2 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–
tures, while indicating the possibility of looking beyond these tropes to examine
a more complex set of gender relations and negotiations. And Eliot’s call for
attention to the distinct characteristics of rural spaces encapsulates the ethos of
many writers discussed in this collection whose works present a nuanced por-
trayal of rural Britain at this time, representing a diverse set of gendered and
classed perspectives on a range of rural geographies.
Writing at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, Eliot’s essay was pub-
lished during a period in which rural spaces were undergoing fundamental
restructuring to become far from representative – if they ever had been – of the
myth of an ideal rurality. During the nineteenth century the countryside con-
tinued to be irrevocably remodelled by enclosure, which not only left a visual
imprint on the rural landscape but also put an end to many traditional methods
of farming the land and its associated customs and cultural practices. Th e end of
the Napoleonic Wars had been followed by a period of agricultural depression,
made worse by the introduction of new Corn Laws. During the 1840s, where
this collection begins, agriculture remained unstable, and the period gained the
undesirable moniker of the ‘Hungry Forties’ due to the extreme poverty and
hardship experienced by the working classes across Europe. From this point on,
agriculture began to regain prosperity, and with the repeal of the Corn Laws
in 1846, agriculture entered into the period of ‘High Farming’ as Karen Sayer
terms it, although, as she notes, this brought about mixed fortunes and smaller
farmers and rural labourers fared less well than the new breed of ‘agri-capitalists’.^4
Agriculture would continue to remain reasonably prosperous until the Great
Depression of the 1870s, but other changes reshaped agrarianism during this
time. Th e mechanization of agricultural practices improved farming in some
respects – enabling more thorough and effi cient production – but steadily
changed the demands on the rural workforce, reducing the number of agricul-
tural workers required. Many of the disenfranchised rural workforce provided
labour for the Industrial Revolution, which, while not exclusive to urban envi-
ronments – A. N. Wilson notes that in the 1830s half the population worked
in rural environments and most industries were ‘rural in base’ – supported an
infl ow to towns and cities from the countryside, as well as emigration abroad.^5
Whilst farming is the industry most readily associable with rural envi-
ronments, mining, fi shing and service to the large country estates were also a
signifi cant feature of rural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Cornwall is a good example of this, with mining and fi shing central to the
rural economy in the nineteenth century and with both of these industries
more dominant in the cultural identity of Cornwall at this time. Philip Payton
argues that mining had ‘become a geographically and culturally unifying factor
by the 1850s’ and it continued to be so even aft er the decline of mining from
the 1860s.^6 In addition, working men and women would move between diff er-