cottage life.
what a mighty space lies between the palace and the cottage in this country! ay, what a mighty space between the mansion of the private gentleman and the hut of the labourer on his estate! to enter the one: to see its stateliness and extent; all its offices, outbuildings, gardens, greenhouses, hothouses; its extensive fruit-walls, and the people labouring to furnish the table simply with fruit, vegetables, and flowers; its coach-houses, harness-houses, stables, and all the steeds, draught-horses, and saddle-horses, hunters, and ladies’ pads, ponies for ladies’ airing-carriages, and ponies for children; and all the grooms and attendants thereon; to see the waters for fish, the woods for game, the elegant dairy for the supply of milk and cream, curds and butter, and the dairymaids and managers belonging to them;—and then, to enter the house itself, and see all its different suites of apartments, drawing-rooms, boudoirs, sleeping-rooms, dining and breakfast rooms; its steward’s, housekeeper’s and butler’s rooms; its ample kitchens and larders, with their stores of provisions, fresh and dried; its[403] stores of costly plate, porcelain and crockery apparatus of a hundred kinds; its cellars of wine and strong beer; its stores of linen; its library of books; its collections of paintings, engravings, and statuary; the jewels, musical instruments, and expensive and interminable nick-knackery of the ladies; the guns and dogs; the cross-bows, long-bows, nets, and other implements of amusement of the gentlemen; all the rich carpeting and fittings-up of day-rooms, and night-rooms, with every contrivance and luxury which a most ingenious and luxurious age can furnish; and all the troops of servants, male and female, having their own exclusive offices, to wait upon the person of lady or gentleman, upon table, or carriage, or upon some one ministration of pleasure or necessity: i say, to see all this, and then to enter the cottage of a labourer, we must certainly think that one has too much for the insurance of comfort, or the other must have extremely too little. if the peasant can be satisfied with his establishment, and the gentleman could not tell how to live without his, one would be almost persuaded that they could not be of the same class of animals. knowing, however, that they are of the same species, it only shews of what elastic stuff human nature is made; into what a nutshell it can compress its cravings, and how immensely it can expand itself when the pressure of necessity is withdrawn. i am not going here to moot the old question of whereabout happiness lies in this strange disparity of circumstance; it, no doubt, lies somewhere between the extremes. it certainly cannot be created by external superfluities. they lay open their possessors to the exercise of despotic power; to the corruptions of pride and luxury; to false taste, frivolous pursuits, and the diffusion of the attention over so many objects as to prevent the heart from settling firmly on any. they have a tendency to weaken the domestic attachments, and the love of solid pursuits. on the other hand, the pressure of poverty and ignorance certainly can, and too often does, lie so heavily as to destroy the relish of life’s enjoyments in the cottager. yet happiness is a fireside thing; and the simplicity of cottage life, the fewness of its objects, and the strong sympathies awakened by its trials and sufferings, tend to condense the affections, and to strike deep the roots of happiness in the sacred soil of consanguinity. when wealth is accompanied by a desire to do good, it is a glorious and a happy destiny; when lowly life is virtuous,[404] easy, and enlightened, it is a happy destiny too—for it is full of the strong zest of existence, and strong affections. but this is not my present subject.
when we go into the cottage of the working man, how forcibly are we struck with the difference between his mode of life and our own. there is his tenement of, at most, one or two rooms. his naked walls; bare brick, stone or mud floor, as it may be: a few wooden, or rush-bottomed chairs; a deal, or old oak table; a simple fireplace, with its oven beside it, or, in many parts of the kingdom, no other fireplace than the hearth; a few pots and pans—and you have his whole abode, goods and chattels. he comes home weary from his out-door work, having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree, and seats himself for a few hours with his wife and children, then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again before daylight, if it be winter. he has no one to make a fire in his dressing-room, to lay out his clothes, to assist him in his toilet; he flings on his patched garments, washes his face in a wooden or earthen dish at the door; blows up the fire, often gets ready his own breakfast, and is gone.
