‘Between Two Civilizations’ 33
ated with rising social status, because in her view their acquisition of ‘the éclat of
living in one of the villas’ came at the cost of living in an inferior property:
Th e new house might prove to be damp and draughty, for the walls were thin and the
woodwork ill-fi tted, and the garden at the back of the house, formerly part of a damp
tussocky meadow, left in the rough by the builder ... but as compensation, she would
enjoy the distinction conferred by owning a smart front door with a brass knocker, a
bay window in the parlour, and water laid on to the kitchen sink.^32Like Jeff eries and Sturt, she mocks the pretensions of the villa residents who
put up lace curtains and gave their properties names like ‘Chatsworth’, ‘Naples’
or ‘Balmoral’, and we are told that Laura regarded the incomers who occupied
these houses as ‘a class newly emerging in this country, on the borderline between
the working and middle classes’, distinguished mainly by their vulgarity of taste,
delight in discussing the cost of their furnishings and ambitions for their care-
fully limited families.^33 For Th ompson, however, these social, demographic and
physical changes are inseparable from deeper cultural changes which she sums up
as ‘the mass standardization of a new civilization’ driven by an overriding desire
for social approval and to avoid controversy in word or deed.^34 Her account of the
losses involved in pursuit of this ‘new civilization’ is slight and generalized – she
mentions a reluctance to voice strongly held religious or political views, or to exer-
cise independence of mind – but she specifi cally contrasts the ‘fl at and toneless’
speech of the new villagers with that of their forebears ‘whose talk had not lost the
raciness of the soil and was seasoned with native wit which, if sometimes crude,
was authentic’.^35 Th e implied inauthenticity of modern speech entails a signifi cant
value judgement on the premium the emerging society placed upon conformity to
particular predetermined codes of conduct deemed respectable by an increasingly
dominant middle class, which the upwardly mobile aspire to join and which is the
arbiter of social acceptance into its ranks. In a diff erent way, therefore, Th ompson
provides another example of the transformative infl uence of ‘Primrose Gold in
Our Village’ and of the quiet displacement of old ways to satisfy new priorities.
Th e rapid population growth in the Bourne valley where Sturt lived helps
to explain the prominence he gives to the accompanying social changes. At the
start of Change in the Village he records that once a good water supply had been
provided, the valley was ‘“discovered” as a “residential centre”’ and increased in
population from 500 to over 2,000 in the twenty years up to about 1910, with
the consequence that the original inhabitants ‘are being crowded into corners,
and are becoming as aliens in their own home; they are receding before newcom-
ers with new ideas, and, greatest change of all, they are yielding to the dominion
of new ideas themselves’.^36 Th ese two claims – the estrangement of the locals
within their own community and their adoption of ‘new ideas’ – inform much
of Sturt’s analysis of the impact of newcomers and infl uence the larger specu-