Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times by Pritchard R. E

Author:Pritchard, R. E. [Pritchard, R. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Dickens’s England
ISBN: 9780752475547
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE HARVEST FIELDS

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded over and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens . . .

Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ (1877; pub. 1918)

Machinery in the field does not reduce the number of men employed. But they are employed in a different way. The work all comes now in rushes. By the aid of the reaping machine acres are levelled in a day, and the cut corn demands the services of a crowd of men and women all at once, to tie it up into sheaves. . . . Under the old system, a dozen men worked all the winter through, hammering away with their flails in the barns. Now the threshing machine arrives, and the ricks are threshed in a few days. As many men are wanted (and at double the wages) to feed the machine . . . But instead of working for so many months, this rush lasts as many days.

Much the same thing happens all through arable agriculture – from the hoeing to the threshing – a troop are wanted one day, scarcely anybody the next. . . . It is not the ‘pranks’ of the farmers that have caused emigration, or threats of it. The farmer is unable to pay high wages, the men will not accept a moderate reduction, and the idle crowd, in effect, tread on each other’s heels. . . .

Let the months roll by and then approach the same village along the same road under the summer sun. The hedges, though low, are green, and bear the beautiful flowers of the wild convolvulus. Trees that were scarcely observed before, because bare of leaves, now appear, and crowds of birds, finches and sparrows, fly up from the corn. The black swifts wheel overhead, and the white-breasted swallows float in the azure. Over the broad plain extends a still broader roof of the purest blue – the landscape is so open that the sky seems as broad again as in the enclosed countries – wide, limitless, very much as it does at sea. On the rising ground pause a moment and look round. Wheat and barley and oats stretch mile after mile on either hand. Here the red wheat tinges the view, there the whiter barley; but the prevailing view is a light gold. Yonder green is the swede, or turnip, or mangold, but frequent as are the fields of roots, the golden tint overpowers the green. . . .

Come again in a few weeks’ time and look down upon it. The swarthy reapers are at work. They bend to their labour till the tall corn overtops their heads. Every now and then they rise up, and stand breast high among the wheat. Every field is full of them, men and women, young lads and girls, busy as they may be.

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