such is the routine of his life, from week to week and year to year; sundays, and a few holidays, are white days in his calendar. on them he shaves, and puts on a clean shirt and better coat, drawn from that old chest which contains the whole wardrobe of himself and children; his wife has generally some separate drawer or bandbox, in which to stow her lighter and more fragile gear. then he walks round his little garden, if he have it; goes with his wife and children to church or meeting; to sit with a neighbour, or have a neighbour look in upon him. there he sits, his children upon his knee, and tells them how his father used to talk to him.
this is cottage life in its best estate; in its unsophisticated and unpauperised condition. he has no carriages, no horses, no cards of invitation, or of admittance to places of amusement; none of the luxuries, fascinations, or embellishments of life belong to him. it is existence shorn of all its spreading and flowering branches, but not pared to the quick. this is supposing the father of the family is sober and industrious;—that he is[405] neither a pot-house haunter, a gambler at the cockpit, a boxer, a dog-fighter, a poacher, an idle, rackety and demoralized fellow, as thousands are. this is supposing that he brings home his week’s wages, and puts them into the hands of his wife, as their best guardian and distributer;—saying,—“here, my lass, this is all that i have earned; thou must lay it out for the best; i have enough to do to win it.”
and what are these wages, out of which to maintain his family, aided by the lesser earnings of his wife, by taking in washing, helping in harvest-fields, charring in more affluent people’s houses, and so on, and the earnings of the children in similar ways, or in some neighbouring factory? his own probably amount to nine, or, at most, twelve shillings, and if his family be large, and there are several workers among them, the whole united earnings may reach twenty shillings per week; a sum which will hardly find other men wherewith to pay toll-bars, or purchase gunpowder; a sum which we throw away repeatedly on some bauble; and yet, on this will a whole family maintain life and credit for a week, ay, and on much less too. in this little hut, which we should hardly think would do for a cowshed or a hayloft, and to which the stables of many gentlemen are real palaces, is the poor man packed with all his kindred lives, interests, and affections: and so he carries on the warfare of humanity, till he, who is no respecter of persons, calls him to stand, side by side, before his throne with the rich man who “has fared sumptuously every day.”
such are “the short and simple annals” of thousands and tens of thousands in these kingdoms; and yet what fine strapping young fellows spring up in these little cabins, men who have tilled the soil of england and wielded at home her mechanic tools, and borne her arms abroad, till their industry and genius, under the direction of higher minds, have raised her to her present pitch of eminence; and what sweet faces and lovely forms issue thence to sunday worship, to village feast and dance; or are seen by the evening passer-by in the light of the ingle, amid the family group, making some smoky-raftered hut a little temple of rare beauty, and of filial or sisterly affections. i often thank god that the poor have their objects of admiration and attraction; their domestic affections and their family ties, out of which spring a thousand[406] simple and substantial pleasures; that beauty and ability are not the exclusive growth of hall and palace; and that, in this country at least, the hand of arbitrary power dare seldom enter this charmed circle, and tear asunder husband from wife, parent from children, brother from sister, as it does in the lands of slavery. yet our new poor laws have aimed a deadly blow at this blessed security; and, till the sound feeling of the nation shall have again disarmed them of this fearful authority, every poor man’s family is liable, on the occurrence of some chance stroke of destitution, to have to their misfortune, bitter enough in itself, added the tenfold aggravation of being torn asunder, and immured in the separate wards of a poverty prison. the very supposition is horrible; and, if this system, this iron and indiscriminating system,—a blind tyranny, knowing no difference between accidental misfortune and habitual idleness, between worthy poverty and audacious imposition, between misfortune and crime,—be the product of philanthropy, may philanthropy be sunk to the bottom of the sea!
