Such is the navvy’s life at work and at rest.

2.  If we can suppose that our camera is capable of distinguishing centres of industrial activity, then our picture will give us ‘vital’ patches, which stand out against a background of deadness.  This deadness is rural England.

What is the condition of the rural counties of Wessex?  ’Everywhere the cottages are old, and frequently in a state of decay.’  ’Ignorance of the commonest things, needle-work, cooking, and other matters of domestic economy, is ... nearly universally prevalent.’[29] To make both ends meet the wife has abandoned her now useless spinning-wheel and hired herself out to hoe turnips or pick stones.

On the little farms inside the factory districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, on which the country hand-loom weavers eke out a miserable livelihood by cultivating patches of grass land, there is distress more acute than ever was known in a Dorset village.  But in Northumberland, by exception, there is a decent country life.  ’What I saw of the northern peasantry impressed me very strongly in their favour; they are very intelligent, sober, and courteous in their manners....  The education in Northumberland is very good; the people are intelligent and cute, alive to the advantages of knowledge, and eager to acquire it; it is a rare thing to find a grown-up labourer who cannot read and write and who is not capable of keeping his own accounts.’[30] The same sort of thing was said of Northumberland in 1869:  ’If all England had been like Northumberland, this commission ought never to have been issued.’  The Commissioner found that though the labourers worked harder and longer than in the South they were not working against starvation.  They were enjoying a rough plenty, which included fresh milk.  The rest of the family earned sufficient to leave the married woman in her home and no children under twelve were employed in field labour.[31]

Here then in Northumberland there is a decent country life, but elsewhere there is an atmosphere of deadness; and it is this deadness of the countryside which explains the horror that new comers to industrial regions frequently expressed at the prospect of a forcible return to the parish of their origin.

‘I was told,’ says a visitor to Lancashire in 1842, ’that there had been several instances of death by sheer starvation.  On asking why application had not been made to the commissioner of the parish for relief, I was informed that they were persons from agricultural districts who, having committed an act of vagrancy, would be sent to their parishes, and that they had rather endure anything in the hope of some manufacturing revival, than return to the condition of farm labourers from which they had emerged.  This was a fact perfectly new to me, and at the first blush, truly incredible, but I asked the neighbours in two of the instances quoted ... and they not only confirmed the story, but seemed to consider any appearance of scepticism a mark of prejudice or ignorance.’[32]