Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

32 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

ripened and steady-growing, rough but not without well-being. But I cannot do it

now because I know it is so false to present the facts; and so I am all adrift in a world

I don’t understand – a raw restless world without dignity in spite of these marvellous

summer days and the roses in the hedges and the quiet evening distance.^28

What makes this entry particularly moving is Sturt’s candour as he faces his own
declining ability to sustain his sense of proximity to the past and the people who he
believes embody it most fully. Th e forlorn nature of his endeavour fi nds symbolic
expression in the reference to his walk up the remains of a country lane which is
increasingly becoming a road, while the references to the ‘imaginings’ which he
loved to indulge calls into question the extent to which he was ever ‘one of the old
sturdy English folk’, other than in his longing. Although this issue receives particu-
lar attention here, it runs through Sturt’s work. In June 1898, for example, he tried
to give an account of the Farnham Fair, which he says should be written about
because it is ‘a part of the unknown life of these village people’, but he simultane-
ously notes that he ‘looked at it as in the Zoo one looks at the animals, knowing
nothing of the inner life going on’; and in Change in the Village, he disconcertingly
classifi es the past generations as the ‘human fauna’ of the area.^29 Even in the history
of his own family, William Smith Potter and Farmer 1790–1858 (1919), he admits
to using details of which he has ‘no real memory’, but that have helped

to build up in me ... a feeling I should be very sorry to lose now – a feeling, however

ridiculous, that in my childhood I looked upon England a hundred years ago and

more, an England going strong then with vigorous country life.^30

In the journal entry for 2 July 1908 cited above, Sturt refers to cottages no longer
inhabited by people with roots in peasant culture, and the altering character of
the rural population itself is another recurrent theme in the period, commonly
taken to signify the impact of modernity on traditional life. Jeff eries’s satirical
article ‘Primrose Gold in Our Village’(1887) is an early critique of the insidious
power of incomers to the new villas which grew up as improved transport and
increased wealth encouraged townsfolk to take country residences. Money and
infl uence are the weapons they use to force the original villagers to comply with
their alien middle-class standards and desires, and, as Jeff eries puts it:

If you are pliant and fl exible and don’t mind being petted you have nice things put in

your way, and you are passed not only in the local village, but right up to London if

you want to do business there. If you are not pliant, you are not harrowed, but you are

not watered, and it is best to get out of the local village.^31

Th e expansion of villa life is also a reference point for change which aff ects the
whole community by the end of Lark Rise to Candleford (1945). Th ompson
fi nds it paradoxical that, if the family income increased, the Candleford women
in particular aspired to move from their old cottages into modern villas associ-