Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel in the 1930s

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 15 [15–30] 5.11.2018 part i Mapping a New Decade: Geographies and Identities C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 16 [15–30] 5.11.2018 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 17 [15–30] 5.11.2018 chapter 1 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel in the 1930s Kristin Bluemel The 1930s were marked by a surge in popular taste for writings about regional and rural Britain. In the midst of this most depressed and thoroughly modern of decades, novels and essays about the regions of England allied with the histories of farming, agriculture, livestock, mining and village life were consumed by readers ranging from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who in a 1928 speech began the 1930s craze for the rural fiction of Mary Webb, to ordinary troops heading out in 1940 with the farming memoir-novels of Adrian Bell in their bags.1 Working far away from the cultural centre of London and the metropolitan influences of modernism, some of the decade’s most successful writers took readers to the cultural peripheries and physical borderlands of the nation to create through their realistic accounts a sense of modern England that competed in the literary marketplace with the modernist Britain celebrated in the elite press. This chapter recovers these regional writers as part of the history of 1930s literature, arguing that they helped extend popular imaginings of the nation beyond any sense of an essential or singular Englishness and thus influenced national identity in distinct ways that perhaps only became clear in the context of the Second World War.2 The most famous and influential of the 1930s regional writers was the Yorkshireman and celebrity author J. B. Priestley, whose 1934 travel documentary English Journey moves beyond any simple, essential Englishness by describing three Englands separated by time as much as by space.3 The first England is ‘the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire’ (372). This ‘Old England’ does not interest Priestley as much as his second, nineteenth-century England that emerges from an extraordinarily long list of particular images from the Midlands and the North. It is the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced 17 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 18 18 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel chapels, Town Halls, Mechanics’ Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses, refined watering places, Pier Pavilions . . . railway stations, slagheaps, and ‘tips’ . . . (373) Priestley’s second England may be ‘cynically devastated’, ‘sooty’ and ‘dismal’ (373), but it spares readers any assertions of regional claims to represent national authenticity. The sheer weight of detail that accumulates in this passage overwhelms as it exposes the superficiality and unreality of any singular vision of England distilled into something called Englishness.4 The ambivalence of Priestley’s position towards the third postwar England of ‘arterial and by-pass roads . . . of giant cinemas and dancehalls and cafés’ (375) represents the awkward position of regional literature in cultural hierarchies of the 1930s. On the one hand, mass culture erases historically significant differences of region – of place and dialect and custom. It is boring in its democratic levelling. On the other hand, its roads and vehicles provide broad access to English and British regions at the very moment its popular mass print culture publications fuelled the public affection for the countryside. Regional literature confronts readers with an instructive paradox: as some writers promoted the remote and unspoiled geographical peripheries of the nation as enduring locations of essential Englishness, other writers discouraged this fantasy through their representations of diverse, specific, physical lands and cultural landscapes. Taken together, the literature of regional writers insists England’s regions do not and cannot compose England or define Englishness. Rather, they give us Englands through a popular literature that contests the cultural dominance of modernist texts. Elite critics were quick to defend highbrow literature against the popular ‘middlebrow literature’ that was identified with Priestley, Webb, and other regional and rural writers.5 Approving of her husband F. R. Leavis’s claim in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture ‘that ‘In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends,’ Q. D. Leavis affirms the existence of a ‘universally acknowledged’ feeling of ‘horror’ at the prospect of ‘being confined in the country, away from “the world”’.6 For Leavis, the city is required for cultivation: for writing, reading, for the enriched English life. Although the Leavises championed D. H. Lawrence’s modernist novels of life in Nottinghamshire, and other modernist critics including T. S. Eliot wrote convincingly about the countryside as an antidote to modernity, 1930s cultural elites did not think of themselves as regional or rural writers. Nor did they imagine regional and rural readers as capable of refined cultural C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 19 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 19 consumption independent of cosmopolitan mediators like themselves. However, Leavis’s