but the cottage life i have been speaking of, is that of the better class of cottagers; the sober and industrious peasantry: but how far short of this condition is that of millions in this empire! to say nothing of irish cabins, the examples of what a state of destitution, misery, and squalor men may sink into; how much below this is the comfort of a highland hut? what a contrast is there often between the cottage of an english labourer, and the steading of a highland farmer. there it stands, in a deep glen, between high, rocky mountains. his farm is a wild sheep-track among the hills. wheat, he grows none, for it is too cold and weeping a climate. he has a little patch of oats for crowdie and oatcake; potatoes he has, if the torrent has not risen during sudden rains so high in the glen as to sweep his crop away. he has contrived a little stock of hay for his cows, but where it can have grown you cannot conceive, till some day, as you see a woman or a boy herding the cattle amongst the patches of cultivation—for there are no fences between the grass and arable land—you find one or the other cutting the longer grass from the boggy waste with a sickle, and drying it often in little sheaves as our farmers dry corn. but the house itself;—it is a little, low, long building of mud, or rough stones; the chimney composed of four short poles[407] wrapped round with hay-bands; a flat stone laid upon it to prevent the smoke being driven down into the hut by the tempestuous winds from the hills; and another stone laid upon that, to keep it from being blown away. the roof is thatched with bracken, with the roots outermost; or often the same roof is a patchwork of bracken, ling, broom, and turf. a little window of perhaps one pane of thick glass, or of four of oiled paper. the door, which reaches to the eaves, is so low that you must stoop to enter; and the smoke is pouring out of it faster than it ascends from the chimney. a few goats are, most likely, lying or standing about the door. you enter, and as soon as you can discern anything through the eternal cloud of smoke, you most probably find yourself in a crowd. the fire of peat lies in the centre of the hut, surrounded by a few stones; wooden benches are nailed on one side against the wall, and the other is partitioned off like a large wooden cupboard, with sliding doors or curtains, for the family bed, as you find all over scotland, and even in northumberland. the pigs are running about the floor; hens are roosting over your head; the cows are lowing in, what we should call, the parlour; nine or ten children, or weans, as they call them, and a callant, or boy, who teaches the weans, and the father and mother, and very probably their father and mother, or one of them, in extreme age, are fixing their eyes on the stranger.
in the summer of 1836, mrs. howitt and myself passed the night in such a dwelling, and a slight notice of the place may present, to many of our readers, a new view of cottage life. it was in rosshire, some thirty or forty miles north-west of inverness, at a spot called the comrie, lying between loch echilty and loch luichart. a wild, and yet most beautiful spot it was,—a little strath opening itself out between the wooded mountains which surround loch echilty, and the bare stony hills in the direction of strath conan. we came upon it after wandering through the delicious fairyland of birch woods that clothe that loch in the very romance of picturesque beauty, springing up amongst the wildest chaos of crags, here hanging over the water, and here surrounding the ruinous blackness of some solitary hut, that, but for children playing before it, would appear to have been tenantless for years. a stern defile guarded by vast masses of projecting rocks, by places[408] clothed with the richest drapery of crimson heather, by places naked and lividly grey, and height above height still scattered with climbing birch trees, brought us to a little nameless loch hidden in the woods, girt with a dense margin of reeds, and covered with the most magnificent display of white water-lilies, and then appeared two of those little huts in this highland solitude. the evening was rapidly sinking into night, and we were uncertain how far it was to the next inn. two women appeared at the door of one of the huts, and rather startled us with the information, that the nearest inn in the way we proposed to go, was distant five-and-twenty miles! that another mile brought us to the ferry over the conan, where the carriage-road ceased, and all beyond was mountain and moorland waste. we seemed, as it were, to be on the very verge of civilization; and there appeared to be nothing for us but to retrace our way for some miles, or to take up our lodging in this house.
