Dickens's England (18 page)

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold,
New Poems
(1867)

There were hundreds who could speak out and up when they were by themselves, but who had learned the trade of mouth-shutting and teeth-locking as soon as they could talk, and before they knew what bird-scaring was. A man with the weight of many masters on him learns how to be dumb, and deaf, and blind, at a very early hour in the morning.

Joseph Arch,
Joseph Arch. The Story of his Life
(1898)

T
he end of the Napoleonic wars severely jolted the rural economy, as prices of meat and grain dropped sharply, while returned soldiers and sailors competed for employment. Most farms, averaging 100 acres, were rented from large landowners, who owned most of the country. Farmworkers were hired by the year, accommodated in poorly-maintained ‘tied' cottages, worked usually from dawn to dusk in all weathers (with women and children pressed into labour, especially at harvest time), and paid very badly, especially in the south (where wages dropped from 12
s
a week in 1815 to 7
s
in 1851); many lived mainly on potatoes and greens, with occasional bacon.

Various poor-relief schemes were in operation, resented by those who had to pay for them. The Poor Law Reform of 1834 was intended to reduce habitual pauperism and a dependency culture by a deliberately hard and callous régime (with enforced labour, separation of families and denial of social life), but proved excessively severe. Enclosure of common land further exacerbated the plight of the poor, while schemes for the provision of allotments of land fizzled out.

Modernisation came slowly. The introduction in 1830/1, in southern England, of threshing-machines, depriving men of winter work and wages, provoked riots and arson; 400 machines were destroyed, 19 men hanged, nearly 500 transported and hundreds imprisoned. Movements towards farm-workers' unions were repressed. In 1832, after farmers in Tolpuddle, Dorset, reneged on promises of better wages, six men sought to set up a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, ‘to maintain the wages of farm servants': they received seven years' transportation with hard labour. Nevertheless, the pressure could not be resisted indefinitely, and in 1872 Joseph Arch encouraged his fellow farm-workers to form a National Agricultural Labourers' Union; farmers, rural magistrates (often farmers) and rural Anglican clergy (often farmers or magistrates) continued to resist with lock-outs and imprisonment; despite this, in 1884 agricultural workers got the vote, and in 1885 Arch became an MP.

In 1851 there were about 2 million farm-workers, more than twice the numbers in the factories or the mills, but the rural population decreased rapidly after that. There was an increasing ‘flight from the land' provoked by the poor wages and conditions on the land and the dubious attractions of urban life and work (farm-workers were usually in better condition than town-dwellers, as recruiters for the Boer War were to discover); thousands more sought the opportunities of Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand. The railways also absorbed thousands, as drivers, engineers or station staff (from 65,000 in 1851 to 174,000 by 1880).

In 1815, the Corn Law had attempted to prop up the price of English wheat against imported grain, but it was unworkable, was steadily undermined and repealed in 1845, which was generally regarded as the decisive event in the development of the agricultural industry and rural life. Agriculture was starting its long decline. In the third quarter of the century, it seemed to be doing well, with increasing mechanisation and improved farming methods, even though ‘high farming', as it was known, was expensive. Wheat prices remained stable as increasing consumption absorbed the growth in imports; increasing prosperity led to a greater demand for meat, cheese and butter over bread and potatoes. Many farmers shifted from arable to pasture, ‘from corn to horn' (though both were threatened by American wheat and then Australian frozen meat).

Then, in 1874, a major agricultural depression set in, occasioned by a sequence of bad summers and poor harvests, with animal and crop diseases, losses of livestock and low prices. In 1851 agriculture had accounted for 20 per cent of national income, but by the end of the century it was only 6 per cent.

The labourers' flight intensified; middling farmers struggled; many landowners turned to game shooting; the large landowners, however, while less wealthy, still retained considerable influence. New great country houses were being built in the 1860s and 1870s, often by ‘new money' from financiers, bankers and industrialists, not always welcomed by the traditional landowning aristocracy, and not deriving their wealth from, nor greatly contributing to, the rural communities they now owned (or evicted). Farming was less important, ‘land' of less value and the landowners more detached. As Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell observed, ‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land. . . . A girl with a simple, unspoilt nature, like Gwendolen, could hardly be expected to reside in the country.' (Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest,
1895)

* * *

IN THE COUNTRY AND OUT OF THE COUNTRY

[Cirencester, 7 November 1821]

I passed through that villainous hole, Cricklade, about two hours ago; and, certainly, a more rascally-looking place I never set my eyes on. I wished to avoid it, but could get along no other way. All along here the land is of a whitish stiff loam upon a bed of soft stone, which is found at various distances from the surface, sometimes two feet and sometimes ten. Here and there a field is fenced with this stone, laid together in walls without mortar, or earth. All the houses and out-houses are made of it, and even covered with the thinnest of it formed into tiles. The stiles in the field are made of large flags of this stone, and the gaps in the hedges are stopped with them. There is very little wood all along here. The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground
on the road side,
where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they have not two rods [1 rod=16½ feet] to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside! Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes of America, who, on an average, do not work one day out of four. And this is
‘prosperity',
is it? These, Oh, Pitt, are the fruits of thy hellish system! However, this Wiltshire is a horrible county. . . .

