News From Nowhere, Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance

“No, no,” said he, “it hasn’t gone that way.  On the contrary, there has been but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns.  Their suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the general country, and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres: but there are the towns still with their streets and squares and market-places; so that it is by means of these smaller towns that we of to-day can get some kind of idea of what the towns of the older world were like;—I mean to say at their best.”

“Take Oxford, for instance,” said I.

“Yes,” said he, “I suppose Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth century.  At present it has the great interest of still preserving a great mass of pre-commercial building, and is a very beautiful place, yet there are many towns which have become scarcely less beautiful.”

Said I: “In passing, may I ask if it is still a place of learning?”

“Still?” said he, smiling.  “Well, it has reverted to some of its best traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its nineteenth-century position.  It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past.  Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial.  They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise.  The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a medi?val baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, the bores of society.  They were laughed at, despised—and paid.  Which last was what they aimed at.”

Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgments.  Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that.  But I must admit that they were mostly prigs, and that they were commercial.  I said aloud, though more to myself than to Hammond, “Well, how could they be better than the age that made them?”

“True,” he said, “but their pretensions were higher.”

“Were they?” said I, smiling.

“You drive me from corner to corner,” said he, smiling in turn.  “Let me say at least that they were a poor sequence to the aspirations of Oxford of ‘the barbarous Middle Ages.’”

“Yes, that will do,” said I.

“Also,” said Hammond, “what I have been saying of them is true in the main.  But ask on!”

I said: “We have heard about London and the manufacturing districts and the ordinary towns: how about the villages?”

Said Hammond: “You must know that toward the end of the nineteenth century the villages were almost destroyed, unless where they became mere adjuncts to the manufacturing districts, or formed a sort of minor manufacturing districts themselves.  Houses were allowed to fall into decay and actual ruin; trees were cut down for the sake of the few shillings which the poor sticks would fetch; the building became inexpressibly mean and hideous.  Labour was scarce; but wages fell nevertheless.  All the small country arts of life which once added to the little pleasures of country people were lost.  The country produce which passed through the hands of the husbandmen never got so far as their mouths.  Incredible shabbiness and niggardly pinching reigned over the fields and acres which, in spite of the rude and careless husbandry of the times, were so kind and bountiful.  Had you any inkling of all this?”

“I have heard that it was so,” said I “but what followed?”

“The change,” said Hammond, “which in these matters took place very early in our epoch, was most strangely rapid.  People flocked into the country villages, and, so to say, flung themselves upon the freed land like a wild beast upon his prey; and in a very little time the villages of England were more populous than they had been since the fourteenth century, and were still growing fast.  Of course, this invasion of the country was awkward to deal with, and would have created much misery, if the folk had still been under the bondage of class monopoly.  But as it was, things soon righted themselves.  People found out what they were fit for, and gave up attempting to push themselves into occupations in which they must needs fail.  The town invaded the country; but the invaders, like the warlike invaders of early days, yielded to the influence of their surroundings, and became country people; and in their turn, as they became more numerous than the townsmen, influenced them also; so that the difference