Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

by Pritchard, R. E.

  For the last three weeks our village has been in a state of great excitement, occasioned by a challenge from our north-western neighbours, the men of B., to contend with us at cricket. . . .

  There is something strangely delightful in the innocent spirit of party. To be one of a numerous body, to be authorised to say we, to have a rightful interest in triumph or defeat, is gratifying at once to social feeling and to personal pride. There was not a ten-year-old urchin, or a septuagenery woman in the parish, who did not feel an additional importance, a reflected consequence, in speaking of ‘our side’. An election interests in the same way; but that feeling is less pure. Money is there, and hatred, and politics, and lies. Oh, to be a voter, or a voter’s wife, comes nothing near the genuine and hearty sympathy of belonging to a parish . . . The sky promised a series of deluging showers, and kept its word, as English skies are wont to do on such occasions . . .

  They began the warfare – those boastful men of B. And what think you, gentle reader, was the amount of their innings? These challengers – the famous eleven – how many did they get? Think! imagine! guess! You cannot? Well, they got twenty-two, or rather they got twenty; for two of them were short notches, and would never have been allowed, only that, seeing what they were made of, we and our umpires were not particular. They should have had twenty more, if they had chosen to claim them. Oh, how well we fielded! and how well we bowled! Our good play had quite as much to do with their miserable failure as their bad. Samuel Long is a slow bowler, George Simmons a fast one, and the change from Long’s lobbing to Simmons’s fast balls posed them completely. Poor simpletons! they were always wrong; expecting the slow for the quick, and the quick for the slow. Well, we went in. And what were our innings? Guess again! – guess! A hundred and sixty-nine! In spite of soaking showers, and wretched ground, where the ball would not run a yard, we headed them by a hundred and forty-seven; and then they gave in, as well they might. . . .

  Mary Russell Mitford, Tales of Our Village (1823–32)

  FROM ‘OUR VILLAGE – BY A VILLAGER’

  Our village, that’s to say not Miss Mitford’s village, but our village of Bullock Smithy,

  Is come into by an avenue of trees, three oak pollards, two elders, and a withy;

  And in the middle, there’s a green of about not exceeding an acre and a half;

  It’s common to all, and fed off by nineteen cows, six ponies, three horses, five asses, two foals, seven pigs and a calf!

  Besides a pond in the middle, as is held by a similar sort of common law lease,

  And contains twenty ducks, six drakes, three ganders, two dead dogs, four drowned kittens, and twelve geese.

  Of course the green’s cropped very close, and does famous for bowling when the little village boys play at cricket;

  Only some horse, or pig, or cow, or great jackass, is sure to come and stand right before the wicket.

  There’s fifty-five private houses, let alone barns and workshops, and pigsties, and poultry huts, and suchlike sheds;

  With plenty of public-houses – two Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King’s Heads. . . .

  There’s one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees,

  Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, little Methodist chapel of ease;

  And close by the churchyard there’s a stonemason’s yard, that when the time is seasonable

  Will furnish with afflictions sore and marble urns and cherubins very low and reasonable. . . .

  There’s a shop of all sorts, that sells everything, kept by the widow of Mr Task;

  But when you go there it’s ten to one she’s out of everything you ask. . . .

  That’s the Doctor’s with a green door, where the garden pots in the windows is seen;

  A weakly monthly rose that don’t blow, and a dead geranium, and a tea-plant with five black leaves and one green.

  As for hollyoaks at the cottage doors, and honeysuckles and jasmines, you may go and whistle;

  But the tailor’s front garden grows two cabbages, a dock, a ha’porth of pennyroyal, two dandelions and a thistle. . . .

  There’s another small day-school too, kept by the respectable Mrs Gaby,

  A select establishment, for six little boys and one big, and four little girls and a baby.

  There’s a rectory, with pointed gables and strange odd chimneys that never smokes,

  For the rector don’t live on his living like other Christian sort of folks; . . .

  There’s a butcher’s and a carpenter’s and a plumber’s and a small greengrocer’s, and a baker,

  But he won’t bake on a Sunday, and there’s a sexton that’s a coal-merchant besides, and an undertaker; . . .

  Now I’ve gone through all the village – aye, from end to end, save and except one house,

  But I haven’t come to that – and I hope I never shall – and that’s the village poorhouse!

