The English Village; A Literary Study, 1750-1850 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III THE CHANGING VILLAGE AND THE NATIONAL LIFE Up to the last two centuries there is not much in English literature to direct attention to the complex and intricate organization of the mediaeval village. Chaucer, the author of Piers Plowman, Sir Thomas More, here and there a renaissance playwright, in a few brief poems Robert Herrick, --hardly a dozen writers before the 18th century deal with the every day affairs of rural England. It is only when, with the growing democratization of letters, the "lower part of mankind" win a recognized right to literary treatment along with princes and nobles, that we are led to an examination of that system which produced the sturdy, shrewd, self-reliant, independent, contented peasantry in which England so long implicitly believed as underlying her national prosperity. At the opening of the 18th century English literature possessed rustics in plenty, both English and Arcadian, but it had no such studies of a rural society as The Deserted Village of Goldsmith, or The Village of Crabbe. The appearance of the village theme in English letters is a part of a complex intellectual and social movement, in some degree independent of the immediate events of English life. Yet it can hardly be accidental that the age in which this theme assumed a distinct and permanent place in literature was also the age of transformation within the village itself. At the beginning of the century the village was still essentially what it had been throughout the middle ages, a cooperative community; at the close of the century it had very generally assumed the competitive character of the village society of today. In investigating the relation of this great event in village history to the new literature of the village, the first step is to ...