Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

36 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

and its intimate personal demands’.^46 He also linked the decline of that mutual
‘understanding’ to the loss of what was accepted by previous generations as the
essential need to live in a highly responsive relationship to the environment.
Again Sturt complements his generalized hypothesis with a precisely detailed
personal account of his own sensation of the ‘old local “Spirit”’ familiar to his
forebears breaking in upon him with the force of a revelation:

For a moment – no more – I recovered some of this understanding that was also

theirs, this aft ernoon: I felt their ‘spirit’ all about me; It [sic] was on the road near

the old Church ... there on the road where as I passed all was fairly quiet, fairly still;

where the sunlight and the hedgerow shadows lay calm and contented; there for that

moment I ‘understood’ the world, and had volitions about it, like those I fancy our

forefathers to have had. So, their ‘spirit’, their volition, came to refresh and strengthen

me, as that of my contemporaries had failed to do. I was in their world – the world of

slow-moving gentle farm-horses and shapely trundling waggons; the world of jogging

old country folk. In fact, however, all this has gone; all the old volitions of that time

have been swept away, by the War, by the Newspaper; have been obliterated by the

Cosmopolitan world.^47

While the intensity of the moment for Sturt is indisputable, he can still do no
more than ‘fancy’ that his sense of relationship to the world corresponded to that
of past generations, and as usual he is quick to acknowledge that the condition
he has fl eetingly ‘understood’ has irretrievably ‘gone’. Furthermore, the transi-
ence of his experience contrasts with what he suggests was the normal ambience
of life in the past. Th e strong sense of retrospective recognition of a watershed in
country life produced here has something in common with Th ompson’s observa-
tion at the end of Lark Rise that ‘aft er the Jubilee nothing ever seemed quite the
same’: she continues,

Wages rose, prices soared, and new needs multiplied. People began to speak of ‘before

the Jubilee’ much as we in the nineteen-twenties spoke of ‘before the war’, either as a

golden time or as one of exploded ideas, according to the age of the speaker.^48

Both writers see their particular small communities penetrated to an unprec-
edented extent by cultural changes fl owing from external events, their
self-suffi ciency challenged, and the attention of their people distracted by the
metropolis or beyond. Williams, too, regretted the invasive infl uence of the cit-
ies, complaining that with urban interests dominating modern legislation, ‘the
dweller in the country – the humble agriculturalist, the most humble and most
necessary of all workers ... the very backbone and support of every industry and
all society, is forgotten, spurned, despised and ridiculed’.^49
Sturt repeatedly strives to fi nd images and examples to evoke the ‘old spirit’
of intimacy he ascribes to the past. In one instance, he imagines that a peasant
handling turfs, faggots or timber at home could visualize the landscape they came