Country life -- England; England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
They stroll, the lonely Crusoes of the fields--
as Bloomfield has beautifully described them from his own experience.
They help to glean, to gather potatoes, to pop beans into holes in
dibbling time, to pick hops, to gather up apples for the cider-mill, to
gather mushrooms and blackberries for market, to herd flocks of geese,
or young turkeys, or lambs at weaning time; they even help to drive
sheep to market, or to the wash at shearing time; they can go to the
town with a huge pair of clouted ancle-boots to be mended, as you may
see them trudging along over the moors, or along the footpath of the
fields, with the strings of the boots tied together, and slung over the
shoulder--one boot behind and the other before; and then they are very
useful to lift and carry about the farm-yard, to shred turnips, or
beet-root--to hold a sack open--to bring in wood for the fire, or to
rear turfs for drying on the moors, as the man cuts them with his paring
shovel, or to rear peat-bricks for drying. They are mighty useful
animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they
successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the
team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. That is the growing up
of a farm-servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is
learning nothing else,--he is growing up into a tall, long,
smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ancle-booted fellow, with a gait as
graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to
service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a
creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives. The mechanic sees
his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clodhopper, the
chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name,
in whatever district, he may be called, is every where the same; he sees
no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his
master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he
has no interest in it. He knows there is such a place as the next town,
for he goes there to statutes, and to the fair; and he has heard of
Lunnon, and the French, and Buonaparte, and of late years of America,
and he has some dreamy notion that he should like to go there if he
could raise the wind, and thought he could find the way--and that is all
that he knows of the globe and its concerns, beyond his own fields. The
mechanic has his library, and he reads, and finds that he has a mind,
and a hundred tastes and pleasures that he never dreamed of before; the
clodhopper has no library, and if he had, books in his present state
would be to him only so many things set on end upon shelves. He is as
much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping,
can make him, and he is nothing more. Just see the daily course of his
life. Harvest-time is the jubilee of his year. It is a time of incessant
and hurrying occupation--but that is a benefit to him--it is an
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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