Dickens's England (22 page)

With chambers where a purer air

The sleepers' lungs may bless,

And pretty porches, gardens fair? –

The Prince of Wales says, ‘Yes.'

The Cottage-homes of England,

Whose aspect makes men wince,

May turn to happy dwellings yet,

With landlords like the Prince.

Then quicker brain and readier arm,

And more strength better spent,

May add an economic charm

To less than two per cent.

The Cottage-homes of England!

The toiler gay and blithe,

Who drinks his ale, and plies his flail,

And swings his sweeping scythe,

His sons and daughters, braced anew

With strength that nothing ails,

Will bless each Prince of Landlords who

Does like the Prince of Wales.

Tom Taylor,
Punch
(1873)

COTTAGE LIFE

(I)

When we go into the cottage of the working man, how forcibly are we struck with the difference between his mode of life and our own. There is his tenement of, at most, one or two rooms. His naked walls – bare brick, stone or mud floor, as it may be; a few wooden, or rush-bottomed chairs; a deal, or old oak table; a simple fireplace, with its oven beside it, or, in many parts of the kingdom, no other fireplace than the hearth; a few pots and pans – and you have his whole abode, goods and chattels. He comes home weary from his outdoor work, having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree, and seats himself for a few hours with his wife and children, then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again before daylight, if it be winter. He has no-one to make a fire in his dressing-room, to lay out his clothes, to assist him in his toilet; he flings on his patched garments, washes his face in a wooden or earthen dish at the door; blows up the fire, often gets ready his own breakfast, and is gone.

Such is the routine of his life, from week to week and year to year; Sundays, and a few holidays, are white days in his calendar. On them he shaves, and puts on a clean shirt and better coat, drawn from that old chest which contains the whole wardrobe of himself and children; his wife has generally some separate drawer or bandbox, in which to stow her lighter and more fragile gear. Then he walks round his little garden, if he have it; goes with his wife and children to church or meeting; to sit with a neighbour, or have a neighbour look in upon him.

(II)

The cooking in the best cottages would not commend itself to the student of that art; in those where the woman is shiftless it would be deemed simply intolerable. Evidence of this is only too apparent on approaching cottages, especially towards the evening. Coming from the fresh air of the fields, perhaps from the sweet scent of clover or of new-mown grass, the odour which arises from the cottages is peculiarly offensive. It is not that they are dirty inside – the floor may be scrubbed, the walls brushed, the chairs clean, and the beds tidy; it is from outside that all the noisome exhalations taint the breeze. The refuse vegetables, the washings, the liquid and solid rubbish generally is cast out into the ditch, often open to the highway road, and there festers till the first storm sweeps it away. The cleanest woman indoors thinks nothing disgusting out of doors, and hardly goes a step from her threshold to cast away indescribable filth. Now, a good deal of this refuse is the remains of imperfect cooking – masses of soddened cabbage, part of which only is eaten, and the rest stored for the pig or thrown into the ditch. The place smells of soaking, saturated cabbage for yards and yards round about.

The difficulty arises from the rough, coarse taste of the labourer, and the fact, which is useless to ignore, that he must have something solid, and indeed bulky. . . . His teeth are large, his jaws strong, his digestive powers such as would astonish a city man; he likes solid food, bacon, butcher's meat, cheese, or something that gives him a sense of fullness, like a mass of vegetables. This is the natural result of his training and work in the fields.

THE COUNTRY PUB

When the agricultural labourer drops in on his way home from his work of a winter evening – heralding his approach by casting down a couple of logs, or bundle of wood which he has been carrying, with a thud outside the door – he does not demand liquor of that character [Bass, or quality beer]. When in harvest time, after sundown, when the shadows forbid further cutting with the fagging hook at the tall wheat, he sits on the form without, under the elm tree, and feels a whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold digger at a fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness. He hoarsely orders a ‘pot' of some local brewer's manufacture – a man who knows exactly what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of the mower and the reaper. He prefers a rather dark beer with a certain twang faintly suggestive of liquorice and tobacco, with a sense of ‘body', a thickness in it, and which is no sooner swallowed than a clammy palate demands a second gulp to wash away the relics of the first. Ugh! The second requires a third swig, and still a fourth, and appetite increasing with that it feeds on, the stream rushes down the brazen throat that burns for more. . . .

MILK COLLECTION

There is a low murmur rather than a buzz [of bees] along the hedgerow; but over it the hot summer breeze brings the thumping, rattling, booming sound of hollow metal striking against the ground or in contact with other metal. These ringing noises, which so little accord with the sweet-scented hay and green hedgerows, are caused by the careless handling of milk tins dragged hither and thither by the men who are getting the afternoon milk ready for transit to the railway station miles away. Each tin bears a brazen badge engraved with the name of the milkman who will retail its contents in distant London. . . .

Sturdy milkmaids may still be seen in London, sweeping the crowded pavement clear before them as they walk with swinging tread, a yoke on their shoulders, from door to door. Some remnant of the traditional dairy thus survives in the stony streets that are separated so widely from the country. But here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries – here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. Everything is mechanical or scientific. From the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal – wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed – and they are swung up into a waggon specially built for the purpose. It is the very antithesis of the jolting and cumbrous waggon used for generations in the hay-fields and among the corn. It is light, elegantly proportioned, painted, varnished – the work rather of a coachbuilder than a cartwright. The horse harnessed in it is equally unlike the cart-horse. A quick, wiry horse, that may be driven in a trap or gig, is the style – one that will rattle along and catch the train.

William Howitt,
The Rural Life of England
(1840)

IN THE HARVEST FIELDS

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded over and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens . . .

Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest' (1877; pub. 1918)

Machinery in the field does not reduce the number of men employed. But they are employed in a different way. The work all comes now in rushes. By the aid of the reaping machine acres are levelled in a day, and the cut corn demands the services of a crowd of men and women all at once, to tie it up into sheaves. . . . Under the old system, a dozen men worked all the winter through, hammering away with their flails in the barns. Now the threshing machine arrives, and the ricks are threshed in a few days. As many men are wanted (and at double the wages) to feed the machine . . . But instead of working for so many months, this rush lasts as many days.

Much the same thing happens all through arable agriculture – from the hoeing to the threshing – a troop are wanted one day, scarcely anybody the next. . . . It is not the ‘pranks' of the farmers that have caused emigration, or threats of it. The farmer is unable to pay high wages, the men will not accept a moderate reduction, and the idle crowd, in effect, tread on each other's heels. . . .

Let the months roll by and then approach the same village along the same road under the summer sun. The hedges, though low, are green, and bear the beautiful flowers of the wild convolvulus. Trees that were scarcely observed before, because bare of leaves, now appear, and crowds of birds, finches and sparrows, fly up from the corn. The black swifts wheel overhead, and the white-breasted swallows float in the azure. Over the broad plain extends a still broader roof of the purest blue – the landscape is so open that the sky seems as broad again as in the enclosed countries – wide, limitless, very much as it does at sea. On the rising ground pause a moment and look round. Wheat and barley and oats stretch mile after mile on either hand. Here the red wheat tinges the view, there the whiter barley; but the prevailing view is a light gold. Yonder green is the swede, or turnip, or mangold, but frequent as are the fields of roots, the golden tint overpowers the green. . . .

Come again in a few weeks' time and look down upon it. The swarthy reapers are at work. They bend to their labour till the tall corn overtops their heads. Every now and then they rise up, and stand breast high among the wheat. Every field is full of them, men and women, young lads and girls, busy as they may be. Yonder the reaping machine, with its strange-looking arms revolving like the vast claws of an unearthly monster beating down the grain, goes rapidly round and round in an ever-narrowing circle till the last ears fall. A crowd has pounced upon the cut corn. Behind them – behind the reapers – everywhere abroad on the great plain rises an army, regiment behind regiment, the sheaves stacked in regular ranks down the fields. Yet a little while, and over that immense expanse not one single, solitary straw will be left standing. Then the green roots show more strongly, and tint the landscape. Next come the waggons, and after that the children searching for stray ears of wheat, for not one must be left behind. After that, in the ploughing time, while yet the sun shines warm, it is a sight to watch the teams from under the same ash tree, returning from their labour in the afternoon. Six horses here, eight horses there, twelve yonder, four far away; all in a single file, slowly walking home, and needing no order or touch of whip to direct their steps to the well-known stables. . . .

Yet what a difficult problem lies underneath all this! While the reaper yonder slashes at the straw, huge ships are on the ocean, rushing through the ocean to bring grain to the great cities, to whom – and to all – cheap bread is so inestimable a blessing. Very likely, when he pauses in his work and takes his luncheon, the crust he eats is made of flour ground out of grain that grew in far distant Minnesota, or some vast Western State. Perhaps at the same moment the farmer himself sits at his desk and adds up figure after figure, calculating the cost of production . . . Then a vision rises before him of green meads and broad pastures slowly supplanting the corn; the plough put away, and the scythe brought out and sharpened. If so, where then will be the crowd of men and women yonder working in the wheat?

Richard Jefferies,
Hodge and his Masters
(1880)

The condition of the working class is the condition of the vast majority of the English people.

Friedrich Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
(1845)

I
n 1867, a Victorian statistician estimated that 11.4 per cent of the population comprised ‘higher skilled labour', earning £73 to £60 a year; 38.8 per cent were ‘lower skilled labour', earning £52 to £46; and 28.9 per cent were agricultural and unskilled labourers, earning £41 to £20. While constituting 79.1 per cent of the whole, clearly there were considerable divisions between the upper and lower strata of the working class, ‘so great,' wrote Mayhew, ‘that it seems as if one were in a new land and among another race'.

The technological inventions of the late eighteenth century made the nineteenth-century industrial revolution possible; former farm-workers, their wives and children provided much of the workforce, as mechanisation was introduced only slowly: they were cheaper and more flexible than machines, and could be got rid of when not needed. Hours were very long, work wearisome, monotonous and strictly disciplined, wages poor, health and safety generally neglected. Workhouses sent pauper children to northern factories and mills as ‘apprentices' (i.e., time-limited slaves), and six-year-old children could work for more than twelve hours a day. Enforced improvements in conditions, opposed and evaded by employers, came slowly. The Factory Act of 1809 set a minimum working age of nine and limited under-sixteens to a twelve-hour day, but this applied only to cotton mills; the 1833 Act introduced inspectors, compulsory schooling (of sorts) and limited under-eighteens to a twelve-hour day; the Ten Hour Act of 1847 limited women and young persons to a ten-hour day, but employers worked them in shifts to fit in with men working a fifteen-hour day. Acts in 1850 and 1853 limited the hours of all textile workers, who did ten and a half hours daily and seven and a half hours on Sunday. By the later 1870s, hours were generally further reduced, with many men not working on Sundays or Saturday afternoons.

In the mines, before 1842, boys between five and ten could work twelve hours a day, operating ventilation doors before graduating, like women, to dragging basket-loads of coal by chains attached to waist-belts. Bodies were distorted by hard labour in cramped conditions, and lung diseases were common. Above ground, boy chimney-sweeps might be bought for £5, working from the age of five for twelve to sixteen hours a day, acquiring ‘sooty warts' or ‘sooty cancer'; not till 1875 was this stopped.