Introduction 3
ent rural occupations as the availability of work fl uctuated in each industry and
some would work in more than one role at the same time. Wales, Cornwall and
the North of England were all rural mining regions and it was the growth of such
industries during the Industrial Revolution, the need for access to ports and to
locate sizeable workforces close to the mines, which led to some previously rural
areas becoming major towns and cities.
Th e railways were also instrumental in changing the countryside. Th e
1840s marks the beginning of ‘railway mania’: from 1844 to 1847 ‘a fever of
unbounded optimism in the future of railways swept the country’, resulting in
the rapid spread of new railway lines throughout England and Wales.^7 Railways
restructured rural landscapes spatially, economically and politically. Th e railways
assisted with extending the reach of state power to the countryside through, for
example, the more effi cient enforcement of laws such as the Mines and Collier-
ies Act of 1842 and the Education Act of 1870. Inspectors could now travel by
train to the coal mines in the north of England or to rural schools (as the writer
Matthew Arnold did as an inspector of schools).^8 Railway routes also had a dam-
aging eff ect by cutting through the countryside with little regard for land usage,
not only providing a visual blight on the landscape but also having serious conse-
quences for agricultural practice. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), for
example, the land will be ‘cut up into railways’ with the building of a new line
through ‘Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbro-
ken by astonishment’.^9 To the farmers, the cutting of ‘the Big Pasture in two’, such
that it will be turned into ‘three-corned bits’, will produce a new organization of
space that is ‘nohow’; that is, it makes no sense to those who work and live on the
land, refl ecting only the concerns of the wider socio-economic order.^10
However, another consequence of these rapidly expanding networks of
travel was that rural spaces became more connected to the rest of the country
and rural producers could utilize new modes of transport for the movement
of their goods. Perishables such as milk, fi sh, meat and fl owers were now easily
transportable from rural regions to urban markets. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891), Hardy shows the rush to get the milk from Talbothays dairy to the sta-
tion in time for the train that will take it to the city: Tess imagines how
Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow ... Strange people that we
have never seen ... [and that] don’t know anything of us, and where it comes from;
or think how we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might
reach ’em in time.^11By the time Hardy was writing, rural spaces would go through another period of
change with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1870s. A number of fac-
tors coincided to facilitate a turn in agricultural fortunes: poor weather blighted
crops and spread disease among livestock; imports of grain and livestock from