The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

The Methodists have done much to check the progress of demoralization in these districts. They have given vast numbers education; they have taken them away from the pot-house and the gambling-house; from low haunts and low pursuits. They have placed them in a certain circle, and invested them with a degree of moral and social importance. They have placed them where they have a character to sustain, and higher objects to strive after; where they have ceased to be operated upon by a perpetual series of evil influences, and have been brought under the regular operation of good ones. They have rescued them from brutality of mind and manners, and given them a more refined association on earth, and a warm hope of a still better existence hereafter. If they have not done all that could be desired, with such materials, they have done much, and the country owes them much. The thorough mastery of the evil requires the application of yet greater power—it requires a NATIONAL POWER. The evil lies deeper than the surface; it lies in the distorted nature of our social relations; and, before the population can be effectually reformed, its condition must be physically ameliorated!

There never was a more momentous and sure truth pronounced, than that pronounced by Christ,—“They who take the sword, shall fall by the sword.” If they do not fall by its edge, they will by its hilt. It is under this evil that we are now labouring. As a nation we have fallen, through war, into all our present misery and crime. It is impossible that the great European kingdoms, with their present wealth and cultivated surfaces, in their present artificial state of society, can carry on war without enduring evils far more extensive, tremendous, and lasting, than the mere ravaging of lands, the destruction of towns, or even of human lives. We are, as a nation, an awful proof of this at this moment. By the chances of war, at one time manufacturing and farming almost for the world; prospering, apparently, on the miseries of whole kingdoms wrapt in one wide scene of promiscuous carnage and anarchy, our tradesmen and agriculturists commanded their own terms; and hence, on the one hand, they accumulated large fortunes, while, on the other, the nation, by its enormous military preparations—its fleets and armies marching and sailing everywhere, prepared to meet emergencies at all points and in all climes; by its aids and subsidies abroad; by its wasteful expenditure at home—piled up the most astounding debt ever heard of in the annals of the world. A vast working population was not merely demanded by this unnatural state of excitement, but might be said to be forced into existence, to supply all manner of articles to realms too busy in mutual slaughter to be able to manufacture or plough for themselves. Every thing assumed a new and wonderful value. All classes, the working classes as well as the rest, with the apparent growing prosperity, advanced into habits of higher refinement and luxury. The tables of mechanics were heaped with loads of viands of the best quality, and of the highest price, as earliest in the market; their houses were crowded with furniture, till they themselves could scarcely turn round in them—clocks, sometimes two or three in one house; chests of drawers and tables thronged into the smallest rooms; looking-glasses, tea-trays, and prints, stuck on every possible space on the walls; and, from the ceiling depending hams, bags, baskets, fly-cages of many colours, and a miscellaneous congregation of other articles, that gave their abodes more the aspect of warerooms or museums, than the dwellings of the working class. Dress advanced in the same ratio; horses and gigs were in vast request; and the publicans and keepers of tea-gardens made ample fortunes.

The war ceased. Commerce was thrown open to the competition of the world. The continental nations began to breathe, and to look round on their condition. Their poverty and their spirit of emulation, the sight of their own stripped condition, and of England apparently enriched beyond calculation at their expense, set them rapidly about helping themselves. This could not but be quickly and deeply felt here. To maintain our position, all manner of artificial means were adopted. Every class, feeling the tide of wealth changing its course, strove to keep what it had got. The working class, as individually the weakest, because they had spent their gains as they came, went to the ground. The value of every necessary of life was kept up as much as possible by legal enactments. The rate of wages fell. The manufacturers, impelled by the same necessity of struggling for the maintenance of their rank, were plunged into the most eager competition; the utmost pressure of reduction fell on the labour of the operatives, who, with their acquired habits, were ill able to bear it. They were thrust down to a condition the most pitiful and morally destructive—to excessive labour, to semi-starvation, to pauperism. They could not send their children to school—not so much from the expense of schooling—for that was made light by public contribution, and new plans of facility in teaching large numbers—but because they wanted every penny their children could earn, by any means, to aid in the common support. Hence, mere infants were crowded in pestilent mills when they should have been growing in the fresh air, and were stunted and blighted in body and in mind—a system, the evil of which became so enormous as to call loudly upon the attention of the legislature, and the indignant wonder of the nation. The parents themselves had not a moment’s time to watch over their welfare or their morals; at least sixteen hours’ unremitting daily labour being necessary to the most miserable existence. Evils accumulated on all sides. The working class considered themselves cast off from the sympathies of the upper classes, regarded and valued but as tools and machines; their children grew into ignorant depravity, in spite of all efforts of law or philanthropy to prevent them. These causes still operate wherever manufacturing extends: and till the condition of this great class, whether in towns or villages, can be amended; till time for domestic relaxation can be given to the man, and a Christian, rather than a literary, education to the boy—an inculcation of the beauty and necessity of the great Christian principles; the necessity of reverencing the laws of God; doing, in all their intercourse with their fellow men, as they would be done by; the necessity of purity of life and justice of action, rather than the cant of religious feeling, and the blind mystery of sectarian doctrine,—the law and the philanthropy must be in vain.