weary as we were, this appeared the less objectionable alternative, and we accepted the offer which the elder woman made us. the moment we did so, the poor woman seemed struck with the rashness of her act. “what shall i do for the like of you? what shall i find for the like of you?” we assured her we should not be very fastidious guests, and in we went. it was such a hut as i have just described. the fire lay on a hearth of stones, with a few large stones built up against the mud wall to prevent the house from being burnt. the woman’s husband, a farmer, was gone into morayshire with lambs; a hired shepherd sat on the side of the partitioned bed, such as i have already described; two fine sheep-dogs lay before the fire, and a troop of barelegged and kilted boys came running in from some distant school. they were macgregors, having come hither from dumbartonshire, and could, fortunately for us, speak english. we sate on a bench in the ingle, and all these little macgregors, grigor macgregor, peter and duncan, and the rest, squatted on the mud-floor, and alternately watched us and their eldest sister, a fine barelegged lassie of eighteen, who was busy baking oatcakes for us. it was a hot post both for herself and for us. she put on peats till the hut was like an oven, and the smoke made our eyes smart almost past endurance. yet we watched the progress of her operation with great interest,[409] as she made a paste of oatmeal and water, rolled it out in cakes, cut it into segments, baked them on an iron girdle over the fire, and then reared them before the glowing peats to make them crisp. this done, she found us some tea, and that was our supper. they had two or three cows, but their milk was already in the process of being converted into cheese; the potatoes and the oats of the last crop were exhausted, and the wet season had prevented the ripening of the present. “there was,” said our hostess, “a great cry in the country for food!” our fatigue, and this announcement, induced us to think we fared well. they made us a comfortable bed in the spence, where we found four gaelic bibles, and the history of robinson crusoe! early in the morning we pursued our way; but ere we took our leave, the poor woman came in from fetching up her cows, her clothes wet to the very knees. when we expressed our surprise—“o,” said she, “that is what we are used to every day of our lives. while you have been in your bed, the herdboy has three times gone round the corn-fields with his dogs, to chase away the stags and roes into the woods. the last thing every night, while the corn is growing in the field, he goes round—once again at midnight, and then at the earliest dawn of day. every night it must be done, or a green blade would not be left. if you went in the gloaming with the man into the wood, sir, you would see twenty stags as big as our cows. o it’s an awful place for wild beasts—foxes and badgers, and serpents! did you ever see a serpent, ma’am? sometimes in a morning they rear themselves up in a narrow path, and hiss at me bitterly.” as the poor woman spoke, we stood at the door of her little tenement, and saw the heavy dew lie glittering on the grass all round; and the primitive cheese-press, consisting of a pole, one end of which was thrust into a crevice of a rock, and the other weighted with a huge stone; and around us were the heathy mountains and the woods; the mists and clouds clinging to the sides of wild hills, or rolling away before the breeze of morning; and the sound of the neighbouring torrent alone disturbing the deep solitude. we could not avoid feeling how far was all this from the cottage-life of england. we gave the poor woman what we thought a fitting return for her hospitality, and left her overwhelmed with a grateful astonishment, which shewed what was there the real value of money.
[410]
this is a scene in the scale of comfort far below the general run of labourers’ houses in england; but yet how far, infinitely far lower, do many of our working people’s abodes sink. what dens have we in manufacturing towns! what little, filthy, dismal, yet high-rented dens! what cabins do some of our colliers and miners inhabit! what noisome, amphibious abodes abound in our fishing villages, such as crabbe has painted! what places have i seen in different parts of england, which everywhere obtain the name of rookeries,—huge piles built for some purpose which has not answered; or some deserted hall, let off in little tenements; the windows broken, and stopped with old rags and hats; the ground all round trodden down, covered with ash-heaps; a few stunted bushes, or gooseberry trees, where once had been a garden, displaying the ragged and tattered wash of the indigence of indigence: altogether exhibiting such an air of poverty as impoverishes one’s very spirit, and fills it with a nameless feeling of disgust and despondence for days after. such a place i particularly recollect seeing somewhere between netherby and gretna-green; and, observing an old man “daundering about,” as he called it, as without hope and object, i asked him how this place came to look so forlorn—“o,” said he, “we once could run our cows on the waste, and did very well, but that is taken away. sir james asked the steward what the poor people must do, ‘o, they will all hooly[25] away,’ said he; but where are we to hooly to?”
