26 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
individualism, the wage economy, the reinforcement of the rights of private
property owners and the shortcomings of an education which ‘failed wholly to
start him on the path to learning’ have left the man stranded ‘between two civi-
lizations, one of which has lapsed, while the other has not yet come his way’.^4
Sturt is well known for his dual project of recording the changing rural world
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as he encountered it in his
own locality and of attempting to interpret the deeper signifi cance of what he
saw to extrapolate a view of how England itself was irretrievably altering. Th e
contrasting stories of the carter and the labourer indicate key concerns in his
work, and his method of presenting them, particularly in some of his other writ-
ings. Th e discussion in Change in the Village is conducted largely in general terms,
but draws heavily on the insights and conclusions Sturt had formed from his
knowledge of specifi c individuals and from his own work in the wheelwright’s
shop. In addition, the journal he kept from 1890 until his death in 1927 (which
was not published in his lifetime) reveals how he combined detailed records of
events, conversations and meetings with extensive speculation on questions such
as the nature of ‘peasant’ civilization and the roles and relationships of men and
women within it, the importance of tradition and of what he called the ‘racial
life’ of the nation, the future social and political structure of society and, later, the
impact of the war in infl uencing this. Th e purpose of this chapter is to examine
how, taken together, these writings reveal the methodolog y of a social historian
and commentator whose self-refl exiveness complicates his representation of the
lives he observes. Furthermore, since Sturt was by no means alone in responding
to the social and cultural changes aff ecting English rural life in the later nine-
teenth century, a comparison with contemporaries whose lives overlapped with
his – Richard Jeff eries, Alfred Williams and Flora Th ompson – helps both to
highlight common ground and to clarify his particular achievement.
Physical work is a shared point of reference for all these writers as they seek to
communicate the experience of labouring people’s lives, but for Sturt work always
has cultural as well as individual signifi cance. Accordingly, he observes the skills of
working people and valorizes the dynamic relationship between their craft sman-
ship or expertise and their materials; and he refl ects on how work itself is changing
and on how these changes give rise to new attitudes and to a revaluation of the
place of work in life as a whole. His style blends descriptive detail, interpretative
comment and nuanced speculation, as the following example from Th e Wheel-
wright’s Shop (1923) shows. Here Sturt records how the wheelwrights in his shop
knew each customer and his needs; understood his carters and his horses and the
nature of his land; and fi nally took a pride in providing exactly what was wanted in
every case. So, unawares, they lived as integral parts in the rural community of the
English ... Th ey were friends, as only a craft sman can be, with timber and iron. Th e
grain of the wood told secrets to them.^5