Chapter 9 - Rural Labour in an Age of Industry

Summary

This chapter re-visits Raymond Williams’s imagined journey in ‘Three around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973), to explore the meanings of georgic in a period of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. It suggests that William Cobbett might be read as a writer engaged with the georgic mode and shows how his writings on rural England contain recognisably pastoral and georgic themes, tropes and rhetorical strategies. It examines Cobbett’s attempts to inhabit the rural ideal through his various farming ventures before reading Rural Rides (1830) as a work in the georgic mode, realised through Cobbett’s detailed mapping of the English countryside. This parallels Cottage Economy (1821–1822), an attempt to take georgic away from elite literary culture and down to the level of the cottage. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Cobbett’s later tours of industrial Britain imagine a union between agricultural and industrial workers as the only possibility for political reform.