38 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
for example, his graphic description of the sheer drudgery and wretchedness of
a fogger’s early morning work in the dead of winter as he tends his cattle, which
he sets against the pastoral fantasies of the uninformed.^53
W. J. Keith observed that ‘one might well see Sturt’s works as documenting
the occurrence, sometime in the 1880s, of an urban-rural dissociation of sensibil-
ity’.^54 Th e key to this process as Sturt understood it is perhaps signalled in Th e
Wheelwright’s Shop where he declares that the economy has shift ed from ‘a nation
of self-supporting workmen’ to ‘a population of wage-slaves’.^55 Th e two terms, ‘a
nation’ and ‘a population’, have diff erent implications: while the former implies a
shared sense of identity and belonging , the latter suggests a more disparate and
random grouping, the product of chance rather than of a common history and
remembered past. Likewise a further value judgement emerges from the contrast
between ‘self-supporting workmen’, a phrase indicative of dignity, independence
and pride in labour, and ‘wage-slaves’ who have no autonomy and work only for
money. Yet Sturt’s view of modern work was not always so negative. Ponder-
ing the ‘deepest meaning’ of the 1912 national miners’ strike which he thought
marked the beginning of ‘a vast social revolution’ by setting the workers against
the government in an unprecedented way, Sturt speculates that the real issue is
not the campaign for a minimum wage, but an underpinning ‘ethical idea’ that
comes from within, and is full of a life which will not die for centuries ... And in the
main this is what it is: a persuasion, not to be argued down, that Work itself is but a
means to well-living ; that it ought to secure happiness, cheerfulness, vivacity to those
who do it, and that if it fails to do that there is something wrong, which must be put
right at all costs.^56According to this view, there is something deep-seated or intuitive in human
nature that will rebel against work that is divorced from or antithetical to the
need for quality of life.^57 Th e character of modern industrial work neglects this
connection, and is therefore the real source of unrest rather than the actual
claims of the strikers.
Later the same year Sturt returned to the issue from a diff erent perspective.
Taking the example of Nipper Slingo, he claims that this local labourer’s ‘skill
and prowess ... fi ll his whole being with a subtle, though sub-conscious satisfac-
tion’ which he likens to the pleasure that golf gives an idle man.^58 He attributes
the alleged subconsciousness of Slingo’s ‘satisfaction’ to lack of awareness of self-
hood, and associates it with what he calls ‘the folk way’ of peasant culture where
‘it was enough for men to live ... fulfi lling the traditions of their community,
or of their caste’.^59 At the same time, in a similar vein to his comments on the
signifi cance of Lucy Bettesworth’s fi eld labour, he likens this mode of work to
that of bees or ants, ‘absorb[ing ] its millions of Slingos’ whose individual exist-
ence is of no consequence ‘in comparison with the immense web or network of