[25] slip quietly away. a word often found in the old border ballads, as “then hooly, hooly up she rose,” etc.
ah! cottage life! there is much more hidden under that name than ever inspired the wish to build cottages ornées, or to inhabit them. there is a vast mass of human interests within its circle, of which the world takes little note. the loves and hopes; the trials and struggles; the sufferings, deaths, and burials; the festivities and religious confraternities; the indignities that fret, and the necessities that compel, to action and union our simple brethren and sisters. how little is truly known; how much is consequently misjudged; how great is the indifference concerning them in those who have the power to work miracles of love and happiness amongst them, and must one day stand with them at the[411] footstool of our common father, who will demand of his children how each has loved his brethren.
let us turn our eyes, however, a moment from the dark side to the light one. there is not a more beautiful sight in the world than that of our english cottages, in those parts of the country where the violent changes of the times have not been so sensibly felt. where manufactures have not introduced their red, staring, bald brick-houses, and what is worse, their beershops and demoralization: where, in fact, a more primitive simplicity remains. there, on the edges of the forests, in quiet hamlets and sweet woody valleys, the little grey-thatched cottages, with their gardens and old orchards, their rows of beehives, and their porches clustered with jasmines and roses, stand:—
hundreds of huts
all hidden in a sylvan gloom,—some perched
on verdant slopes from the low coppice cleared;
some in deep dingles, secret as the nest
of robin redbreast, built amongst the roots
of pine, on whose tall top the throstle sings.
hundreds of huts, yet all apart, and felt
far from each other; ’mid the multitude
of intervening stems; each glen or glade
by its own self a perfect solitude,
hushed, but not mute.
john wilson.
there they stand, and give one a poetical idea of peace and happiness which is inexpressible. well may they be the admiration of foreigners. in many of the southern counties, but i think nowhere more than in hampshire, do the cottages realize, in my view, every conception that our poets have given us of them. one does, no doubt, when looking on their quiet beauty, endow them with a repose and exemption from mortal sufferings that can belong to no human dwelling; and professor wilson, in his poem called “an evening in furness abbey,” which appeared in blackwood’s magazine, september, 1829,—a poem flushed all over with the violet hues of poetry, and overflowing with tenderness and grace, gives one this very delightful expression of a thought which has occurred to many of us—
the day goes by
on which our soul’s beloved dies! the day[412]
on which the body of the dead is stretched
by hands that decked it when alive; the day
on which the dead is shrouded; and the day
of burial—one and all go by! the grave
grows green ere long; the churchyard seems a place
of pleasant rest, and all the cottages,
that keep for ever sending funerals
within its gates, look cheerful every one,
as if the dwellers therein never died,
and this earth slumbered in perpetual peace.
but sobering down by such sad, yet sweet thoughts as these, our poetical fancies of cottage life, and bringing them within the range of human trouble and suffering, still these rustic abodes must inspire us with ideas of a peace and purity of life, in most soothing contrast with the hurry and immorality of cities. blessings be on them wherever they stand, in woodland valleys, or on open heaths, throughout fair england; and may growing knowledge bring growth of happiness, widening the capacity of enjoyment without touching the simplicity of feeling and the strength of principle. well may the weary wayfarer—
lean on such humble gate and think the while,
o! that for me some home like this would smile;
some cottage home to yield my aged form,
health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.
there are thousands of them inhabited by woodmen, labourers, or keepers, that are fit dwellings for the truest poet that ever lived; and it is the ideal of these picturesque and peace-breathing english cottages that has given origin to some of the sweetest paradises in the world—the cottages of the wealthy and the tasteful. what most lovely creations of this description now abound in the finest parts of england, with their delicious shrubberies, velvet lawns, hidden walks, and rustic garden-huts; their little paddocks lying amid woods, and skirted with waters; spots breathing the odour of dewy flowers, and containing in small space all the elegance and the country enjoyments of life.
happiness, it is true, is not to be dragged into such places; but what places they are for the genuine lover of the country to invite her into! the very feeling of the cumbrous pomp and circumstance of aristocratic establishments in this country, makes[413] one think of such sweet hermitages with a sense of relief and congratulation. what more charming abode has the wide earth for a spirit soothing itself with the pleasures of literature and the consolation of genuine religion, far from the wranglings pf political life, than such a one as the cottage, formerly that of mrs. southey, at buckland, on the border of the new forest; of miss mitford, at three-mile-cross; or that of wordsworth at rydal? but we must quit these earthly paradises to speak of other things.
