‘Between Two Civilizations’ 31
In his journal entry for 21 June 1908, Sturt comments that with the decline
of ‘peasant-life, most of the meaning has gone out of our English landscape, and,
for me, half of the charm’; and he goes on:
If the peasant life was narrow and void of aspirations, at least it clung to the country-
side with a more faithful love than ours. Faithful, respectful, nay, almost venerating,
that love was: the love of children for their fathers, of patriots for their fatherland. In
that temper the peasantry nestled in their valleys; more at home there – tied, subser-
vient as they were to the soil and the seasons among the hills – than we can conceive,
who but make a sort of toy and harlot of the beautiful country – keeping it to our-
selves, or selling it, without true understanding.^25Th ere is a tension, however, between this elevated, generalized view of ‘peas-
ant life’ and such specifi cs of the Bettesworths’ lives as Sturt is able to retrieve
or imagine, and in his attempted history of Lucy’s background and childhood
he seems characteristically aware of the dangers of both over- and under-repre-
senting the material hardships of her circumstances. Although put to work aged
about seven trimming swedes with her mother, Sturt suggests this was preferable
to household drudgery so that rather than regarding her as ‘a little slave’, we are
told that Lucy may ‘be imagined a sturdy, matter-of-fact, careless creature, at
worst subdued by her hard work, but not at all crushed by it’.^26 Th e unavoid-
able fact, however, is that this is merely Sturt’s preferred conjecture, and as if
recognizing it and seeking to redress the balance, he subsequently warns against
‘sentimentalizing’ over her fi eld work ‘in a romantic Wordsworthian way’.^27 Fur-
thermore, the condition to which fi eld work has reduced Lucy, as it did Betsy
Horton, Mrs Spicer, Lily and the unnamed women in Jeff eries’s article, makes it
problematic to accept in purely celebratory terms.
Sturt’s treatment of Lucy Bettesworth points to the central dilemma in his
work, for in spite of his apparent sympathy with socialist principles, and his genu-
ine abhorrence at the indignities of the workhouse as the almost inevitable end
point for people like the Bettesworths, the general direction of modern life dis-
mays him and he hankers aft er an older way even though he has no personal place
within it. Th is predicament is captured in his journal on 2 July 1908 where he
attributes his own discontent and lack of peace to the ‘distracted “times”’ and ‘a
breach of continuity in the traditions of English country life’; he continues:
I looked at the lights that came out in the cottages across the valley this evening : but
they are not the cottage lights of a people with any peasant lore or peasant pride or
contentment. And earlier, I walked up the last bit of our old road from the town,
because for fi ft y yards or so it still has the look of a country lane. But to imagine the
country folk, contented and sane, going home along it, or carting their hay there,
and keeping their shrewd old-world eyes open, was not possible. I used to love those
imaginings; they belonged to my people and home, to my family and my childhood;
indulging them, I was one of the old sturdy English folk, and belonged to something