34 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
lations he makes on the signifi cance of this. Like Jeff eries and Th ompson, he
emphasizes their lack of empathy with the existing residents, both in the dis-
missive or exploitative way in which they treat them and in their presumptuous
imposition of diff erent cultural standards on the community. While the relative
wealth of the villa dwellers and employers may set them apart from the village
labourers, Sturt defi nes the essential root of their diff erence as ‘a question of civi-
lization’.^37 Th is leads to an astute recognition of the insecurities of the newly rich
who try to balance liberal concern or guilt about the predicament of the less well
off against a determination to keep them in their place, and objections to the
labouring classes having material aspirations of their own. Above all, there is a
gap in understanding between the aspiring middle class and the old rural labour-
ing population. Sturt indicates this in general terms when he tells how a labourer
employed by a villa owner to perform ‘wanton tasks’ in his garden realizes these
prove to him more fully than any language can do that they put a diff erent sort of
value upon the countryside from its old value, and that they care not a straw for the
mode of life that was his before they came here;and likewise, he knows that the praise of his employer is ‘ignorant’ and ‘undis-
criminating approval’ void of ‘the sympathy of a fellow-expert’ who appreciates
the ‘cunning of his craft ’.^38 Th is tension is refl ected more graphically in Memoirs
of a Surrey Labourer (1907) where the old labourer, Bettesworth, shows his con-
tempt aft er being treated with ‘patronizing familiarity’ by Kelway, an incomer to
the Bourne who purchased a former labourer’s cottage and set about renovating
it: asked by the man if he can recommend a plumber, because ‘plumbing is a
thing I never had any knowledge of ’, Bettesworth replies dismissively, ‘if I was
you I should sleep with a plumber two or three nights’.^39
With the decline of traditional rural work for women, Sturt sees that they
are equally caught in the double bind of having to take employment from the
better-off which at the same time reinforces the social divisions between them.
‘Th e truth is’, he writes, ‘that middle-class domesticity, instead of setting cottage
women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and body, has side-tracked
them – has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may
shirk these duties and be “cultured.”’^40 His judgement is that in becoming part
of the wage economy, such women have lost what he calls ‘the larger existence
which enwrapped the peasant woman’s house-drudgery and made it worthwhile’,
and although this is an unsatisfactorily vague proposition as it stands, taken in
the context of comments Sturt makes elsewhere, it may be understood to refer
to the more integrated and less materially competitive structure he ascribes to
pre-modern village communities.^41 What is clear is that while women’s work had
become less harsh than it was for Lucy Bettesworth, the new domestic employ-
ment lacked the structure of service within grand houses, conferred little dignity