The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

The Excursion, B. 1.

Such a process I should rejoice to see producing such characters in England. Yes! Milton, Thomson, Cowper, the pious and tender Montgomery, and Bloomfield, one of their own kind, would be noble and enriching studies for the simplest cottage, and cottage-garden, and field-walk. Some of our condensed historians, our best essayists and divines, travellers, naturalists in a popular shape, and writers of fiction, as Scott, and Edgeworth, and De Foe, might be with vast advantage diffused amongst them. Let us hope it will one day be so. And already I know some who have reaped those blessings of an awakened heart and intellect, too long denied to the hard path of poverty, and which render them not the less sedate, industrious, and provident, but, on the contrary, more so. They have made them, in the humblest of stations, the happiest of men; quickened their sensibilities towards their wives and children; converted the fields, the places of their daily toil, into places of earnest meditative delight—schools of perpetual observation of God’s creative energy and wisdom.

It was but the other day that the farming-man of a neighbouring lady having been pointed out to me as at once remarkably fond of reading and attached to his profession, I entered into conversation with him; and it is long since I experienced such a cordial pleasure as in the contemplation of the character that opened upon me. He was a strong man; not to be distinguished by his dress and appearance from those of his class, but having a very intelligent countenance; and the vigorous, healthful feelings, and right views, that seemed to fill not only his mind but his whole frame, spoke volumes for that vast enjoyment and elevation of character which a rightly directed taste for reading would diffuse amongst our peasantry. His sound appreciation of those authors he had read—some of our best poets, historians, essayists, and travellers—was truly cheering, when contrasted with the miserable and frippery taste which distinguishes a large class of readers; where a-thousand-times-repeated novels of fashionable life, neither original in conception nor of any worth in their object—the languid offspring of a tinsel and exotic existence—are read because they can be read without the labour of thinking. While such works are poured in legions upon the public, like a host of dead leaves from the forest, driven along in mimic life by a mighty wind—and while such things are suffered to swell the Puffiads of publishers, and shoulder away, or discourage, the substantial labours of high intellect—it is truly reviving to see the awakening of mind in the common people. It is, I am persuaded, from the people that a regenerating power must come—a new infusion of better blood into our literary system. The inanities of fashion must weary the spirit of a great nation, and be thrown off; strong, native genius, from the measureless, unploughed regions of the popular mind—robust, gigantic, uneffeminated by luxury, glitter, and sloth—will rise up, and put all soulless artificialities to shame; and already mighty are the symptoms of such a change manifested, in an array of names that might be adduced. But I must not be led farther away by this seducing topic.

I found this countryman was a member of our Artisans’ Library, and every Saturday evening he walked over to the town to exchange his books. I asked him whether reading did not make him less satisfied with his daily work; his answer deserves universal attention:—“Before he read, his work was weary to him; for, in the solitary fields, an empty head measured the time out tediously, to double its length; but, now, no place was so sweet as the solitary fields: he had always something pleasant floating across his mind; and the labour was delightful, and the day only too short.” Seeing his ardent attachment to the country, I sent him the last edition of “The Book of the Seasons;” and I must here give a verbatim et literatim extract from the note in which he acknowledged its receipt, because it not only contains an experimental proof of the falsity of a common alarm on the subject of popular education, but shews at what a little cost much happiness may be conveyed to a poor man:—“Believe me, dear sir, this kind act has made an impression on my heart that time will not easily erase. There are none of your works, in my opinion, more valuable than this. The study of nature is not only the most delightful, but the most elevating. This will be true in every station of life. But how much more ought the poor man to prize this study! which if prized and pursued as it ought, will enable him to bear, with patient resignation and cheerfulness, the lot by providence assigned him. O sir! I pity the working man who possesses not a taste for reading. ’Tis true, it may sometimes lead him to neglect the other more important duties of his station; but his better and more enlightened judgment will soon correct itself in this particular, and will enable him, while he steadily and diligently pursues his private studies, and participates in intellectual enjoyment, to prize, as he ought, his character as a man in every relative duty of life.”

What a nation would this be, filled with a peasantry holding such views, and possessing such a consequent character as this!

