad for alpine scenery; Swiss landscapes were brought home, like souvenirs, and domesticated as ornaments for our own countryside.

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