‘Between Two Civilizations’ 29
has simply become an accepted feature of the topography.^15 Th ere is nothing
here to compare with Sturt’s anguish at the sight of the cart being towed by the
steam tractor; for Williams, this is something that has happened and has had
a major impact on life and work, but it does not evoke any particular distress.
Whereas Sturt seizes on the material symptoms of change to point to a deeper
underlying crisis, Williams off ers a cautionary tale, debunking the imagined
advantages of modern town houses over rural cottages and insisting that urban
workers become wage slaves forced to work long hours in an unhealthy envi-
ronment to pay for material goods and entertainment. Although he accepts the
need to address ‘the insuffi ciency of remuneration and of leisure’ in the country,
he maintains that the rural population are happiest before they are tempted by
the false attractions of urban life, and have no appreciation of what it will be like
in reality.^16 Williams, who was deeply religious, couches his view of the fate of
those who succumb to the lure of the urban in terms that are suggestive of an
irreversible fall from a relative state of grace:
If the dweller on the land knew to what extent he must eventually suff er, he would
never be so anxious to get away into the towns; by the time he has made the experi-
ment and fi nally learned for himself, it is too late for repentance.^17Yet even Williams concedes that rural work has changed, and he off sets a fulsome
account of harvesting as he knew it in his childhood with regretful observation of
the effi ciency of mechanization which has ended the age-old custom of gleaning,
and most female fi eld labour – a subject of repeated attention in writing about this
period. He regards this particular change as symptomatic of a weakening of female
character resulting from modern social pretensions, and contrasts the alleged hap-
piness of the women fi eld workers in Wiltshire when he fi rst joined them at the
age of eight with ‘that look of superiority and self-consciousness which is becom-
ing more and more general everywhere throughout the land’.^18 Williams’s moral
affi rmation of women fi eld workers is in sharp contrast to the more conventional
view of them as disreputable and indecent found in Flora Th ompson’s Lark Rise
to Candleford (1939). Th ompson, born the year before Williams, records that few
women were employed in the Oxfordshire fi elds during Laura’s youth, and that
the bad reputation of gangs of female labourers in former times made most coun-
try women reluctant to undertake fi eld work. ‘In the eighties’, she writes,
about half a dozen of the hamlet women did fi eld work, most of them being respect-
able middle-aged women who, having got their families off hand, had spare time, a
liking for an open-air life, and a longing for a few shillings a week they could call their
own.^19