distaste for rural living was contested by other members of what she would have recognised as England’s minority culture. For example, Philip Gibbs, literary editor of the Daily Mail, the Daily Chronicle and the Tribune, argues in England Speaks (1935) that the heart of England is the English countryside, its centre is its periphery. He offers readers the consolations of remote, unchanging English natural sites as a remedy for ‘the speed mania . . . the jazzing up of life, the restlessness, the triviality which goes by the name of the Modern Spirit’:7 In this machine age, which is killing some of our character and some of our beauty every day, England is still beautiful where one slips away from the roar of traffic and the blight of industrialism; and in these quiet places where there are still English meadows not yet taped out by the jerry builder, and trees not yet marked for the axe, and old houses with old timbers, there are . . . men and women still living very deep in tradition. (33–4) While the location of Gibbs’s quiet rural place is suspiciously indeterminate, it effectively opposes the energies of all modernity. Simultaneously disappearing, vulnerable, threatened and essential, it is the distillation of ‘the soul of England’ (34). The nation cannot know itself without retreating to the country it destroys. In contrast to both Leavis and Gibbs, Priestley positions himself as a writer too busy to indulge in the leisured habits of literary elites. At the conclusion to English Journey, he insists that ‘I shall never be one of those grand cosmopolitan authors who have to do three chapters in a special village in Southern Spain and then the next three in another special place in the neighbourhood of Vienna’ (389). But if one is not a ‘grand cosmopolitan author’, is one necessarily a regional or ‘minor’ author? When does regional literature become a national literature or a national literature regional? And how does a more nuanced understanding of national–regional relations change our construction of the history of 1930s literature? This chapter can only begin to answer these questions, but in so doing it directs scholarly attention to a set of writers who move beyond generic Englishness to propose instead particular imaginative structures for national identity, memory and culture: Adrian Bell, who wrote about farming in Suffolk in the trilogy made up of Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932); A. G. Street, who wrote about rural life in Wiltshire in autobiographical novels including Farmer’s Glory (1932); Francis Brett Young, who wrote about the West Midlands and Welsh Borderlands in the Mercian novels, including The House under the Water C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 20 20 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel (1932); and Flora Thompson, who wrote about village life in Oxfordshire in her Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy (1939–43).8 Examination of the complex social and cultural negotiations between urban and rural represented in and by these books challenges critical biases against 1930s regional literature and culture that assume and construct a divide between centre and periphery, urban and rural, modernist and middlebrow. After all, even members of the metropolitan avant-garde, including the likes of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf or W. H. Auden, are regional writers. As Raymond Williams points out in ‘Region and class in the novel’, the categorization of certain English novels as ‘regional’ is an ideological effect of cultural centralization. It is only metropolitan bias that turns all regions except London into origins of regional literature.9 This chapter aims to understand and revise the literary values resulting from this bias. It contends that the most interesting and honest of the regional writers, like the most interesting and honest of the metropolitan writers, grapple with the evidence of social change and conflict that characterised English regional life in the 1930s. It also contends that representations of regional specificity, rather than claims of eternal rural verities, are the source of the popular and critical interest of many regional narratives. Literary Geographies As early as 1942, Yorkshire novelist Phyllis Bentley attempted to define the English regional novel.10 In a thin pamphlet produced on wartime economy paper, Bentley asserts that national cultures with ‘considerable diversity’ provide the richest materials for regional novels and names as a source of Britain’s diverse cultures its ‘amazing’ geological diversity (11). Fiction, for Bentley, is a matter of local geography, for ‘wherever the rock changes, the soil changes, the crops and cattle change, the industry changes, and the manners and customs of the people tend to be different too’ (12). Her interest in the impacts of physical materials on production and reception of diverse kinds of regional novels complements her contemporary F. W. Morgan’s interest in the less concrete differences of ‘regional consciousness’. Writing in 1939, Morgan argues that the ‘true regional novel represent[s] “people at work as an essential material; it has become almost the epic of the labourer”’. 