[Kensington, 24 June 1822]

Set out at four this morning for Redbourn, and then turned off to the westward to go to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and Chesham. The
wheat
is good all the way. The custom is in this part of Hertfordshire (and, I am told, it continues into Bedfordshire) to leave a
border
round the ploughed parts of the field to bear grass, and to make hay from, so that, the grass being now made into hay, every cornfield has a closely mowed grass walk about ten feet wide all round it, between the corn and the hedge. This is most beautiful! The hedges are now full of the shepherd's rose, honeysuckles, and all sorts of wild flowers; so that you are upon a grass walk, with this most beautiful of all flower gardens and shrubberies on your one hand, and with the corn on the other. And thus you go from field to field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedgerows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of
pleasure-grounds
indeed! All along the country that I have come, the labourers' dwelling are good. They are made of what they call
brick-nog
(that is to say, a frame of wood, and a single brick thick filling up the vacancies between the timber). They are generally covered with tile. Not
pretty
by any means; but they are good; and you see here, as in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, and, indeed, in almost every part of England, that most interesting of all objects, that which is such an honour to England, and that which distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, namely,
those neatly kept and productive little gardens round the labourers' houses,
which are seldom unornamented with more or less of flowers. We have only to look at these to know what sort of people English labourers are: these gardens are the answer to the
Malthuses
and the
Scarletts.
. .

[Canterbury, 4 September 1823]

When I got upon the corn land in the Isle of Thanet, I got into a garden indeed. There is hardly any fallow; comparatively few turnips. It is a county of corn. The labourers' houses all along through this island, beggarly in the extreme. The people dirty, poor-looking; ragged, but particularly
dirty.
The men and boys with dirty faces, and dirty smock-frocks, and dirty shirts; and, good G— what a difference between the wife of a labouring man here, and the wife of a labouring man in the forests and woodlands of Hampshire and Sussex! Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute of woods, that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers. The cause is this: the great, the big bull frog grasps all. In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees around the farmhouse. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon. . . .

At Up-street I was struck with the words written upon a board which was fastened upon a pole, which pole was standing in a garden near a neat little box of a house. The words were these. ‘
PARADISE PLACE
.
Spring guns and steel traps are set here.'
A pretty idea it must give us of Paradise, to know that spring guns and steel traps are set in it! This is doubtless some stockjobber's place; for, in the first place, the name is likely to have been selected by one of that crew; and, in the next place, whenever any of them go to the country, they look upon it that they are to begin a sort of warfare against everything around them. They invariably look upon every labourer as a thief. . . .

[Spittal, near Lincoln, 19 April, 1830]

It is time for me now, withdrawing myself from these objects visible to the eye, to speak of the state of the
people,
and of the manner in which their affairs are affected by the workings of the system. With regard to the labourers, they are, everywhere, miserable. The wages for those who are employed on the land are, through all the counties that I have come, twelve shillings a week for married men, and less for single ones; but a large part of them are not even at this season employed on the land. The farmers, for want of means of profitable employment, suffer the men to fall upon the parish; and they are employed in digging and breaking stone for the roads; so that the roads are nice and smooth for the sheep and cattle to walk on in their way to the all-devouring jaws of the Jews and other tax-eaters in London and its vicinity. None of the best meat, except by mere accident, is consumed here. Today we have seen hundreds and hundreds of sheep, as fat as hogs, go by this inn door, their toes, like those of the foot-marks at the entrance of the lion's den, all pointing towards the Wen [Cobbett was the first to call London ‘the great Wen']; and the landlord gave us for dinner a little skinny, hard leg of old ewe mutton! Where the man got it, I cannot imagine. Thus it is: every good thing is literally driven or carried away out of the country.

One of the great signs of poverty of people in the middle rank of life, is the falling off of the audiences at the playhouses. There is a playhouse in almost every country town, where the players used to act occasionally; and in large towns almost always. In some places they have of late abandoned acting altogether. In others they have acted, very frequently, to not more than
ten or twelve persons.
. . .

Another respect in which our situation so exactly resembles that of France on the eve of the Revolution, is, the
fleeing from the country
in every direction. When I was in Norfolk, there were four hundred persons, generally young men, labourers, carpenters, wheelwrights, millwrights, smiths and bricklayers, most of them with some money, and some farmers and others with good round sums. These people were going to Quebec, in timber-ships, and from Quebec, by land, into the United States. They had been told that they would not be suffered to land in the United States from board ship. The roguish villains had deceived them; but no matter; they will get into the United States; and going through Canada will do them good, for it will teach them to detest everything belonging to it. Those that have most money go direct to the United States. From the Thames, and from the several ports down the Channel, about two thousand have gone this spring. All the flower of the labourers of the east of Sussex, and west of Kent, will be culled out and sent off in a short time. From Glasgow, the sensible Scotch are pouring out amain. The United States form another England without its unbearable taxes, its insolent game-laws, its intolerable deadweight, and its tread-mills.