10 - Clifton Walks: Milkmaids Real and Imaginary

Summary

Since Maria Rollinger declaring in 2007, ‘There is no historical book about milk history in Europe or the near East in any language of this region,’ several books have appeared on the subject, including Deborah Valenze's Milk: A Local and Global History (2011), which reveals the profound culturalisation of something as overtly natural as milk. Beginning with the figure of the milkmaid in Ann Yearsley's ‘Clifton Hill’ (1785) and Henry Kirke White's ‘Clifton Grove’ (1803), this essay proceeds on to more recent representations of Japanese and French farmlabourers –in Tōson Shimazaki's Chikuma River Sketches (1911) and John Berger's Pig Earth (1979)respectively –to offer a meditation not only on the relationship between cows and people, but also between people, domestic animals and wildlife generally. In his prime, when he served as viceroy of India from 1899–1905, Lord Curzon was once lauded for having ‘the complexion of a milkmaid and the stature of Apollo’. In 1918, Elmer McCollum claimed ‘milk-using peoples’ were taller, longer-lived and also ‘more aggressive’. Sadly, such fascistic senti-ments are now resurgent. Using archaeological and genetic research con-necting milk with European civilisation, such as Andrew Curry's for the scientific journal Nature (2013), white supremacists have adopted milk as their symbol. Partly to explore alternative human and non-human relationships, and partly from a desire to counter the triumphalist narra-tive of milk as a catalyst of Western civilisation, I will communicate how economic exploitation and animal suffering have gone hand in hand with the modernisation of British dairy farming.

‘Clifton Hill’ concludes Poems, on Several Occasions (1785), the book in which Hannah More first brought Yearsley to public attention as ‘a milk-woman’ and ‘Poetess’. Taking advantage of the eighteenth-century fad for natural genius, she managed to secure almost a thousand subscribers to support her discovery, ensuring an enthusiastic reception of the volume. The first edition made £350, or more than £50,000 in today's terms. The lifelong altercation that resulted between the two women as a consequence of More's decision to allocate to her only the interest drawn from theearnings –an annual allowance of £ 18 –was understandable, as Yearsley doubtless wanted to liberate herself from dairying,11 perhaps the most arduous form of women's agricul-tural work in the eighteenth century.