11 The priorities of Bentley and Morgan – regional life, labour and rocks (or, more elegantly, cultural and physical geography) – provide one framework guiding the analyses and interpretations that follow. Historians of interwar rural England provide another. They document crises of C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 21 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 21 agriculture intensified by new patterns of global imports from Canada, Australia and Argentina that forced many farmers to abandon their arable fields to grazing and take up dairy farming.12 Many rural labourers and bankrupted aristocrats had already given up their lands and occupations, leaving for cities during the agricultural depressions that characterised much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.13 There are records of ‘unrelieved gloom’ inspired by sightings of derelict farm buildings and untended fields in the areas of England’s collapsing breadbasket, East Anglia and Norfolk,14 and of divided gentry estates in the north of England and Wales.15 In contrast, counties in south-eastern England were growing prosperous by the 1930s. The people who enjoyed this prosperity, resettling the country lands in the interwar years, were urban workers leaving the cities. Though regarded with horror in the preservationist press, energised since 1925 by the creation of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, these newly rural citizens were responsible for bringing new business to regions transformed by motor traffic, rural tourism, the spread of electricity and postwar home building.16 They also stimulated the market for books about rural England. Though few followed the model of Adrian Bell, who left city life to earn his living working a small farm in Suffolk, many settled down within commuting distance of metropolitan areas to take up tennis, cycling, rambling, village dramatic productions and, above all, gardening. Farmer or gardener: those with a literary bent were able to turn their skills with plough, spade and pen to profit, supplementing their earnings from the land with proceeds from their popular books. Two of the most successful of the 1930s farmer-writers were Adrian Bell and A. G. Street.17 Due in part to the shared histories of grain production in their regions of Suffolk and Wiltshire, the scenes, themes and vocabularies of both men’s books are similar as are their narratives of agricultural decline. Bell, in his memoir beginning with Corduroy, and Street in his Farmer’s Glory, record the desperate sinking of grain prices in the twenties, their equally desperate efforts to make farming pay through abandoning arable for animal or ‘dog and stick farming’, and the end of a comfortable pattern of rural social life with the transfer in landownership from traditional farming families to metropolitan newcomers. Despite these parallels, the backgrounds of the authors themselves couldn’t be more different. Bell grew up in London where his father was a successful journalist turned editor and the family’s life in Chelsea was shaped by metropolitan literary and arts culture.18 Corduroy is the story of a year his unnamed, twenty-yearold narrator spends as an apprentice to the successful Suffolk gentleman C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 22 22 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel farmer, Mr Colville, of Farley Hall of Benfield St George (based on Bradford St George). The memoir-novel offers readers the pleasures of a countryside revealed through the eyes of a transplant, of someone who is constantly measuring country life against the routines of city life. This perspective, along with Bell’s talent for making descriptions of everyday Suffolk geography, weather, work and sport exotic in their minute particulars, made Corduroy an immediate bestseller, the purchases of Bell’s book being supported, as was his produce, by London markets.19 Street, on the other hand, was raised on the farm that he takes over as an adult manager and, eventually, leaseholder; the ‘farmer’s glory’ of the title of his memoir refers to his nostalgic vision of his father’s experience as a tenant farmer working the land with independence and financial success in the first decade of the twentieth century. Of these days he recalls, ‘What a secure, pleasant, spacious business my whole life and surroundings seemed. Rooted so firmly in the soil, surely nothing could ever interrupt or upset its even happy tenor. Farmer’s Glory! Farmer’s Glory!’ (56). Part III of his book, ‘The waning of the glory’, begins with Street’s return home from Canada on the Lusitania in the first winter of the First World War in order, he imagines, to enlist. Instead, rejected from the army for flat feet, he takes over the tenancy of his father’s farm. He recalls the mass folly of the immediate postwar years, chiding his own younger self for being ‘as criminally extravagant as any one’ (205). When the crash comes, he, like so many others, found himself ‘searching anywhere and everywhere for a way of escape’ (217). Through outdoor dairying, he stems his financial losses, but regrets that ‘The farm had become a factory’ (242). Street’s Epilogue offers readers a recommendation at the level of national policy for slowing the loss of youth and traditional ways of life from rural England, but the memoir itself ends on a defeatist note. In keeping with other narratives of degeneration, Farmer’s Glory ultimately measures the losses to farming not in financial terms, but in terms of the failures of men as men: Granted, the old system had its