Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 219

Social surveys of Victorian and Edwardian urban England are well-known to historians. But, as Mark Freeman’s illuminating monograph points out, investigations into rural life from the same period are also numerous. This book sets out to examine the changing methodology used by these rural social investigators and the divisions between them. Although the book begins with a useful overview of early surveyors of the countryside, its main focus is the period after 1870 when rural issues – trades unionism, depopulation and the land question – became national ones. Freeman identifies four main groups of investigations: the official government inquiry carried out by appointed commissioners; newspaper investigations undertaken by special correspondent journalists; systematic sociological surveys which complemented the great urban inquiries; and finally, the cultural investigation based on close personal contact with the rural poor. Much of the material under scrutiny is familiar to rural historians, from the royal commissions and Board of Trade reports, to the country writing of Augustus Jessopp, Richard Jefferies, Henry Rider Haggard and George Sturt. Others, perhaps, arenot so well-known: Booth and Rowntree’s own studies into rural life are assessed alongside similar contemporary surveys by Harold Mann and Maud Davies. Such studies, the author contends, ‘helped to shape theways in which rural society was understood bycontemporaries and has since been interpreted by 220 the agricultural historians’ (p.12). What this book shows, then, is that the historian cannot afford to ignore the methodological impetus behind this material as it moulded the attitudes, findings and conclusions of the investigations. Every historian that has an interest in or actively uses these investigations as primary source material should read this book.

Several key points emerge from Freeman’s study of the methodology of rural investigation. The different agendas that shaped reports on the countryside between 1870 and 1914 produced a wide range of perspectives on rural wages, workers and conditions. ‘Roving reporters’ of the 1870s used a wide range of informants but most only had fleeting contact with poor rural inhabitants. ‘Resident investigators’ of the 1880s like Jessopp and Jefferies offered more reflective descriptions of the countryside than the 1890s royal commissions or Rider Haggard’s Rural England which relied on the evidence of employers and local elites. Poverty surveys of the early twentieth century used the questionnaire method to tabulate the level of rural distress, but they also stressed their intimate knowledge of the local inhabitants under investigation. George Sturt’s and Stephen Reynolds’ cultural studies went much further in breaking down class barriers and both were informed by a strong belief in investigating the poor ‘on their own terms rather than according to an agenda imposed by external authorities’ (p.141). These different methodological approaches meant that all investigations were criticized and con-tested. So although many of these surveys contributed to a better awareness of rural conditions, few legislative changes were forthcoming. In addition, investigators shared certain characteristics (the majority being male, middle class, urban dwellers), and all studies were infused with moral and cultural assumptions about rural labour and life. Thus the voice of the rural labourer is marginalized in many of these investigations. The reports of Jessopp and Jefferies often resort to the ‘Hodge’ stereotype and assume rural life was demoralized and decaying. Sturt and Reynolds, on the other hand, elevated the life of rural workers but, as Freeman puts it, ‘the lionization of the labourer did not necessarily reflect an achievement of empathy any more than had the reduction to an unflattering stereotype’ (p.152). The ‘objectivity’ of the scientific poverty surveys can also be questioned because the agenda ‘remained determined by elite perceptions of the rural population and its role’ (p.130) and although the Liberal Party’s Land Enquiry Committee (whose rural volume was published in 1913) set out to fully incorporate the views of the agricultural labourer, the perspectives of its members remained ‘fundamentally external’ to the rural poor (p.181).

The difficulties in investigating rural life were not history review overcome in the period 1870–1914. Payments in kind and the wide range of non-wage resources clearly contributed to rural subsistence but translating these into cash estimates was fraught with complications. Regional distinctions in hiring, wages and living conditions persisted, making it hard for any local study to claim to be representative of England as a whole (let alone Britain). Thus there are also difficulties for the author in convey-ing the diversity of opinion represented by these investigations. Understandably the voluminous royal commissions are glossed over somewhat, whereas the poverty studies of Mann and Davies, for example, are discussed in some detail. But this criticism is perhaps unfair as overall the book is successful in its main aim – to detail the methodological diversity of rural social investigation. It deserves a wide readership.