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2 ‘BETWEEN TWO CIVILIZATIONS’: GEORGE
STURT’S CONSTRUCTIONS OF LOSS AND
CHANGE IN VILLAGE LIFE
Barry Sloan
In Change in the Village (1912) George Sturt writes of a young man who, he
believes, soon aft er leaving school, probably found employment as a gravel-dig-
ger before becoming a night repairman on the railway until a chill contracted
at work turned to bronchitis and pleurisy and nearly killed him. Unemploy-
ment would have forced him back to the same job had he not secured work as
a coal-carter. Sturt expects that he will remain a coal-carter indefi nitely, and
acknowledges that it is ‘more useful by far – to the community – than the old
industries were wont to be’.^1 However, since the work itself, he claims, requires
little skill or knowledge, it provides no opportunities for the man to broaden his
mind. Sturt imagines, on the one hand, that he will have to suppress ‘the zest and
fascination of living, with the senses alert, the tastes awake, and manifold sights
and sounds appealing to his happy recognition’ until his brief leisure hours; and,
on the other, that he will be so exhausted by his labours that he will have no
energ y to ‘even begin to refresh himself with the arts, or even the games, of civi-
lization’.^2 Worse still, he opines, in contrast with another exemplary fi gure, an
elderly village labourer who has preferred the freedom of casual employment to
the servitude of regulated work, the carter has no memories or experience of the
variety of ‘rural activities, changeful, accomplished, carried on by many forms
of skill and directed by a vast amount of traditional wisdom, whereby the coun-
try people of England had for ages supported themselves in their quiet valleys’.^3
Sturt himself was a native of such a place; born in Farnham, Surrey, in 1863, he
lived there until 1891 when he moved permanently to the neighbouring village
of Lower Bourne. On his father’s death in 1884, he inherited the wheelwright’s
shop which had been in the family since the early years of the century and he
managed it until ill-health forced him to sell the business in 1920. Sturt’s experi-
ence convinced him that the memories and knowledge of a community’s life and
of a particular area are an endless source of stimulus for the mind and imagina-
tion which the carter in Change in the Village will never possess: competitive