faults, but it worked, and produced farmers and labourers such as I have described in this book . . . I am well aware that I am very small beer compared with my father and others of his type, and with very few exceptions the modern young labourer is of little value as compared with his father, either as a workman, a citizen, or as a man. (265) With memories of a time when farming was a negotiation between farmer, soil and weather, Street can only regret that ‘The romance of farming was C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 23 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 23 gone’ (248). National priorities are not regional priorities and the nation has won at the expense of the region. It is this economic context, more than anything else, that relegates Street’s – and Bell’s – narratives to histories of regional, as opposed to national, literature. Bell’s Silver Ley takes up Street’s rhetoric of comparison, repeatedly measuring the meaning of Suffolk life against London life. However, in defiance of the late twentieth-century Englishness thesis, Silver Ley does not construct an urban–rural binary out of these comparisons. The boundaries separating Bell’s farm in Suffolk and his markets in London are fluid and permeable; the people he encounters in both places are similar. In fact, they may be the same people, as Silver Ley details the move in the early to middle twenties of Bell’s mother, father and siblings from London to Suffolk to live on Silver Ley, his 50-acre farm. Silver Ley delights Bell’s urban relatives, even tempting his mother to give up interior design for poultry farming and butter making. In tones of wondering regret at past extravagance that recalls Street’s description of his life in Wiltshire at the same time, Bell writes: From our London days the idea of our owning horses and car plus home farm would have appeared fantastic, but it all came by such slow degrees, that even my father took it for granted. This was a very pleasant hiatus in our lives . . . it was out of touch with the reality of things for us. For my brother a holiday on the eve of life, for my sister the gay whirl of the Willington circle, for me the daydream of being a countryman of leisure. (Silver Ley, 223) Bell’s awareness in 1931, the time of writing, that his life before 1925 was ‘fantastic’ and ‘unreal’, indicates the rate of change that afflicted the life of his family and other Suffolk farmers. When a northern syndicate buys neighbouring Farley Hall, ‘the best farm in Benfield’ goes to ruin and, in Bell’s retrospective vision, heralds the decline that ‘came upon the whole valley in the end’ (Silver Ley, 150). Bell’s portrait of regional economic decline is supported by facts. According to economist Paul Brassley, ‘in Britain average wheat prices fell from 17s 0d per hundred-weight in 1919 to 9s 10d in 1929’ (189). Barley prices in that same period dropped by more than half, as did the price of oats (189). So why did Bell keep farming? One of his answers is that he loves the land – quite literally the working of it, the harrowing and drilling and tilling of the soil – and the associations of freedom and independence the ownership of that soil gives him. But Bell, like Street during these same years, decides to give up on wheat, barley and oats. Although the soils of C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 24 24 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel Suffolk are ideal for this kind of farming, global economic trends push Bell into poultry, cattle and sugar beets. Poultry farming he describes as ‘a soulless affair’ (Cherry Tree, 51). Sugar beets thrive in his heavy soil more than they do in Street’s Wiltshire, but they are a hateful vegetable, and take too much of the field’s top soil with them to the processing factories. Describing this in The Cherry Tree, Bell impressed both professional and kitchen critics with his sustained commitment to geographical specificity and global and national economic realities. That Bell’s regional writing did not come to represent English literature is, perhaps, due to his refusal to conflate specific with general, region with nation, Suffolk with England. Bell’s defiance of contemporary discourses reducing England and Englishness to images of the English countryside is implied by his critique of Hardy’s famous poem, ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’, which suffers, in Bell’s words, from ‘the non-ruralist’s attitude’: that of one who had not gone to the heart of the matter, the attitude of ‘only’. Only a man harrowing, only a man ploughing, only a man guiding a manure-cart through a gate. And if the stranger tried, he would overturn the harrows, knock down the gate-post, and smash the plough. (Corduroy, 29). Though literary historians put Hardy, Street and Bell into the same regional, ruralist tradition, Bell here insists on his literary, if not regional, difference. Hardy may enjoy the ‘legend of his rural understanding’ (Corduroy, 29), but it is Bell, the urban settler, who proudly claims the reputation of regional ruralist, for he shares the field labourer’s knowledge that it is impossible to harrow or plough ‘Half asleep’, as Hardy would have it, in the heavy soil of Suffolk (Corduroy, 29). There is nothing nostalgic about his claim or his pride; Bell really did share in the 1930s the wideawake experience of the farm labourer. His novel suggests what