‘“The Riddle of this Painful Earth”: Late Victorian Literature and Archaeology During the Great Agricultural Depression’

Abstract

In 1888 the Reverend Monro Gibson, writing for The Sunday at Home, likened the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century to a cloud that hung over the country:"Depression, depression, depression!" How sadly familiar the word has been for many years. It is not an unfamiliar word at any time, but lately it almost seems as if it had come, not to visit, but to stay. The depression in agriculture and commerce has been so long continued, that it is almost a weariness to speak of it. And though we may take a hopeful view of the outlook, with the expectation that the clouds may roll away, and the sun appear, there still remain burdens sufficient to weigh heavily on those who are thoughtful enough to vex themselves with "the riddle of this painful earth." (5) An era of change and uncertainty, the agricultural depression introduced new farming methods and alternative ways of thinking about the landscape. At the same time, the rise of archaeology as a science encouraged wider recognition of the importance of the land as a preserve of past human activity. The farmland of the counties forming historical Wessex concealed archaeological evidence of Iron Age and Roman farming communities -signifying not only the emergence of civilisation in Britain, but a tradition of working the land that had been passed down through generations to the nineteenth century. The writing of Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, who were both born in Wessex counties, 1 is rooted in this formative time for agriculture and archaeology; in chronicling emergent understandings of the soil both authors sought to address "the riddle of this painful earth."There are affinities between the gradual development of nineteenth-century archaeology as a discipline and the understanding and practice of agriculture over time. These can be seen best in Hardy's and Jefferies's fiction and non-fiction. Andrew Radford has explored the relation between the experience of rural landscapes and the developing knowledge of the human past, and has discussed the imaginative significance of contemplating past human activity in agricultural landscapes. In his discussion of the work of Hardy and Jefferies, Radford concludes that the nineteenthcentury imagination, dislodged by social revolution, could not be sufficiently sustained by a human past which was ultimately remote and inaccessible (55). Roger Ebbatson has considered ways in which Hardy's and Jefferies's phenomenological experiences of place might be better understood in the context of Heideggerean theory, and how both authors innovatively employ agricultural technology in their representations of landscape and nature ("Sensations of Earth; "Landscape and Machine"). Other research has identified the nineteenth-century difficulty of perceiving continuity between past and present human societies due to the dissolution of "the Georgic vision of nature [. . .] [in] an era of rapid rural and agricultural change" (Parker 32). Yet despite such attempts to align the mind with the land's own past, the potential for the...