Though visiting the poor was not a regular duty, it is evident from many indications that the girls took pleasure in knowing the parishioners, and they must have been to see them occasionally.
The life of labourers was at that time extremely dull, and it is little to be wondered at that they were rough boors when they were left entirely without reasonable means of recreation, and without any mental nourishment. The public-house was often the working-man’s sole chance of relaxation. Very few could read or write; in the long winter evenings there was nothing for them to do but to sit in a draughty cottage over a small wood-fire, without any of the luxuries that are now considered necessaries in every labourer’s cottage. The interiors resembled a Highland crofter’s hut, with beaten earth flooring, often damp; rough uncovered walls, no gay prints, or polished furniture. The introduction of machinery has in this case, as in so many others, altered the entire aspect of life. When sofa legs can be turned out by the hundred by a machine for little cost, everyone can afford sofas; when the process of reproduction of pictures is reduced to a minimum, every wall is adorned. Even the woven quilts and patterned chair-covers, now so little thought of as to be hardly noticed, were then unknown; plain dyes for materials were all that could be had.
Though probably Cowper’s dismal picture is an extreme case, it has the merit of being contemporary—
“The frugal housewife trembles when she lights
Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,
But dying soon like all terrestrial joys.
... The brown loaf
Lodged on the shelf, half eaten without sauce
Of savoury cheese, or butter costlier still.
... All the care