Essays in Rebellion

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food. Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like Waterloo or the coach to York—so long ago that we can almost hope it was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country, and issued their piteous memories in the book called The Hungry 'Forties. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the quartern loaf ranging from 7d. to 11-1/2d., and heavy, sticky, stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told of oatmeal and a dash of red herring—one red herring among three people was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea—sixpence an ounce, and one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of our working people—the only people who really count in a country's prosperity—we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret, and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery. And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may just glance at the verses and read:

"What is Freedom?—ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well—
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs....
'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak—
They are dying whilst I speak."

Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we casually notice the song beginning:

"Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay you low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?"

And so to the conclusion:

"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre."

Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidée and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines: