‘Between Two Civilizations’ 35
or status on the employee, and principally announced the enhanced social stand-
ing of her employers.
In his journals, Sturt makes repeated eff orts to tease out and clarify his own
thoughts on the signifi cance of the changed nature of work. Sometimes he pur-
sues this in highly abstract terms, referring, for example, to the warp and weft of
‘Heredity’ [sic], which is ‘the continuity of organic form through the generations’,
and ‘Tradition’, defi ned as ‘a continuity going on in the environment, and spread-
ing across the generations’, which ‘unites them by an external tie’.^42 Modernity, he
considers, has disrupted heredity and tradition, atomizing society and elevat-
ing the individual above the community. At a practical level, for people like the
natives of the Bourne, the eff ects of this process
resemble an eviction, when the inmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the
road-side with their goods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling
of their home, and aware only of being moved against their will.^43Th e simile combines literal truth in some instances with metaphorical sugges-
tiveness of the general sense of displacement and helplessness in the face of an
irresistible force.
Th is force is not limited to the changes in traditional employment and the
large numbers of newcomers to the village but, as Jeff eries had recognized, is
signalled in other ways too, whether, for example, in the coming of road lamps
and cars, or the sounds of tennis parties and pianos; or in the increasingly visible
presence of the guardian of private property and respectable behaviour, the police-
man. But for Sturt, one of the most off ensive attempts to subvert traditional life
was the ‘Institute’ designed with the dual purpose of giving men an alternative
social meeting place to the public house and opportunities to ‘improve’ them-
selves. ‘Controlled by people of another class whose “respectability” is irksome,
and open only to members and never to women’, it embodied a presumptuous and
gendered rejection of the customs and recreations of the past, off ering instead an
alien and alienating environment with little appeal to its intended users.^44
Sturt locates the basis of the disconnection caused by change, and so tellingly
represented in the Institute, in the lost bond between people and the land. While
he claimed this was at its worst in the rich who came to the country merely ‘to
pass time in it, bringing into it the town outlook, the town pursuits’, he knew
it extended beyond them as the advancing commercial imperative fuelled ‘the
readiness to sell or break up or cut down or level away or build over anything or
any site’; and he concluded sadly: ‘We are a decent people, but we have arrived
at a very sordid out-at-elbows period of our nation’s history’.^45 Th is opinion can
be linked to his pessimistic view of the shift from a parochial to a cosmopolitan
perspective on life at the cost of what he calls ‘the old local “Spirit”’, character-
ized as ‘an understanding, common to all neighbours, of the neighbourhood