  Thomas Hood (mid-nineteenth century)

  CAPTAIN SWING

  (I)

  [In the 1820s and especially the 1830s, gangs of farm labourers went machine-wrecking, ascribing their actions to ‘Captain Swing’.]

  All across the south, from Kent to Cornwall, and from Sussex to Lincolnshire, the commotion extends.

  The labourers of England see, at any rate, that the threshing-machines rob them of the wages that they ought to receive. They, therefore, began by demolishing these machines. This was a crime; the magistrates and jailers were ready with punishments; soldiers, well fed and well clothed out of the taxes, were ready to shoot or cut down the offenders. Unable to resist these united forces, the labourers resorted to the use of fire, secretly put to the barns and stacks of those who had the machines, or whom they deemed the cause of their poverty and misery. The mischief and the alarm that they have caused by this means are beyond all calculation. They go in bands of from 100 to 1,000 men, and summon the farmers to come forth, and then they demand that they shall agree to pay them such wages as they think right; and you will please to observe, that even the wages that they demand are not so high by one third as their grandfathers received, taking into consideration the taxes that they have now to pay. . . .

  The millions have, at last, broken forth; hunger has, at last, set stone walls at defiance, and braved the fetters and the gallows; nature has, at last, commanded the famishing man to get food. All the base and foolish endeavours to cause it to be believed that the fires are the work of foreigners, or of a conspiracy, or of instigation from others than labourers, only show that those who make these endeavours are conscious that they share, in some way or other, in the guilt of having been the real cause of the mischief.

  William Cobbett, The Political Register (4 December 1830)

  (II)

  No one that had the misfortune to reside during the last winter in the disturbed districts of the south of England, will ever forget the awful impression of that terrible time. The stilly gatherings of the misguided peasantry amongst the wild hills, partly heath and partly woodland, of which so much of the northern part of Hampshire is composed . . . or the open and noisy meetings of determined men at noontide in the streets and greens of our Berkshire villages, and even sometimes in the very churchyards, sallying forth in small but resolute numbers to collect money or destroy machinery, and compelling or persuading their fellow labourers to join them at every farm they visited; or the sudden appearance and disappearance of these large bodies, who sometimes remained together to the amount of several hundreds for many days, and sometimes dispersed, one scarcely knew how, in a few hours; their daylight marches on the high road, regular and orderly as those of an army, or their midnight visits to lonely houses, lawless and terrific as the descent of pirates . . . all brought close to us a state of things which we never thought to have witnessed in peaceful and happy England. . . .

  Nor were the preparations for defence, however necessary, less shocking than the apprehensions of attack. T
he hourly visits of bustling parish officers, bristling with importance (for our village, though in the centre of the insurgents, continued uncontaminated – ‘faithful amidst the unfaithful found’ – and was, therefore, quite a rallying point for loyal men and true); the swearing in of whole regiments of petty constables; the stationary watchmen, who every hour, to prove their vigilance, sent in some poor wretch, beggar or match-seller, or rambling child, under the denomination of suspicious persons; the mounted patrol, whose deep ‘all’s well’, which ought to have been consolatory, was about the most alarming of all alarming sounds; the soldiers, transported from place to place in carts the better to catch the rogues, whose local knowledge gave them great advantage in a dispersal; the grave processions of magistrates and gentlemen on horseback; and above all, the nightly collecting of arms and armed men within our own dwelling [her father was chairman of the local bench of magistrates] kept up a continual sense of nervous inquietude.

  Mary Russell Mitford, Tales of Our Village (1823–32)