To the simple, and yet uncontaminated parts of the country, there is yet a different kind of education that I should rejoice to see extended. It should be, to open the eyes of the rural population to the advantages of their situation;—to awaken a taste for the enjoyment of nature;—to give them a touch of the poetical;—to teach them to see the pleasantness of their quiet lives,—of their cottages and gardens,—of the freshness of the air and country around them, especially as contrasted with the poor and squalid alleys where those of their own rank, living in towns, necessarily take up their abode,—of the advantages in point of health and purity afforded to their children by their position,—of the majestic beauty of the day, with its morning animation, its evening sunsets, and twilights almost as beautiful; its nightly blue altitude, with its moon and stars:—all this might be readily done by the conversation of intelligent people, and by the diffusion of cheap publications amongst them; and done, too, without diminishing the relish for the daily business of their lives. Airy and dreamy notions—notions of false refinement, and aspirations of soaring beyond their own sphere—are not inspired by sound and good intelligence, but by defective and bad education.

The sort of education I mean has long been realized in Scotland, and with the happiest results. There, large towns and manufactories have produced their legitimate effect, as with us; but, in the rural districts, every child, by national provision, has a sound, plain education given him. He is brought up in habits of economy, and sentiments of rational religion, and the most solemn and thorough morality. The consequence is, that almost all grow up with a sense of self-respect; a sense of the dignity of human nature; a determined resolve of depending on their own exertions: and though no people are so national, because they are made sensible of the beauty of their country and the honourable deeds of their forefathers, yet, if they cannot find means of living at home without degradation, and, indeed, without bettering their condition, they soberly march off, and find some place where they can, though it be at the very ends of the earth.

Nothing is better known than the intelligence and order that distinguish a great portion of the rural population of Scotland. No people are more diligent and persevering in their proper avocations; and yet none are more alive to the delights of literature. Amid wild mountain tracks and vast heaths, where you scarcely see a house as you pass along for miles, and where you could not have passed two generations ago without danger of robbery or the dirk, they have book societies, and send new books to and fro to one another, with an alacrity and punctuality that are most delightful. When I have been pedestrianizing in that country, I have frequently accosted men at their work, or in their working dress—perhaps with their axe or their spade in their hands, and three or four children at their heels—and found them well acquainted with the latest good publications, and entertaining the soundest notions of them, without the aid of critics. Such men in England would probably not have been able to read at all. They would have known nothing but the routine of their business, the state of the crop, and the gossip of the neighbourhood: but there, sturdy and laborious men, tanned with the sun, or smeared with the marl in which they had been delving, have not only been able to give all the knowledge of the district; its histories and traditions; the proprietorships, and other particulars of the neighbourhood; but their eyes have brightened at the mention of their great patriots, reformers, and philosophers, and their tongues have grown perfectly eloquent in discussing the works of their poets and other writers. The names of Wallace, Bruce, Knox, Fletcher of Saltoun, the Covenanters, Scott, Burns, Hogg, Campbell, Wilson, and others, have been spells that have made them march away miles with me, when they could not get me into their own houses, and find it difficult to turn back.

Now, why should not this be so in England? Why should not similar means produce similar effects? They must and would; and by imbuing the rural population with a spirit as sound and rational, we should not only raise it in the social scale to a degree of worth and happiness at present not easily imaginable, but render the most important service to the country, by attaching “a bold peasantry, the country’s pride,” to their native soil, by the most powerful of ties, and rendering them both able and more determined to live in honourable dependence on self-exertion. Book Societies, under local management, should do for the Country what Mechanics’ Libraries are doing for the Towns—building up those habits, and perfecting those healthful tastes, for which popular education is but the bare foundation.

Wordsworth gives an account of the early years of his Wanderer, which, under such a system, might be that of thousands.

Early had he learned
To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die:—
What wonder if his being thus became
Sublime and comprehensive! Low desires,
Low thoughts, there had no place; yet was his heart
Lowly; for he was meek in gratitude,
Oft as he called those ecstasies to mind,
And whence they flowed; and from them he acquired
Wisdom, which works through patience:—hence he learned
In oft-recurring hours of sober thought
To look on nature with a humble heart,
Self-questioned, where it did not understand,
And with a superstitious eye of love.
So passed the time; yet to the nearest town
He duly went, with what small overplus
His earnings might supply, and brought away
The book that most had tempted his desires,
While at the stall he read. Among the hills
He gazed upon that mighty orb of song,
The divine Milton. Lore of different kind,
The annual savings of a toilsome life,
His schoolmaster supplied; books that explain
The purer elements of truth, involved,
In lines and numbers, and, by charm severe,
(Especially perceived where nature droops,
And feeling is suppressed) preserve the mind
Busy in solitude and poverty.

Yet still uppermost,
Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might tend to wean him. Therefore, with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth,
While yet he lingered in the rudiments
Of science, and among her simplest laws,
His triangles—they were the stars of heaven,
The silent stars! Oft did he take delight
To measure th’ altitude of some tall crag
That is the eagle’s birthplace, or some peak
Familiar with forgotten years.——
In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,
Thus was he reared; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,
And every moral feeling of his soul
Strengthened and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome air of poverty,
And drinking from the well of homely life.