Williams’sCountry and the City overtly states: ‘Most of the natural and working experiences which have been so powerfully celebrated in our rural literature are still directly available’ (301). While there are many other themes that characterise Bell’s narrative as regionalist literature, his attention to the particular labours of men working the particular soils of his region of Suffolk validates not only Williams’s reminder that rural work is real and endures, but also Morgan’s description of regional novels as epics of labour and Bentley’s description of regional literature as indebted to differences of rock and soil. What Bell does for Suffolk and Street for Wiltshire, novelist, poet, playwright and composer Francis Brett Young does for the West Midlands and C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 25 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 25 Welsh Marches. Trained as a physician, but unable after service in East Africa in the First World War to practise medicine, he settled in Worcestershire, supporting himself, his wife and his renovated Craycombe House on his literary earnings. By the 1930s, Young, like Priestley, was a celebrity author, most famous for his Mercian novels. The first of these was the autobiographical The Young Physician (1919), and like those that followed in the series, it is defined by its West Midlands setting. Young’s readers became adept at aligning his fictional place names with real places: North Bromwich is Birmingham, Halesby is Hales Owen, the River Garon is the River Elan, Werewood is the Wyre Forest. Contributing to the Mercian novels’ sustained reality effect is Young’s concentration on the same few decades associated with the development of the Birmingham Corporation Water Department’s Elan Valley reservoirs and aqueduct (1893–1904). In The House under the Water (1932), the creation of the reservoirs themselves provides a memorable backdrop for a story about the rise and fall of the family of Griffith Tregaron. In contrast to Street’s regret over the impact of modernity on rural life, Young’s social worlds inspire more ambivalent emotions about regional identity and development. For example, when the capable, honest Rob Tregaron, oldest son and heir of Griffith Tregaron, is banished by his father from their ancestral Welsh estate, Nant Escob, he is not condemned by paternity or modernity to despair and poverty, but rather elevated to opportunity and riches. Always enamoured of machines and motors, Rob moves to Coventry, finds a business partner, goes into the manufacture of bicycles and then low-cost motor cars, marries the beautiful daughter of his father’s neighbour at Glan Elan, and becomes a millionaire able to save his stepmother and younger sister from penury after his father, as volatile in fortune as in temperament, dies a bankrupt. Young’s plotting of the life of Rob’s younger sister, Phil, the most sympathetic character of the novel, explores the meaning of urban–rural relations from a more conservationist perspective. It is Tregaron’s house, Nant Escob, that will end up under the water, a fate that Tregaron himself does not regret but that Phil deplores. While Tregaron undertakes protracted negotiations with the North Bromwich Corporation for sale of his ancestral lands, in the family for more than seven hundred years, Phil wanders away ‘to the company of her mute fellow-victims, the river, the meadows rosy with sorrel, the patient woods’ (489), suffering under the illusion that ‘the doomed valley . . . seemed aware of the impending destruction’ (489). The family’s removal is a sign of social triumph for C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 26 26 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel Tregaron, who has always felt spurned by the neighbouring Welsh gentry, and now has the satisfaction of leaving them to the noise and disruption of innumerable workers with hammers, drills, dynamite, shunting-engines, excavating machinery, vertical rock-drills, travelling cranes, boilers and pile drivers as they build a dam (634). For Phil, the mechanical processes of filling Birmingham’s water needs deprive her of everything she loves about the Welsh valleys. But Young does not abandon Phil to live as an exiled poor relation on the peripheries of other family members’ plots. Rather, he returns her to Dol Escob, resolving her acute nostalgia in a restorative vision of rural Wales made possible through (or despite) urban intervention: A new earth, if not a new heaven. For the earth that she knew and loved had passed away and the waters lay everywhere – not in the stagnant pools she had often shuddered to imagine, but in two shining lakes. Yes, Nant Escob was gone, and Barradale [the chief engineer] had done his worst, yet the spirit of Forest Fawr, resurgent, inviolable, had perfected, out of man’s disfigurement, a new loveliness surpassing any that conscious man could achieve. (680) Young’s vision of a dialectical relation between natural materials and human forces – of an evolving world that is not purely natural and ancient or purely mechanical and modern and degraded – contradicts some of the most trenchant criticism of regional literature: that it is foolishly sentimental, dangerously nostalgic, and advances an idealised vision of nation that is consistent with the most narrow-minded, isolationist versions of Little Englander conservativism. While elsewhere Young