The Poor Man at his Gate

Silas Marner by George Eliot, adapted by Greg Cullen

Theatr Clwyd, 1996

George Eliot

Rural life in England underwent more far-reaching change during the course of the 19th century than it had over the previous thousand. George Eliot saw the coming of the machine age as a very mixed blessing for the kind of community she had grown up in, and on one level Silas Marner is a homage to the qualities of village life that she feared were fast being burned away by the fires of the Industrial Revolution.

“In the days when spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses…” The opening pages of the book make it clear that the setting is already far removed from the year, 1860, in which the author was writing. In fact, the story takes place during the Napoleonic War, though that conflict scarcely impinges on the isolated, insular communities of the countryside. The peace of Raveloe is yet to be disrupted by the fierce social changes soon to be carried in along the new roads, ferried up the canals, or borne on the steel tracks of the penetrating railways.

The land “in that far-off time” was practically all in the hands of the aristocracy or local landowners. By the start of the century the long process of enclosure was reaching completion, with practically all common land now in private hands. It ensured for the farmers a more compact and easily worked area, free from the restrictive rules of communal husbandry.

For small farmers and cottagers, however, enclosure was less advantageous. Many could ill afford to change over to a more viable form of farming on the small parcel of land left to them. The loss of common acreage removed their rights to graze animals or forage for fuels. The poorest yokels tended to be in the south where the slower rate of industrial development provided few alternative occupations to farming. On the other hand, for those who were prepared to embark on a fresh challenge, enclosure spelt opportunity. With more land now under cultivation there was an annually greater yield to be gathered and moved. There were walls to erect and farms to build, drains to dig and roads to be laid. These roads were in time to become one of the reasons for greater integration between villages as, being a regulation forty feet wide and bordered by verges on which sheep or cattle could be driven, they replaced many of the old meandering lanes which linked the scattered communities.

The Squirarchy

The land was divided into mostly large estates – those over a thousand acres – and medium-sized farms. Urban areas covered barely a twentieth of the country at this time, the rest being open fields or forests, which were now beginning to look threadbare from having supplied the navy for so many generations. In these wooded areas hamlets would be spaced a mile or two apart, their size dictated by the amount of arable land available. The yeomanry, traditionally that breed of hardy individuals who had inherited a smallholding from their forebears, were everywhere on the decline.

Many villages had taken root at the gates of a castle or manor house and spread along the walls of the estate in hopeful anticipation of patronage. If the settlement grew too large or unwieldy, the squire would often move the inhabitants into purpose-built quarters further off, either to reclaim an uninterrupted view of his property from his windows, or to make way for more private parkland.

These so-called closed parishes, of which Raveloe is one, were generally small as the local magnate wished neither to share nor sell his land to newcomers. The population was strictly controlled in order to reduce the number of potential recipients of parish relief, and also to keep out troublemakers like fugitives or poachers. Open parishes, in contrast, developed where an area of land was not under the control of any one man. Although numbers here were greater because the policy on admission was more lax, conditions were a lot worse because the housing thrown up to accommodate the labourers was generally jerry-built and unsanitary, with land leased out to be worked by the settlers. The housing in estate villages may have been better, but the freedom allowed the inhabitants was less. Invariably supported by the moral authority of the local parson, the squire exercised strict economic control over a population that looked to him for its daily bread. Many didn’t even provide a pub, and any unruly elements were quickly shown the open road.

Yet both ends of the social spectrum were satisfied with the status quo. Upward mobility from the lower echelons was as much scorned by the villagers as it was regarded with horror by the gentry. Besides their uncomplaining acceptance of subordination to their ‘betters’, the villagers took pride in their own natural gifts, their toil and, in many cases, their musicianship, a skill which even the gentry were not above appreciating. 

Land and Class

Rural society echoed the classic Victorian three-tiered system with a few thousand landed capitalists at the top living off rents and employing an estate manager to oversee the workforce. In the middle were the farmers paying rent for their properties, about a quarter of a million of them, who, like their town-dwelling counterparts, functioned as both employers and manufacturers. At the bottom were the 1.25 million labourers, hired hands, ploughmen, shepherds and farm domestics, a working underclass as poor, ill-educated and subservient as anywhere in the Empire.

