Page 29 - History 2020

left-leaning liberals, enjoyed enormous literary success by condemning material

progress and praising the solace to be found in nature. Rupert Brooke, the first of the
war poets, wrote from France of “Grantchester”, the “certainty” of “deep meadows”,
and asked if the church clock still stood timelessly at ten to three.

Richard Blatchford, a socialist in the William Morris mould, sold a million copies of
“Merrie England” (1894) condemning the factory system: “the thing is evil. It is evil in
its origin, evil in its progress, evil in its methods, evil in its motives and evil in its
effects.” With wonderful irony, the very man who coined the term “Industrial

Revolution”, historian and Oxford don Arnold Toynbee, turns out to have been a
disciple of John Ruskin. Not surprisingly, he describes it as “a period as disastrous and
as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed.” “Well-being” was destroyed
and replaced by “poverty, alienation and degradation”: pure Ruskin. It may have
been a step on the road towards democracy, but the price was terrible. Kipling wrote
a popular school history textbook which barely mentions it; Chesterton wrote one
too; the English, he said, were “dispossessed” in the name of progress: “They took

away his maypole” is his heartrending cry, and forced him into wage-slavery.
Historians of the English labourer John and Mary Hammond agreed: “The Industrial
Revolution delivered society from its primitive dependence on the forces of nature,
but in return had taken society prisoner.” The popular image we have of the Industrial
Revolution as something that should make us shudder was permanently cemented in
our imaginations during this period. Blake came up with the phrase “dark Satanic
th
th
mills” in the late 18 century, but it was in the later 19 century that this image
became a staple of British historical memory.

The irony of course is that the avid readership of this avalanche of “England is a
garden” literature continued to inhabit an ever-more industrial, urban country, while
the country life portrayed was an idealised cultural construct rather than based on
any sociological or historical reality. As cultural historian Raymond Williams says,
during this period, industrial and urban Britain “remade the countryside in its own

compensating image”.

Some reformers, however, inspired by the William Morris, became convinced that
something could be done to bring the rural idyll to life other than in the pages of a
book. Two leading figures in this movement were Octavia Hill and Ebenezer Howard.

Octavia Hill came from a family of dedicated social reformer who were inspired by
their Christian faith. When her farther, a merchant, went bankrupt, he fell into
depression and left. Her mother took charge, moved them all to London, got a job

and encouraged Octavia to do the same. Her first job at 14 was in a Christian socialist