  NO FULL STOP

  The celebrated Mr Robinson of Cambridge, who was fond of farming, gives in a letter to a friend a most striking view of the perpetual recurrence of the little occupations which present themselves to the practical farmer and, however apparently trivial, are really important, and full of pleasure to those whose hearts are in such pursuit. – ‘Rose at three o’clock; crawled into the library, and met one who said, “Work while ye have the light; the night cometh, when no man can work: my father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Rang the great bell, and roused the girls to milking, went up to the farm, roused the horsekeeper, fed the horses while he was getting up; called the boy to suckle the calves and clean out the cowhouse; lighted the pipe, walked round the garden to see what was wanted there; went up to the paddock to see if the boy had scooped and cleaned the boat; returned to the farm, examined the shoulders, heels, traces, chaff and corn of eight horses going to plough, mended the acre-staff [to scrape earth off the plough], cut some thongs, whipcorded the ploughboys’ whips, pumped the troughs full, saw the hogs fed, examined the swill-tubs, and then the cellar; ordered a quarter of malt, for the hogs want grains, and the men want beer; filled the pipe again, returned to the river, and bought a lighter of turf for dairy fires, and another of sedge for ovens; hunted out the wheelbarrows and set them a-trundling; returned to the farm, called the men to breakfast, and cut the boys’ bread and cheese, and saw the wooden bottles filled; sent one plough to the three roods, another to the three half-acres, and so on; shut the gates, and the clock struck five; breakfasted; set two men to ditch the five roods, two men to chop sods and spread about the land, two more to throw up manure in the yard, and three men and six women to weed wheat; set on the carpenter to repair cow-cribs and set them up till winter; the wheeler, to mend the old carts, cart-ladders, rakes, etc., preparatory to haytime and harvest; walked to the six-acres, found hogs in the grass, went back and set a man to hedge and thorn; sold the butcher a fat calf and the suckler a lean one. The clock strikes nine; walked into the barley-field; barleys fine – picked off a few tiles and stones, and cut a few thistles; the peas fine but foul; the charlock must be topped; the tares doubtful, the fly seems to have taken them; prayed for rain, but could not see a cloud; came round to the wheatfield, wheats rather thin, but the finest colour in the world; sent four women on to the shortest wheats; ordered one man to weed along the ridge of the long wheats, and two women to keep rank and file with him in the furrows; thistles many, bluebottles no end; traversed all the wheatfield, came to the fallow field; the ditchers have run crooked, set them straight; the flag sods cut too much, the rush sods too little, strength wasted, show the men how to three-corner them; laid out more work for the ditchers, went to the ploughs, set the foot a little higher, cut a wedge, set the coulter deeper, must go and get a new mould[earth]-board against tomorrow; went to the other plough, gathered up some wood and tied over the traces, mended a horse-tree, tied a thong to the plough-hammer, went to see which lands wanted ploughing first, sat down under a bush, wondered how any man could be so silly as to call me reverend, read two verses in the Bible of the loving-kindness of the Lord in the midst of his temple, hummed a tune of thankfulness, rose up, whistled, the dogs wagged their tails, and away we went, dined, drank some milk and fell asleep, woke by the carpenter for some slats which the sawyers must cut, etc., etc.’

  William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1840)

  HACKING SWEDES

  The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres, in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets – the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped and phallic shapes. The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the livestock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

  Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in hessian ‘wroppers’ – sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom to keep their gowns from blowing about – scant skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of the two Marys.

  They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rainwater, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

  Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

  A COUNTRY CLERGYMAN

  6th May 1870

  By the Ceau the gold bushes of gorse were creeping down and clothing the old worked-out deserted quarry sides. People had been attempting to burn the gorse trees but had only succeeded in burning the underbrush and charring the long straggling stems of the old gorse trees which still stood up black and naked, crowned with dry withered tufts which the fire had not reached. The fire had, however, had the effect of blackening with scorch and smoke the beautiful silvery bark of some of the lovely birches which form a row down the lane, dividing it from the gorsy field. On one favourite and beautiful silver birch I was almost tempted to carve my name.

  When I got out on to the open of the Little Mountain the lapwings were wheeling about the hills by scores, hurtling and rustling with their wings, squirling and wailing, tumbling and lurching on every side, very much disturbed, anxious and jealous about their nests. As I entered the fold of Gil-fach-yr-heol, Janet issued from the house door and rushed across the yard, and turning the corner of the wain house [cart sh
ed] I found the two younger ladies assisting at the castration of the lambs, catching and holding the poor little beasts and standing by whilst the operation was performed, seeming to enjoy the spectacle. It was the first time I had seen clergymen’s daughters helping to castrate lambs or witnessing that operation and it rather gave me a turn of disgust at first. But I made allowance for them and considered in how rough a way the poor children have been brought up so that they thought no harm of it, and I forgave them. I am glad however that Emmeline was not present, and Sarah was of course out of the way. Matilda was struggling in a pen with a large stout white lamb, and when she had mastered him and got him well between her legs and knees, I ventured to ask where her father was. She signified by a nod and a word that he was advancing behind us, and turning, I saw him crossing the yard with his usual outstretched hand and cordial welcome. I don’t think the elder members of the family quite expected that the young ladies would be caught by a morning caller castrating lambs, and probably they would have selected some other occupation for them had they foreseen the coming of a guest. However they carried it off uncommonly well.