Nor is the feeling confined to the slatternly section, but often exhibited by very respectable cottagers indeed.
‘My mother never would go out to service—she wouldn’t go,’ said a servant to her mistress, one day talking confidentially.
‘Then what did she do?’ asked the mistress, knowing they were very poor people.
‘Oh, she stopped at home.’
‘But how did she live?’
‘Oh, her father had to keep her. If she wouldn’t go out, of course he had to somehow.’
This mother would not let her daughter go to one place because there was a draw-well on the premises; and her father objected to her going to another because the way to the house lay down a long and lonely lane. The girl herself, however, had sense enough to keep in a situation; but it was distinctly against the feeling at her home; yet they were almost the poorest family in the place. They were very respectable, and thought well of in every way, belonging to the best class of cottagers.
Unprofitable sentiments! injurious sentiments—self-destroying; but I always maintain that sentiment is stronger than fact, and even than self-interest. I see clearly how foolish these feelings are, and how they operate to the disadvantage of those whom they influence. Yet I confess that were I in the same position, I should be just as foolish. If I lived in a cottage of three rooms, and earned my bread by dint of arm and hand under the sun of summer and the frost of winter; if I lived on hard fare, and, most powerful of all, if I had no hope for the future, no improvement to look forward to, I should feel just the same. I would rather my children shared my crust, than fed on roast-beef in a stranger’s hall. Perhaps the sentiment in my case might have a different origin, but in effect it would be similar. I should prefer to see my family about me—the one only pleasure I should have—the poorer and the more unhappy, the less I should care to part with them. This may be foolish, but I expect it is human nature.
English folk don’t ‘cotton’ to their poverty at all; they don’t eat humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other, always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his rights. To me, it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I hope they never will be—an evil day that—if it ever came—for the Anglo-Saxon race. There always seemed to me to be something peculiarly repulsive in the doctrine of the old Catechism, once so studiously worked into the minds of the villagers by dint of constant repetition, teaching them to be satisfied ‘To do their duty in the station to which it had pleased God to call them’—that is, to hedge and ditch and wash greasy plates all their lives, according as they were male or female, handmaids or man-jacks. To touch hats and forelocks, to bob courtesies (not out of courtesy as equals, but in sign of low degree). To be lowly of spirit before clay clad in broadcloth—a species of idolatry—to beat down and destroy those inward feelings of independence natural to all. Anything more opposed to that onward movement in which the hopes of the human race are bound up, it would be impossible to conceive.
One girl prided herself very much upon belonging to a sort of club or insurance—if she died, her mother would receive ten pounds. Ten pounds, ten golden sovereigns, was to her such a magnificent sum, that she really appeared to wish herself dead, in order that it might be received. She harped and talked and brooded on it constantly. If she caught cold, it didn’t matter, she would say, her mother would have ten pounds. It seemed a curious reversal of ideas, but it is a fact that poor folk in course of time come to think less of death than money. Another girl was describing to her mistress how she met the carter’s ghost in the rickyard; the wagon-wheel went over him; but he continued to haunt the old scene, and they met him as commonly as the sparrows.