The Victorian countryside: hardship, change and nostalgia

Myles Birket Foster, 'The Old Watermill'
Public domain

The population

The census of 1871 was the last to show that most of the inhabitants of Great Britain still lived in rural areas or in small towns. In the following ten years, while the urban population increased by over 25 per cent. Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire and Oxfordshire lost a quarter of their population. By 1914 only 8 per cent of the British population were employed in agriculture, compared with 27 per cent in Germany and 38 per cent in France. Daily commuting, not just from the suburbs but from the shires and the south coast had become common and rural England was beginning to acquire its role as a place for living and leisure rather than work. 

The agricultural depression

A whole combination of adverse circumstances combined to make the period 1877-1895 a dark time for British farmers, especially grain producers.

1. A series of wet summers, culminating in the wettest season in living memory in 1879 meant an alarmingly low yield in successive harvests.
2. Farmers could not raise prices because they could not compete against the produce of the American prairies where the McCormick reaper was cutting labour costs. By the 1870s American technology had advanced to the use of self-binders, while the new railroads and steamships were cutting transport costs.
3. The government refused to reintroduce agricultural protection - this was one of the reasons why Disraeli lost the election of 1880.
4. There was an outbreak of animal diseases: 1879 liver rot, 1880 foot and mouth.

The assault on ‘landlordism’

The political consequence was to strain relations between landowners and tenants, which led to widespread criticism of the whole landed order’ This was especially intense in Ireland and Scotland. In 1879 the Irish Land League was founded, its President Michael Davitt, its Secretary Charles Stewart Parnell.

The winter of 1881-2 was particularly severe, and many Highland crofters were so destitute that they could no longer pay their rents. When the factors of the great estates tried to evict them, they retaliated by taking back grazing rights of which they had been deprived and by rent strikes. This escalated into violence at the ‘Battle of the Braes’ on Skye in 1882 when Glasgow policemen clashed with crofters. For the rest of the decade their were disturbances throughout the Highlands and gunboats and marines were sent in to quell them. The Crofters' War was the most severe crisis in the Highlands since the heyday of Jacobitism’. The crofters were supported by the Irish Land League and by a great deal of public opinion in Scotland.

There were similar disturbances in Wales.

Hubert von Herkomer, 'Hard Times' (1885)
Wikimedia Commons

In retrospect it can be seen that some of the attacks on landlordism were unfair. In the Celtic fringes, the problem was poor soil and an adverse climate, which left the landowners often powerless to effect improvements. Aristocrats such as the dukes of Bedford and Argyll went into print to defend themselves. Others, such as the 9th duke of Marlborough, married American heiresses to revive the family fortunes. But the real point, which was a shift in political power. The widening of the franchise and the agricultural depression struck fatal blows at the aristocracy.

In England there was little rural violence, but the Liberal politician, Joseph Chamberlain delivered celebrated attacks on the aristocracy. On 30 March 1883:

Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class - of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin; whose fortunes - as in his case - have originated by grants made in times gone by for services which courtiers rendered kings, have since grown and increased, while they have slept, by levying an increased share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country.

The agricultural worker

Agricultural workers were obvious sufferers from the depression and this lay behind much migration to the towns. However, as a group they were becoming more assertive.

In the 1870s they became unionized. At a meeting of Warwickshire labourers, a Primitive Methodist preacher, Joseph Arch, a labourer at Barford, made a revivalist speech calling for a farm workers’ strike, which raised him to the leadership of a movement. The strikers were given considerable publicity in the press, especially the Liberal Daily News, and on 29 March 1872 they founded at Leamington the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union. It spread rapidly and soon became a national union with a membership of nearly 100,000 at the end of 1872. But after a defeat over a Suffolk and Norfolk strike in 1874 membership fell rapidly, and with the decline in agriculture the union lost power.

Lily Maxwell: woman voter

Lily Maxwell, woman voter
Public domain

There is a fascinating post here about Lily Maxwell, who actually voted in a by-election in Manchester. She possessed the necessary property qualification and was included in the electoral register by mistake. She was encouraged to vote by Lydia Becker and Jacob Bright (brother of the more famous John), two prominent women's suffrage campaigners. Unfortunately, judges ruled in November 1868 that the 1867 Reform Act did not apply to women. A small number of women voted in the general in the following month were subsequently removed from the register. It's sad to note that Lily Maxwell died in a workhouse in 1876.

Victorian civic pride

Birmingham Council House, Victoria Square
Public domain

The building of cities was a characteristic Victorian achievement, impressive in scale but limited in vision, creating new opportunities but also providing massive new problems. Perhaps their outstanding feature was hidden from public view - their hidden network of pipes, drains, and sewers, one of the biggest technical and social achievements of the age ... Yet their surface world was fragmented, intricate, cluttered, eclectic and noisy, the unplanned product of a private enterprise economy developing within an older, traditional society. …Economic individualism and common civic purpose were difficult to reconcile.… Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities.

Individualist preference for avoiding public enterprise whenever possible died hard. J.K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914.

Urbanisation

The census of 1871 revealed that out of a population of 31 million nearly two thirds still lived in rural areas or in towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants. Apart from London only five cities housed more than a quarter of a million people. Heavy urbanization was physically confined to certain localities: London and Middlesex, Lancashire and Durham, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, west-central Scotland and parts of south Wales.  Suburbia was still limited and was unknown as a word. Most people still lived near their place of work. Farm labouring was the largest male occupation. Even in industrial areas many urban-dwellers lived within walking distance of green fields.

But this census was the last decennial survey for which this was true. The picture was irrevocably shattered by 

1. the agricultural depression that drove many off the land 
2. the gravitational pull of urban employment 
3. the development of a cheap, suburban transport system. 

Writing in 1901 the novelist H. G. Wells envisaged the total breakdown of the traditional distinction between town and country. He predicted that by the start of the twentieth century the Londoner might ‘have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as its suburb' (quoted G. R. Searle, A New England?, Oxford, 2004, p. 86).

The Victorians continually commented on the speed of urban development. A north London rector wrote,

I have tried to keep Hornsey a village, but circumstances have beaten me (quoted Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, 1954, p. 31.)

The visitor to Birmingham could expect to find a street of houses in the autumn where he saw his horse at grass in the spring. In Victorian South London the houses could spring up in what seemed a single night (Briggs, p. 31).

Much of the effort went into church building, but particularly in the last quarter of the century there was a huge development of public offices, hospitals, schools, sewage farms, and water works.

These rapid changes meant that the late Victorians were subject to two conflicting ideas. On the one hand there was a flowering of civic pride, seen in the growing activism of the municipal corporations set up by the Act of 1835. On the other there was a deep rural nostalgia shown in the growing market for idyllic depictions of the countryside.