28 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
ends Change in the Village by declaring that he ‘would not lift a fi nger, or say a
word, to restore the past time’ lest he retard ‘a movement which ... looks like a
prelude to the renaissance of the English country-folk’; but he still admits that
he has lost ‘a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give
me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living’.^9
Again, the choice of verb here is notable: given Sturt’s calculating use of lan-
guage, it is impossible to ignore his implied admission that his view of country
life may have been more notional than actual.
Th is may be contrasted with Alfred Williams’s declaration at the start of A
Wiltshire Village (1912), issued by the same publisher and in the same year as
Change in the Village. He announces his intention ‘to sketch out an old-fash-
ioned village, and to give an unvarnished account of some portion of the life
there’, and his determination to exclude the ‘merely picturesque’, the ‘romantic’,
and scenes or characters invented in order ‘to weave a web of fantastic design
with which to deceive others, and myself as well’.^10 To achieve his aim, Wil-
liams insists that he will only write about what he has seen and what he knows,
and throughout his book he shows none of the hesitation or uncertainty that
frequently interrupts Sturt when he writes about private lives and thoughts of
people like the old labourer, Bettesworth, and his wife, Lucy. Williams started
life in much less advantageous circumstances than Sturt. Born into an already
large labouring family in the village of South Marston in 1877, he was precipi-
tated into full-time farm work at the age of eleven to help support his mother
aft er his father left home. In 1892, he followed two of his older brothers into the
Great Western Railway workshops in nearby Swindon, where he was to work
in heavy industry for many years while at the same time resolutely educating
himself and struggling to make his name as a writer.^11 Williams explicitly situ-
ates himself as someone who knows what it is ‘to labour in the fi elds and in the
factory, too, to be both rural and urban, to have a knowledge of two spheres, and
two sets of conditions’.^12 He claims authority from this dual perspective to judge
the relative qualities of rural and urban life and work, defi ning the latter rather
conventionally in terms of ‘shackles’, ‘din and turmoil’, ‘strife and battle’ and
‘unnatural confi nement’.^13 He is like Sturt in believing that factory work under-
mines individual self-reliance and weakens character, while town life creates false
material desires; and also in associating rural life with ‘health of body and hap-
piness of spirit’, a more independent way of life, and work that has none of the
monotonous repetitiveness of mechanical production.^14 However, whereas Sturt
is attentive to the nature of the losses involved in these diff erences, Williams is
less interrogative and concentrates principally on establishing the contrasts. Th is
diff erence is illustrated in the sanguine way he tells how the ancient landscape
visible from Callis Hill above his native village is bisected by the east–west rail-
way line, ‘one of the great highways of travel and commerce’, whose presence