Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 353

The English rural poor have always been overshadowed by their urban, industrial counterparts in the historiography of Victorian and Edwardian England, despite the state of rural life and labour being a key cause for concern for contemporary commentators and politicians. This handsomely-produced five-volume set aims to redress this neglect by reproducing forty three pamphlets, books, reports and extracts from the period 1850 to 1914, all of which address, in various ways, the condition of the English rural poor. The set is edited by Mark Freeman, well qualified for the task being the author of the recent monograph Social investigation and rural England, 1870–1914 (2003). Freeman provides a concise 35-page general introduction to the volumes, as well as a brief one to two page overview of each source in turn. The content of the volumes has been arranged in chronological order. Thus Volume I concentrates on pre-1872 material, Volume II spotlights the agricultural labourers union of the 1870s, Volumes III and IV include sources from the 1880s and 1890s respectively, and finally Volume V features the Edwardian rural poor. The sources are reprinted in their original typeface and setting, enhanced by modern digital techniques for a clean presentation. The selection of material has been informed by several criteria: first, the documents are ‘rare’ or difficult to obtain, second, they are short(ish) in length, and third, they represent a range of different English regions. Thus we find reports from government inquiries such as J.H.Tremenheere’s on agricultural gangs and Arthur Wilson Fox’s on work and wages, essays by well-known writers such as Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, social investigations by B.S.Rowntree, Maud F.Davies and H.H.Mann, alongside more quirky material like a 1865 pamphlet How to supply the agricultural labourer with good beer at a low price or the 1874 National Agricultural Labourers Union melody book. Many of the sources are obscure and little-known but others are much more familiar and have been widely utilized by historians of the rural poor. Indeed the inclusion of some may seem a little surprising in that they are so well-known and fairly easily available. The same reasons are given for the exclusion of celebrated rural autobiographies (such as those by Walter Rose and Flora Thompson) which may have been an oversight. However, bringing together such a diverse and rich body of literature for the first time can only be welcomed as it provides a treasure trove for the academic researcher and interested amateur alike.

Although the volumes have been arranged chronologically there are three prominent themes: the moral and material condition of the rural poor, the political consciousness of the rural labourer, and the depopulation of the countryside. The state of rural housing and education, the availability and remuneration of work, hiring conditions, female and child labour, the influence of beer houses and access to land dominate the first category. Although the focus of concern altered over the decades, moral censure of the rural poor remained a prominent feature of the whole period. One example, the employment of women outside the home, is typical. Charles Whitehead in 1870 claimed that outdoor work was unsuitable for women as ‘A woman who works constantly in the fields cannot fulfil her social duties; she cannot attend properly to the wants of her husband; she cannot do her duty by her children’ (I, p.279). The sentiment is echoed by Rowntree in 1914: ‘A woman’s place is in the home, looking after her house and children, and no social condition can be regarded as satisfactory which compel her to neglect these fundamental duties in order to eke out the inadequate wage of her husband’ (V, p.357).

The emergence of the rural poor as an important constituent in the political arena is chronicled through the rise of agricultural trade unions in the early 1870s, the enfranchisement of the male rural population in the 1880s, the formation of parish councils in the 1890s and the ‘land question’. Many commentators, fearful of the appearance of modern strike tactics and alarmed by the potential of democratic change, call for the reinstatement of a paternalist model of social relations in which labourers, farmers and landlords ‘are a compact threefold cord’ (II, p.135). Others were more welcoming and optimistic about political change. Jefferies saw genuine village self-government as leading to ‘the sentiment of independence’ where men ‘work, strive and save, that they may settle at home’ (III, p.113). But whilst there was cause for optimism, many sources point to the continuation of poor pay, lack of recreation and disinheritance from the land itself as contributing to the drift from the countryside. Rowntree still stressed in 1914 that ‘there is no doubt that as a class’ agricultural labourers were the ‘worst paid’ in Britain ‘and it is high time something was done to raise their status’ (V, p.356). Allotments, higher wages, co-operative farming, sanitary housing and pension provision were all touted as possible remedies by various authors but, as Mann argued, the cry of ‘back to the land’ rang hollow as long as life chances and expectations of rural people remained so low in the early twentieth century.

Do we get to hear the ‘true’ voice of the rural poor themselves? The vast majority of sources are written by the social, political and economic elites of the day: rural clergy, landowners, farmers, JPs, land agents and so on. Some clearly are sympathetic to the plight of the rural poor and sought to undermine the idyllic representation of the English countryside. But as Freeman argues in his introduction, most of the sources offer an ‘external’ perspective on the rural poor. Even the handful of sources which purport to be written by agricultural labourers such as A few words on courtship and marriage by A Hampshire Agricultural Labourer (1867) or The strike in the agricultural districts by the self-proclaimed ‘Owd Warwickshire Lad’ (1872), probably were not. The autobiography of George Mitchell is however reprinted in full in Volume 2. Thus the collection needs to be approached critically. What the volumes provide is a fascinating representation of many facets of rural labouring life between 1850 and 1914 which is invaluable to anyone with an interest in this period. At £450 for the set, it will be out of reach for most academics and university and public libraries too. This is a shame, as these volumes deserve to reach as wide an audience as possible to highlight the continued centrality of the rural world to Victorian and Edwardian England.