Page 28 - History 2020

of the Wessex of their imagination was so strong that Hardy played this aspect up,

simplifying and compromising his more nuanced understanding to please his readers.
Touring guides to Hardy’s Wessex were, and still are, published.

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By the end of the 19 century, as Victorian shaded into Edwardian Britain, the rural
idyll was firmly established in British culture. Listen to Sir Edward Grey, a leading light
of the last Liberal government, who as Foreign Secretary more or less secretly allied
us to France and took us into the First World War. He spent the night before the
declaration of war, 3/4 August 1914, in his fishing hut in Hampshire, at Itchen Abbott,

before getting the train to London. (Grey and his wife deeply craved the peace and
quiet of their rural weekends. Once an uninvited couple knocked on their cottage
door. Grey greeted them with, “We are reading. What are you going to do?”) His
other passion, on which he wrote books, was bird-watching. After he retired in 1916,
he wrote this: “I feel deep in me that the civilisation of the Victorian epoch ought to
disappear. I think I always knew this sub-consciously, but I took things as I found them
and for 30 years spoke of progress as an enlargement of the Victorian industrial age –

as if anything could be good that lead to telephones and cinematographs and large
cities and the Daily Mail.” Grey held our destiny in his hands as we slithered to war in
July 1914. Historians have rightly dissected the minutiae of his every diplomatic move
during those tense weeks. His profound dislike of every aspect of the industrial
civilisation that was about to tear itself apart is less studied and therefore comes as a
surprise; yet, as we have seen, it was startlingly typical among British decision-
makers and opinion-formers.

Later Victorian and Edwardian writers of all kinds queued up to celebrate the virtues
of countryside, country people, country life and country qualities. What were these
rural virtues? Stability and tranquillity, said Edward Thomas, “all of us gone out of
reach of change”. The “spirit of ancient peace,” said novelist Ford Madox Ford, to be
found in “any English rose-garden, walled in and stone paved”. “The heart of
England” said writer Richard Jeffries, was around “Fleeceborough” (based on

Cirencester) on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border; here, modern life had barely
“skimmed the surface” of the “fixed unchangeable character” of village life;
contented country-dwellers were cared for by their benevolent local landowner, who
battled against attempts by urban radicals to stir up the labourers. Novelist George
Gissing found rural spirituality in villages thankfully remote from railway stations.
Poet George Bartram also went in search of “England: A Nation” which he found in its
“pastoral beauty” and “rustic glory”. George Sturt thoroughly disliked the other
England, “industrial, over-capitalised, where the struggle to live is so sordid, and
success means motor-cars and insolence”. From 1911, Edward Marsh’s editions of

“Georgian Poetry” averaged sales of 20,000 copies each; the Georgian poets, mostly