But while Britain remained the most powerful country in the world, there was little incentive among the landowners to entertain the thought of social reform. The system obviously worked to their advantage, so why change it? Indeed, at the time Silas Marner is set, it was the squires who benefitted most from keeping the war going, although, as Eliot is careful to point out, their bad husbandry is preparing them for ruin when it ends.

Nevertheless, throughout the century, as the introduction of machinery and James Caird’s modern methods of ‘high farming’ came in, increased yield led to higher profits and land values rose. Improved drainage was helped by government loans, a particular boon among the heavy clay soils of the Midlands. Guano from Peru became (literally) widespread, and steam power aided ploughing, harvesting, mowing and gathering.

The landowners and the farmers reaped many times more than the quantity they sowed. But the labourers saw none of these gains. Toil on the land had always been seen as labour in its noblest form, but an equally venerable tradition stated that he who owned the soil held the reins of power. So long as this thinking persisted, things were destined never to change much for the village dwellers.

Reform and Revenge

Sporadic efforts were made in the 1830s to improve the workers’ lot. During the ‘Swing Riots’ machines were destroyed and ricks burned, but the authorities’ response was swift and brutal. Some protestors were hanged, many more transported. Then, during the 1840s, Radicals took up the Chartists’ complaint that far too much land resided in the hands of the few, and eventually in 1873 a new consensus of the countryside was ordered to refute their arguments. Its findings actually proved the Radicals’ case: four-fifths of UK land was in the hands of a mere 7,000 individuals or families, a quarter of this owned by just 360 people, each of whom held over 10,000 acres. As the century wore on, the tendency was for the size of farms to increase as the smaller farmer was squeezed out or sold up to move to the city. Factory towns sucked in the rural population until by 1860 townies began to outnumber country dwellers for the first time. Prices for homegrown produce fell sharply causing many farmers and landowners to go bust.

In the south, labour continued to be plentiful and cheap, but the factories in the north had drawn many off the land making manpower scarce and expensive. But it was a myth that the encroaching machines made men redundant – in fact, machinery created the need for high levels of manpower to process, package and move the produce. And they also provided work in ancillary industries, to keep the wheels turning. In many villages the blacksmith became a repairer and servicer rather than a manufacturer.

Nevertheless, where the population was large and there was not enough work to go round, wages were low and conditions poor – in Dorset in 1850, for instance, farm labourers received roughly half of what their peers in Lancashire did. But the threat of losing their workforce due to easier travel and better conditions impelled some farmers to increase wages and buy their workers’ loyalty. Around the middle of the century wages rose by about 30%. But such improvements as there were, were mainly brought about by economic forces rather than by the organised mobilisation of the workers, as the condition of their lives precluded much organised activity. Only unusual individuals stood out by actively implementing change. 

The First Labourers’ Union

One of these has been Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and farmer who as early as 1813 succeeded his father-in-law David Dalke as owner of a mill at Lanark, one of the first factories to have set up a model village to house its workforce. His efforts to improve working conditions there contributed to the passing of the Factory Act in 1819. At New Lanark he reduced the length of the working day to ten and a half hours and ensured that the workers were supplied with cheap foodstuffs. He also inaugurated Britain’s first infants’ school on the New Lanark estate.

Another progressive was Canon Girdlestone who, in 1866, helped parishioners in Devon move north to better paid jobs, so incensing local farmers that they retaliated by boycotting his church. Six years later, in George Eliot’s own home county of Warwickshire, Joseph Arch, a Methodist lay preacher, hedger and mower, organised a union and the subsequent strike forced local wages up to 16 shillings a week. In May a congress at Leamington created the first National Agricultural Labourers’ Union which soon had 150,000 members. However, the farmers closed ranks and Union payments to unemployed members crippled the movement. By 1875 membership has dropped to below 60,000. Depression followed, bringing the era of high farming to a close – and simultaneously seeing off the country’s first attempt at organising the rural workforce as a whole.

But by the early 1860s when George Eliot was writing Silas Marner, the golden age of rural village life was already over, and the book stands as a monument encapsulating, for a generation that would never know it, the realities of that life: its noble struggles, its self-reliance, its qualities of stoicism, neighbourliness and fair dealing. Above all she set out to paint a portrait of the basically decent human qualities that had been lost through the Industrial Revolution, and, more radically, to indicate how moral superiority in no way resides with the gentry simply because they are privileged to live behind high walls in large houses.

[click here for a biography of George Eliot]