That Dazzling Sun by Lawrence Reid Bechtel

Author:Lawrence Reid Bechtel [Lawrence Reid Bechtel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BQB Publishing
Published: 2020-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

The poor people of Cheddar, Ovid in the marketplace, a thoughtful letter in return, I catch Scamp and discover a danger

11 March 1792

Dear Isaac,

I have begun my real work now, briefly mentioned in my prior letter, which is going with Miss More to the village of Cheddar, where I help teach Sunday School, called that because the children can only go to school on Sunday, as they work every other day. I could hardly believe the deplorable conditions in which the thousand or so residents of this wretched village live, work, and die. It is scarcely a village at all, just an assortment of ramshackle buildings crowded like a malignancy at the bottom of magnificent Cheddar Gorge, and all the more wretched for such breathtaking beauty close by. Fashionable people often drive out in their fine carriages to view the gorge, yet such privileged parties evidently remain blind to the human suffering so near. They have eyes, but do not see.

Or perhaps these well-dressed tourists do see the poor village and its inhabitants—but only as another curiosity, as permanent as the great rocks of the gorge. Even Ms. More thinks that God in His mystery has destined some people to be forever poor, other people to be wealthy and titled. But if the people of Cheddar were properly washed, and dressed in the best cloth, and taught manners, could they not pass for Lords and Ladies?

Working conditions here are little better than slavery, maybe worse. Men and children work twelve to eighteen hours a day, mostly as coal miners, known as colliers, or as farm workers, or laborers in the glass furnaces known as “hell holes.” If these poor people cannot pay their debts, they are thrown into prison. I was told an old woman caught stealing butter was condemned to death. I wonder that these people do not rise up in revolt. Instead they accept poverty as their lot and endure abuse from landowners as if they deserve it. One landowner, a fat man chewing on a rind of bacon, stopped us on the road and wanted to know what we thought we were doing in the village. Miss More told him, politely, to teach the children to read, and their parents, manners. Oh, the man was put out! “You mustn’t do that!” he said. “The people shall get ideas and ape their betters and then they shall be no good for work. And they must work, ladies,” he went on in his rude dialect, “if the factories is to run, and the coal be mined, and the fields tilled. No, you mustn’t teach ’em to read,” he concluded, raising his staff most threateningly. And he said all this while three ragged men with short-handled hoes scrabbled at the poor dirt close by.

Yet these poor people of Cheddar are so ignorant that they fear Miss More, thinking she is come from Satan to seduce them and sell them into slavery. Truly! They know almost nothing of scripture; indeed the only Bible we have seen was propping up a flowerpot.

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