Rural England in 1857

There is a striking series of photographs of English and Welsh rural life in 1857 which can be found on the blog Rare Historical Photographs at Idyllic vintage photographs capture the rustic rural life in Victorian England, 1857

They are the work of William Morris Grundy, who had taken up photography in 1855 aged 49. Some were used to profuce that popular Victorian pass time of viewing them as stereoscopic images and others were reproduced in a book in 1861.

Grundy’s photographs are similar in date and subject to those from the 1840s and 1850s of life in Sussex about which I wrote in October 2020 in my post Victorian rural life in photographs

As with that series one is looking at the rural world of Thomas Hardy, and at a time, according to the 1851 Census when agriculture was still the largest single employer in the country. These are not just images of that world but, obviously, of something much older. Both sets are, consciously or otherwise, basking in a rural idyll that was to be increasingly under the pressures of economic change and urbanisation alongside the expansion of industry. Within a generation the agricultural depression was to arrive which lasted until the 1920s, if not until after the Decond World War. That was to affect the lives of everyone who lived in the countryside, from landowners to the lowliest farmhand. As with so many popular Victorian paintings of similar themes there is a delight in the landscape and in rural life and, alongside, a sense of its vulnerability in the changing circumstances of the time. This can also be seen, as I suggested above, in the novels of Thomas Hardy and of late Victorian and early twentieth century writers who drew upon their observations of the world in which they had lived and which they sensed was slipping away.