may stray into some of the traps of regional idealisation, in The House under the Water he presents a volatile, often violent natural world that is specific to the region of the Radnor Marches and West Midlands and could never be confused with an essentialised England. Reading Thirties Regional Literature in the Forties Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford was published by Oxford University Press in 1945, a testament to the enduring appeal of regional rural writing well into the war years. This volume brought together Thompson’s three previously published autobiographical novels, Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941) andCandleford Green (1943), all of which treat rural life in Oxfordshire in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Thompson, a self-taught naturalist and social historian C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 27 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 27 whose only formal education was at the parish school in Cottisford, recorded through the lens of memory the customs and habits of the ‘poor people’ she had observed so keenly in the houses and fields of the Oxfordshire hamlet she called Lark Rise, but which she knew as her childhood home of Juniper Hill. Her protagonist, Laura Timmins, is a thinly disguised version of her younger self, Flora Timms; fiction follows fact insofar as Laura, like Flora, is a bookish girl, yearning for time away from domestic demands and opportunity to acquire books other than the romantic ‘novelettes’ or copies of the Bicester Herald that circulate within the hamlet. Her outsider’s perspective offers readers a sympathetic heroine who, like themselves, wants to read, but one who is hurt by social and political policies that long, long ago made poverty and grinding routine the horizon of Lark Rise’s residents. While Thompson insists that ‘Lark Rise must not be thought of as a slum set down in the country’ (19), the hamlet exists in ‘a state of siege’, its ‘chief assailant . . . Want’ (97). It is only ‘for a few weeks in late summer’ that Laura’s ‘flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire’ has ‘real beauty’ (17). Thompson never suggests that Lark Rise’s occasional peaceful vistas represent a timeless English scene or essential vision of Englishness. Rather, she remarks that ploughing and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could remember when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath – common land, which had come under the plough after the passing of the Enclosure Acts. (17) Thompson insists on a history of change in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agricultural practices that implicitly extends to the moment of her writing in the late 1930s and 1940s.20 H. J. Massingham, commissioned to write the Introduction to Lark Rise to Candleford, did Thompson an injustice when he wrote that ‘What Flora Thompson depicts is the utter ruin of a closely knit organic society with a richly interwoven and traditional culture that had defied every change, every aggression, except the one that established the modern world’.21 Massingham’s ideological investment in a vision of an unchanging, defiant England ‘with its roots warmly bedded in the soil’ (9) blinds him to Thompson’s more sophisticated commitments to the complex realities of rural life that have been utterly transformed by centuries of social change. His perspective turns Thompson’s corner of Oxfordshire into a national ideal of Englishness as it separates that corner from the nation’s interrelated urban–rural practices, cultures and human relations. Perhaps the only enduring critical value of Massingham’s Introduction to Lark Rise to C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 28 28 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel Candleford is its date: ‘August 1944’ (15). It tells us that English readers, whether on the home front or front lines of a world war, were still hungry for narratives about rural and regional England.22 While it would have been hard for these readers to ignore the wartime discourse to which Massingham contributed, allying the nation with an idealised English countryside, they might also have felt the claim on their imaginations of Flora Thompson’s quiet catalogues of late nineteenth-century Oxfordshire life. She, like Bell, Street and Young, did not bring a radical voice into the volatile mix of 1930s literary conversation or to the more controlled conversations of the early 1940s. Rather, she exercised social power through her work as a regional writer, modelling for others how they could identify themselves with communities whose distinct histories and cultures could exist within the sometimes terrifying forms of mass society, including not only the cinemas, dance halls and cafés of Priestley’s third England, but the conscriptions, mobilizations, bombings and evacuations of Churchill’s wartime Britain. Notes 1. Stanley Baldwin praised Mary Webb as a neglected genius at a Royal Literary Fund dinner in 1928. See Stanford University Libraries, Mary Webb: Neglected Genius library.stanford.edu; M. Webb, Precious Bane (University of Notre Dame Press, 1980); A. Bell, Corduroy/Silver Ley/The Cherry Tree (London: John Lane/The Bodley Head, 1936). 2. This chapter considers a fraction of the 1930s regional fiction of England by English authors. Literary texts about regions of Scotland, Wales and Ireland that were read by English readers in the 1930s are too distinct and too numerous to be examined here. 3. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, 1934; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 4. M. Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) launched the ‘Englishness’ thesis, which argues that economic decline in late twentieth-century England had its roots in the nineteenth-century propagation by elites of an ideal national character embedded in scenes and experiences of rural, ‘Deep England’. Supporting studies of the period include R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986); G. Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester University Press, 1993); J. Giles and T. Middleton (eds.), Writing Englishness, 1900–1950 (London: Routledge, 1995). See P. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”: English culture and the limits to rural nostalgia, 1850-1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (1997),155–75, for a compelling refutation of the Englishness thesis. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 29 [15–30] 5.11.2018 Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel 29 5. Scholars insist that there is no such thing as middlebrow literature. There is only literature disparaged as middlebrow. See ‘Defining the middlebrow’, Middlebrow Network, middlebrow-network.com; E. Brown and M. Grover (eds.), Middlebrow Literary Culture: the Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); and K. Macdonald (ed.), The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). 6. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932; rpt London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), pp. 201–2. 7. P. Gibbs, ‘Here, then, is something of England . . .’ in JGiles and Middleton, Writing Englishness, 1900–1950, pp. 33–4. 8. A. G. Street, Farmer’s Glory (London: Faber and Faber, 1934); F. Brett Young, The House under the Water (London: Heinemann, 1932); F. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford: a Trilogy (London: Penguin, 1973). 9. R. Williams, ‘Region and class in the novel’ in Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), p. 230. See also Williams’s The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973). For a more in-depth examination of the ideological and institutional factors that contributed to the metropolitan bias that Williams describes, see K. Bluemel and M. McCluskey’s introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: a Critical Intervention (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Dominic Head discusses the tendency to view the interwar rural novel as disconnected from ‘recognized responses to modernity . . . as, in itself, a response to modernity’. See Head, Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 1. 10. P. Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1941). 11. Quoted in K. D. M. Snell, ‘The regional novel: themes for interdisciplinary research’ in Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain ad Ireland, 1800–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–53. 12. See P. Brassley, ‘British farming between the wars’ in P. Brassley, J. Burchardt and L. Thompson (eds.), The English Countryside between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline? (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 187–99. 13. A. Howkins, ‘The discovery of rural England’ in Colls and Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, pp. 64–5. See also A. Howkins The Death of Rural England: a Social History of the Countryside since 1900 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 55–76. 14. A. Howkins, ‘Death and rebirth? English rural society, 1920-1940’ in Brassley et al., The English Countryside between the Wars, p. 10. 15. Howkins, The Death of Rural England, 56–7. See also Trevor Wild, Village England: a Social History of the Countryside (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 115, on the causes of an interwar ‘emphatic retreat of landlordism’. 16. See J. Lowerson, ‘Battles for the countryside’ in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture, and Social Change: a New View of the 1930s (Chichester: Harvester, 1980), pp. 258–65. 17. See D. Head for discussion of Street and Bell in the context of the tradition of the ‘farming novel’. ‘“The everlasting land”: farming and the novel’ in Modernity and the English Rural Novel, pp. 56–91. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/15359553/WORKINGFOLDER/KOHLMANN/9781108474535C01.3D 9:17AM 30 30 [15–30] 5.11.2018 kristin bluemel 18. M. Crosland, ‘Adrian Bell’ in G. M. Johnson (ed.), British Novelists between the Wars (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998),Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 191, p. 18. 19. Bell writes in The Cherry Tree, p. 12, that ‘quite a number of [London’s] citizens had bought my book’, making it possible for him to bridge ‘the otherwise impassable gulf of penury’. 20. R. Williams summarises this history in The Country and the City, p. 39, as one of ‘vigorous, often brutally vigorous, growth’. 21. H. J. Massingham, ‘Introduction’ in Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, p. 10. 22. See V. Holman’s in-depth history of British publishing and reading during the Second World War, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England, 1939–1945 (London: British Library, 2008).