The English Rural Poor, 1850–1914 (review)

In this five-volume collection of facsimile pamphlets, periodical articles, songbooks, and ephemera, Mark Freeman provides scholars investigating Victorian attitudes about the condition of the farm laborer with a wealth of material hitherto unavailable except in a few research libraries. The 43 items include essays aimed at de-romanticizing the life and work of the rural poor, essays protesting the economic exploitation of farm workers, pamphlets exposing the immorality of farm workers, songs of protest from the National Agricultural Labourers Union Melody Book, lectures, sermons, Commission reports, and essays published in such disparate periodicals as the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, Cornhill, Fraser's, and Longman's; the spokespeople range from farm workers themselves, rural parsons, conservative farmers and landowners, radical politicians, and Seebohm Rowntree. Freeman has deliberately avoided the (alas, few) standard items on the topic-material by and about Joseph Arch, for example-and instead concentrated on items that are both hard to find and that illustrate the many, generally conflicting, concerns about rural workers: their morality, their economic plight, their politics, education, clothing, housing, health, future prospects, and on and on.

In his comprehensive general introduction to the collection, Freeman provides readers with a context for the collection and a brief explanation of why he selected these particular items. Victorian scholars who have tried to pin down particularly slippery concepts will recognize Freeman's difficulty with his very title: in the late nineteenth century, the line between rural and urban (or at least, rural and suburban) blurred as the spreading towns overtook formerly rural villages, and as factories sprouted in pastures. The "poor," too, defy easy description, because contemporaries sometimes differentiated between the working poor, unemployed paupers, and the "undeserving poor," and sometimes simply lumped everyone making less than an arbitrary sum-say 12 shillings a week-together as "poor." The many autobiographies written by the generation born in the 1860s and '70s illustrate how easily one could move from laborer (economically a near pauper) to artisan or clerk or school teacher (economically in the lower middle class) and back to pauper, depending on one's luck and the vagaries of a regional economy. And finally, the complexities of regional and local conditions in rural England can barely be covered by the five volumes in this collection. As Freeman explains, "to do justice to the varieties of the rural experience across Britain would require several additional volumes" (1:x). Even the years under study are rather arbitrary, but realistically, 1850 works just as well as any other date for a starting point, and most people would agree that 1914 ended the long nineteenth century rather emphatically.

Freeman's selections illustrate the conflicting perceptions of the lot of the rural poor among society in general, who was at fault for the worst abuses, and what could be done to make life bearable, at least. As is always the case, virtually every essayist wrote with an agenda. In 1854 John Eddowes tried to de-romanticize rural life by describing The Agricultural Labourer as He Really Is, or Village Morals in 1854. Eddowes carefully described the laborer's life as desperate, immoral, and ignorant, weighed down with chains as real as the chains of felons, lunatics, and negro slaves, and lived not in a simple, cheerful, innocent, clean, well-lighted dwelling but most often in the merest corner of a cottage, "dirty, untidy, comfortless, 'a heap of fuel in one corner of his kitchen, a brood of chickens in another"' (1:11). Eddowes's solution was to encourage education and regular church attendance, and to do away with hiring fairs; Charles Whitehead's (1870) was prohibition of strong drink, while J. B. Haynes's was to Supply the Agricultural Labourer with Good Beer at a Low Price; George Mitchell's was (surprise!) a decent wage, reasonable working hours, clean housing, and a union. Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, claimed that large numbers of laborers lived a clean and thrifty life, that...