Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

40 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

journals, however, remain much more provisional in their analysis of change and
their attempts to foresee the future character of society and culture. Th e chal-
lenge appeared to mount when he felt that the war had ‘wiped out’ the past,
making it almost impossible ‘to get the long vista’ of history ‘where the name
“England” called up readily [the] august progress through the centuries’.^66 Sturt
himself felt increasingly stranded between two civilizations like the carter he
describes in Change in the Village. He did not belong to the society of men like
Bettesworth or the wheelwrights in his shop, and was always conscious of the
limits to his understanding of their lives; but he found the contemporary world
alien and unappealing , and regarded the arts as a poor substitute for tradition,
and machines as the enemy of skill. Near the end of his life he wrote:

I had rather be a faulty amateur, dependent on faulty amateurs, than a connoisseur

dependent on a machine; for the latter may hardly taste the inwardness of the delight

reached by having the tools in one’s own hands or at least by fellow-feeling with those

who have.^67

Yet with characteristic wryness he also remembered his own limitations as a
spoke-maker compared with the expertise of the master wheelwright, George
Cook, who could fi nd and correct faults in his employer’s work that were imper-
ceptible to him. Th e distinctive mark of Sturt’s best work is his capacity both to
record the phenomena of change and loss and his own emotional reactions to
them, and to resist self-pity or a lapse into nostalgia for the past by means of a
counterbalancing irony and attention to material facts. Th is is implicit in a late
journal entry following the death of his beloved sister, Mary, who had been his
principal carer for many years. ‘I would not have her back any more than I would
have the crocuses back or go back, myself, to youth’, he wrote:

Th e process must not be disturbed. A stream of vitality, millions of years old (ceasing

indeed in our celibate family) built up in her a set of sense organs that responded,

much as in myself, to contacts with the environment. In me too it will stop by and by.

But I would not have it otherwise.^68

Here, even as he mourns his deeply felt personal loss, Sturt faces it philosophi-
cally and unresentfully, as he also faces his own eventual extinction, the fi nality
of which will be just as complete as the passing Bettesworth’s generation, the sale
of the wheelwright’s shop or the changes in the village.