The sources of enjoyment in nature have been too long closed to the poor. The rich can wander from side to side of the island, and explore its coasts, its fields, and forests—but the poor man is fettered to the spot. The rich can enter the galleries and exhibitions of cities, and contemplate all the great works of art; the poor ought to be taught to know that, if they cannot see the works of art—statues and paintings—they can see those of God;—if they cannot gaze on the finest forms of beauty from the chisel of the sculptor, they may be taught to distinguish the beauty of all living forms;—if they cannot behold splendid paintings of landscapes, of mountains, of sea-coasts, of sunrises and sunsets; they can see, one or other of them, all the originals of these—originals to whose magnificence and glory the copies never can approach. To the poor, but properly educated man, every walk will become a luxury, a poem, a painting—a source of the sweetest feelings and the most elevating reflections.

But there is one class in these back settlements of England to whom a liberal education is most requisite, and to whom it would be most difficult to give it—the class of smaller resident proprietors. The effect of the possession of property in such places is singular and most lamentable. It produces the most impenetrable hardness of nature—the most selfish and sordid dispositions. Everywhere, the tendency of accumulation is to generate selfishness: but, in towns, there are many counteracting influences; the emulative desire of vying, in mode of life, with equals and superiors—the greater spread of information—the various objects of pleasure and association, which keep open the avenues of expenditure, not only in the purse, but in the heart. Here there are none. Amusements and dissipations are self-gratulatingly denounced as gross follies and sins; objects of display, as pride. The consequence is, that habits of the strangest parsimony prevail—the rudest furniture, the rudest style of living. Men who, in a town or its neighbourhood, would appear as gentlemen, and, perhaps, keep a carriage, there wear often clouted shoes, threadbare and patched clothes, and a hat not worth a farthing; and all in a fashion of the most awkward rusticity. All wisdom is supposed to lie in penuriousness. They have abundance of maxims for ever in their mouths, full of that philosophy; as “Penny-wise and pound-foolish”—“A penny saved is a penny got”—“A pin a-day’s a groat a-year.” All ideas seem absorbed in the one grand idea of accumulating coin, that will never be of more value to them than so many oyster-shells. Such a thing as a noble or generous sentiment would be a surprise to their own souls. Of such men are made the hardest overseers of the poor; whose screwing, iron-handed administration of relief is the boast of the parish, and has led to the most monstrous abuses. To them all objects are alike; they have no discrimination; the old and young, the idle and industrious, the sturdy vagabond, and the helpless and dying!—they deem it a virtue to deny them all, till a higher power forces the reluctant doit from their gripe. They are surly, yet proud churls, living wrapped in a sense of their own importance; for they see nobody above them, except there be a squire or a lord in the parish; and they see little of him, and then only to make their passing obsequious bow; for they are at once

Tyrants to the weak, and cowards to the strong.

Any education, any change, would be a blessing to these men, that would bring them into collision with those of their own supposed standing, but with better education and more liberal views and habits. The excess to which these causes operate in some of these out-of-the-world places, is scarcely to be credited: they produce the strangest scenes and the strangest characters. Let us take a specimen or two from one parish, that would be easily paralleled in many others.

In one part of this secluded neighbourhood, you approach extensive woods, and behold amongst them a house of corresponding air and dimensions—a mansion befitting a large landed proprietor. If you choose to explore the outbuildings belonging to it, you will find there a regularly educated and authorized physician, living in a dovecot, and writing prescriptions for any that choose to employ him, for a crown, or even half-a-crown, which he spends in drink. Paternal example and inculcations made him what he is; unfitted him for success in his profession, and left him dependent on his elder brother, who affords him the asylum of his dovecot, yet so grudgingly that he has even attempted to dislodge him by pulling off the roof; and the poor doctor owes his retreat, not to his brother’s good-will, but to his own possession of a brace of formidable bull-dogs, that menace the destruction of any assailant. The dogs lie in his chamber when you enter, with their noses on the ground, and their dark glittering eyes fixed steadily upon you, and are ready, at a signal, to spring on you, and tear you to pieces. The doctor’s free potations have now deprived him of the power of locomotion; he cannot quit his pigeon-house; but one of his bull-dogs he has trained to act as his emissary, and with a note suspended to his neck by a tape, he goes to certain houses in the neighbouring village, and so communicates his wishes to certain cronies of his, who are in the habit of attending to them. The dog would tear any one to pieces that attempted to stop him while on his master’s errands, being a very strong and fierce creature; but, if he is not molested, he goes very civilly along to his place of destination, and, when the note is taken off his neck by the proper hands, returns with great punctuality and decorum.