4 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–
America competed with home-grown produce; and rural labour forces were
impacted by the Education Act of 1870 which reduced children’s work capacity,
as well as by ongoing disputes about pay and conditions. Gradual improvements
took eff ect, with the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in
1872 and the Agricultural Holdings Act of 1883 which improved the rights of
tenant farmers, but life remained an ongoing struggle in comparison to the more
prosperous years earlier in the century.^12
In addition to changing agricultural fortunes, in the second half of the nine-
teenth century a number of other signifi cant factors also played a key role in
reshaping the rural landscape. With the coming of the railways, there was an
infl ux of visitors into rural sites as rail travel opened up opportunities for tour-
ism around the country. Th e marketing of rural locations as holiday destinations,
particularly from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, by companies such
as the Great Western Railway, oft en drew on extant stereotypes of the rural
as wild and less civilized than towns and cities while also recasting these same
spaces as a place of sanctuary and escape within Britain’s own borders: a home-
from-home, therefore, and a place of safety, while simultaneously imbued with
qualities of diff erence.^13 Yet at the same time, one eff ect of the increased traffi c to
a variety of rural locations was a better appreciation for the distinct and varied
qualities of diff erent regional locales. As W. J. Keith argues, rail travel helped
enable a move from a generalized impression of the countryside to an apprecia-
tion of ‘a series of diff erent countrysides with their own physical features, history,
customs, dialects and ways of living’, one implication of which was the growth of
regionalism in literature.^14
Th e process of opening up access to rural environments through greater meth-
ods of travel and communication, and its concomitant eff ects, continued in the
early twentieth century. Travel by car brought new opportunities for trips to the
countryside and the seaside for the upper classes and, as rail travel become more
widely accessible, increased the proportion of the middle-class population who
could be tourists, leading to the years until the First World War being termed a
‘“golden age” for the railway companies of Britain’.^15 Intensive urban development
in the early twentieth century also increased the pool of people looking to escape
to the countryside and coast for their leisure while, at the same time, leading to a
greater diff erentiation between cities, towns and rural locales. As Chris Th omas
explains, ‘the working classes were to benefi t later from the railways’ expansion
of holiday making and had yet to venture much abroad – before, that is, the First
World War sent them in great numbers to France and the Low Countries’.^16
For those who returned to rural communities in Britain aft er the war, almost
the end point of this collection, their experiences must have changed, among
other aspects of their lives, their relationship to the familiar landscapes of home.
For the poet Edward Th omas it was the rural countryside of home that was being
fought for: as Peter Sacks explains