The changes that took place in England in the decades from 1840 to 1900 were profound. While we must not over-generalize in considering their effects, we can be certain that the impact on social and economic structures, and on peopleâs lives, of the transition from rural to urban living over the Victorian period was enormous. Indeed, England was so dramatically transformed during these six decades that historians have written of âcomplete breaks with the pastâ.1 The move from village to town could be perceived as something to be aspired to, with its apparent promise of employment and perhaps greater freedom, but simultaneously, and subsequently, rural life would be seen as something that was being lost. As Mark Freeman observes, the realities of rural life were âhidden behind a series of pastoral conceptions of the countryside that accorded rurality a status superior to that of urban cultural lifeâ.2 This chapter sketches the broad social and economic context out of which emerged the representations of working-class dress that are the subject of this book.
The 1851 census provided the quantitative evidence that, for the first time, the English population was more urban than rural.3 However, this point needs some clarification: Alun Howkins points out that the census returns show the population as divided almost exactly between âurbanâ and âruralâ areas, but, since an administrative definition of âtownâ was used, rather than one based on size, the âurban populationâ included many people in towns like Lewes in Sussex or Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire that were predominantly rural in character.4 But if the balance in the 1850s was only just tipped in favour of an âurbanâ population, by 1911, a decade after Victoriaâs death, 80 per cent of the population of England and Wales resided in towns, however defined. While the population of England and Wales rose from 17.9 to 36.1 million in the period from 1850 to 1914, the number of people living in rural districts fell from 8.9 to 7.9 million.5 However the term âruralâ was defined, a story of great change is revealed.
As the title of Raymond Williamsâs The Country and the City reminds us, the dichotomy between rural and urban values, often represented so vividly in literature and the visual arts, was not new in the second half of the nineteenth century: the âcontrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical timesâ.6 In eighteenth-century England, as new ideas about âlandscapeâ and ânatureâ were being formed in terms of aesthetics on the one hand and agricultural âimprovementâ on the other, poetry and prose, for example, were preoccupied with both realistic and mythologized consideration of the relationship between the rural and the urban. However, in the nineteenth century it was the scale of social change that fuelled well-known radical critiques of industrial society, such as those of Thomas Carlyle (1795â1881), A. W. N. Pugin (1812â52) and William Morris (1834â96). For many, including Morris, this became a quest for an idyllic rural society: the frontispiece of his News from Nowhere (1890) was an image of his own rural retreat from the urban chaos of Victorian London, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. The idea of the countryside as an escape from the pressures of modern life is familiar to us in the twenty-first century, but in the nineteenth century it was the reality of their own lived experience that, for so many people, added a particular poignancy to representations of the rural.
The census enumerators found it challenging to define precisely the boundaries between the rural and the urban, and there is no easy demarcation in geographical or cultural terms, partly because these boundaries were shifting so rapidly. Contemporaries, however, offer fascinating glimpses of their own experience of change from around the middle of the century, and of the ways in which, more and more, the countryside offered refuge in a rapidly changing world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the increasingly industrialized north of England. In her novel Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell describes the way in which the growing industrial town of Manchester rubs shoulders with its still rural environs:
If you could walk from the middle of Manchester to a landscape of âthoroughly rural fieldsâ in half-an-hour in the 1850s, things had altered dramatically by the latter years of the nineteenth century in areas where the tentacles of cities, and of a growing suburbia, spread forever outwards, drawing in any hitherto isolated rural pockets that remained. As a counterpoint to this process, however, the âcountrysideâ became increasingly accessible to the town- and city-dweller, if not by foot, then, as the railway network expanded, by train. So as Tim Barringer observes, ideas about ânatureâ changed radically as early as the 1840s and 1850s, as a result of increasing urbanization on the one hand and the new accessibility of the countryside by rail on the other, and this was expressed in the renewed demand for agrarian landscape paintings and a shift in cultural values among the urban middle class â to which artists and the majority of their patrons belonged.8 It was arguably this proximity between town and countryside that fuelled an awareness of the contrasts between them, so that they were frequently perceived precisely in terms of their respective âothernessâ. Published just after the end of the Victorian period, and set in the places where he himself grew up on the NottinghamshireâDerbyshire border, D. H. Lawrenceâs novel The Rainbow (1915) repeatedly contrasts the beauty of the countryside with the âcorruptionâ of the urban and its âmodernâ buildings: to him, âit was a violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the townâ.9
By the 1850s, the countryside had earned an identity entirely distinct from that of the urban and increasingly industrial centres that is reflected, for example, in Elizabeth Gaskellâs North and South (1855).10 In Mary Barton, Gaskell had focused on the conflicts between factory owner and factory worker, arguing that these could be resolved if it were recognized that their interests were actually the same. In North and South, she turns to another conflict that was created in industrializing society â that between the new, thrusting urbanâindustrial class and the older, ruralâagricultural communities. She represents this as a conflict between the north and south of England. Gaskellâs world is framed in terms that might not stand up to the historianâs scrutiny.11 Nevertheless, she provides a contemporary perspective that has influenced our own and still has a resonance today. Likewise, in the writing of Thomas Hardy, whose Wessex is both a literal and a figurative representation of âa vanishing lifeâ,12 the urban and the rural are juxtaposed in a way that recorded and at the same time shaped a particular vision of that dichotomy. For Gaskell it is the northern industrial city that is the antithesis of the southern rural village, and of the countryside in which it nestled. In southern England itself, as we shall see in Hardyâs novels, the urban, as well as being intimated through a brash ânorthernâ character such as Alec dâUrberville (whose real family name is of course âStokeâ), is also associated with the metropolis of London, geographically not so far away and anyway now linked to his Wessex by the railway, in stark and sprawling contrast to what appeared to be a disappearing rural England.
A SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE OF ENGLISHNESS
The construction of the railway network from the 1840s, combined with rapid developments in agricultural technology, led to large-scale rationalization of the English landscape into the two broad regions that broadly persist today: a more arable and intensively farmed south and east and a largely pastoral north and west.13 Published in the year after the 1851 census, James Cairdâs English Agriculture in 1850â51 (1852) defined what has become the classic geographical division of England and Wales. This division was the result of many factors, including climate, topography and geology, which have all played a part in determining settlement and farming patterns over thousands of years. In this context it is useful to be reminded of W. G. Hoskinsâs thesis in The Making of the English Landscape, his pioneering account of the historical evolution of the landscape: âeverything is older than we thinkâ.14 Cairdâs division followed an imaginary, roughly diagonal north-east to south-west line from the Scottish border in West Northumberland to the river Exe: the area north and west of this line (including Wales), which has a more maritime climate, he described as upland and largely pastoral, given over to grazing and dairying, while the area south and east of the line, with a drier climate, he defined as lowland and largely arable â the chief corn districts of England; these geographical âzonesâ therefore determined different types of farming. Cairdâs divisions in fact conceal many regional variations and are therefore something of an oversimplification.15 Even so, the upland areas were, predominantly, areas of scattered homesteads, while the lowland regions were characterized by village settlements.
The type of farming and land-use in turn corresponds to distinctive patterns of settlement and social organization. While âliving-inâ farm servants were a regionally important occupational group, in most of arable England the land was worked by men and women who were hired for relatively short periods and who lived away from the farm where they worked, either in villages or small towns: âfarm labourersâ made up about 80 per cent of those who worked the land in England.16 These groups of workers were more mobile and therefore arguably more receptive to new ideas, for example with regard to clothing styles and the adoption of what some contemporaries would have termed âfashionableâ â often synonymous with âurbanâ â dress. Significantly, it was the adoption of such ânewâ styles that from the 1870s and 1880s drew attention to the fact that the more traditional, âruralâ styles were vanishing.
The âsouthernâ landscape identified by Caird became the âlandscape of Englishnessâ â the world of village England, and this is frequently the landscape represented in literature.17 Regional variation notwithstanding, the dominant cultural image of rural England was a southern one.18 The poet Edward Thomas used the idea of âThe South Countryâ, a term he borrowed from Hilaire Belloc, in his prose-poem of that name (1909). For Thomas, the South Country included the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and parts of Somerset. The focus on the south was reiterated by social commentators in the Victorian period.19 Furthermore, the tendency by historians to concentrate their attention on southern England is partly explained by the particular economic patterns of farming prevalent in the south and south-east: these areas were associated with low wages in the nineteenth century as well as deep-seated agricultural unrest arising out of poor and depressed conditions of employment. As a result, there is a greater body of evidence of the activity of the agricultural labourer. For example, the Swing riots of 1830 took place predominantly in the corn-growing areas of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, most of Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, parts of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Dorset. In many of these counties, an increasing pool of agricultural labour had the effect of depressing wages, and what alternative employment there was in local rural industries was adversely affected during the second half of the nineteenth century by mechanization and a consequent decline in the number of workers required for these occupations. Conversely, economic and social conditions for those working in rural and/or agricultural employment in areas with alternative employment opportunities resulting from industrialization and urbanization (generally speaking to the north of that same imaginary line that runs from the mouth of the river Exe to that of the river Tees) were better. Social commentators at the time, and historians subsequently, have tended to concentrate on the counties of Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, where wages were particularly low and the condition of the labourer appeared to be in most urgent need of redress.20 Indeed, it was the Wiltshire labourer in the Avon valley near Salisbury that William Cobbett described so despairingly as âthe worst used [âŚ] upon the face of the earthâ.21
It is true that âagricultural historiography in Britain has always been shot through with southern English insularityâ,22 and it is therefore this southern contextual landscape that frames here the representation of dress â both the garments found in museum collections and the clothing represented by artists and writers in a variety of literary and visual media. And together they cast refracted light on perceptions of a vanishing world, alongside an emergent urban and suburban culture.
THE DECLINE OF AGRICULTURE
Interest in rural issues between 1840 and 1900 was informed by concern not only that, as a proportion of the total national income, agriculture was declining, but that, not unrelated to this decline, by the 1870s the plight of the agricultural labourer was particularly acute. Despite this overall pattern, however, England supported a diversity of regional economies, each with their own distinctive social structure. To complicate matters further, change over the period was uneven: during the six decades covered by this study, the âdecline of agricultureâ was gradual at some points and more rapid at others. For example, the late 1840s and early 1850s were relatively prosperous decades, often referred to as a period of âhigh farmingâ. There then followed 20-or...