Lark Rise, Flora Thompson [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

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Title: Lark Rise

Author: Thompson, Flora Jane (1876-1947)

Author [introduction]: Massingham, Harold John (1888-1952)

Date of first publication: 1939

Edition used as base for this ebook:

London: Oxford University Press, 1957

[reprint of the 1954 edition, volume 542

of the OUP’s The World’s Classics series.

Thompson’s “Lark Rise to Candleford” trilogy of novels

was first published as a single volume in 1945:

“Lark Rise” is the first novel in the trilogy.]

Date first posted: 27 July 2009

Date last updated: 27 July 2009

Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #360

 

This ebook was produced by:

Andrew Templeton

LARK RISE

Part One of the trilogy “Lark Rise to Candleford”

 

by FLORA THOMPSON

Introduction to the trilogy by

H. J. MASSINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

By absolute values, a true writer can never be other than what he is.

But in our imperfect world his living light will only shine among men if

it appears at precisely the right time. If it does so appear, it is not

merely good luck, because the truth should also possess a

super-sensitive probe (like the woodcock’s bill) for testing the subsoil

of what it works on. This is something very different from what is

called ‘appealing to the popular imagination’. Flora Thompson possesses

the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to

such a degree of quality and beauty that her claims upon posterity can

hardly be questioned. Her lovers guessed it when her three memorial

volumes, Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green, were

published separately; now that they form a trilogy, each part

illuminating and reflecting the others in a delicate interplay, the time

of speculation is over. This wholeness, they will say, is a triune

achievement: a triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that,

being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another

in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography;

and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which

is the author’s ‘message’.

 

Nor will these lovers be deceived by the limitations of her range, her

personal simplicity and humility of spirit and the excellent lowness of

her voice as the narrator of these quiet annals, into withholding from

her the full measure of what is her due. Is that range so restricted?

The trilogy enables us to appreciate for the first time what she has

done both for literature and social history. By the playing of these

soft pipes the hamlet, the village, and the small market town are

reawakened at the very moment when the rich, glowing life and culture of

an immemorial design for living was passing from them, at the precise

point of meeting when the beginnings of what was to be touched the last

lingering evidences of what was departing. Of late years memorial books,

I might almost say by the score, have strained to overhear the few

fading syllables of that country civilization of which the younger

generation of today knows and can know nothing. A few of these have been

of high distinction. I have only to mention the names of George Bourne,

Adrian Bell, Walter Rose, W. R. Mottram, and the author of _How Green

was My Valley_. But none of these authors singly achieved the triple

revelation of the hamlet, the village, and the market town; none, with

the possible exception of the last, has, like Flora Thompson, chronicled

the individual life as an integral part of the group life and as the

more of an individual one for it.

 

Again, by these three books being subdued into sections of one whole,

Laura now emerges into her full selfhood and as the chorus of the

complete drama. Now for the first time Flora Thompson’s master work in

portrait-painting is seen to be herself. But we keep on forgetting that

Laura is her own self, so subtly has our author’s spiritual humility

contributed to the fineness of the self-portrait. She has lost her life

to another and so exquisitely regained it that the personal quality of

Laura, which is the key to the whole and diffuses over it a tranquil

radiance, is never mistaken as other than that of a separate person. As

remote from the present day as Uncle Tom, Queenie, or Dorcas Lane, she

is yet more living even than they. At the same time, she is something

else than the Cranfordian Miss, ‘quaint and old-fashioned’, as another

character calls her, something else than the lover of Nature and of

books, the questing contemplative, the solitary in the Wordsworthian,

quite un-Cranfordian sense. She is the recorder of hamlet, village, and

country town who was of them but detached from them, and whose

observation of their inmates by intimacy by no means clouded precision

of insight and an objective capacity to grasp in a few sentences the

essentials of character. One of the very best things Laura ever did was

to become assistant post-mistress at Candleford Green. The post-office

magnetized the whole village.

 

When George Bourne described Bettesworth and the craftsmen of his

wheelwright’s shop, he made them the vehicle of an immensely valuable

inquiry into social conditions now made obsolete by urban invasion.

Flora Thompson’s method is entirely different. But the result is the

same in both writers. It is the revelation of a local self-acting

society living by a fixed pattern of behaviour and with its roots warmly

bedded in the soil. The pattern was disintegrating and the roots were

loosening, but enough remained for sure inferences to be drawn from it.

Flora Thompson does not reconstruct the shattered fabric like a

historian nor illustrate and analyse it like a sociologist: she

reanimates it.

 

In this tripartite book we distinguish three strata of social and

economic period, cross-hatched by differences of social degree. In terms

of geological time, the lowest stratum is the old order of rural England

surviving rare but intact from a pre-industrial and pre-Enclosure past

almost timeless in its continuity. The middle stratum, particularly

represented in Lark Rise, discloses the old order impoverished, reduced

in status, dispropertied but still clinging to the old values,

loyalties, and domestic stabilities. The top stratum, symbolized in the

row of new villas that began to link up Candleford Green with Candleford

Town, is modern suburbia. This wholly novel class in itself had shed the

older differentiations and possessed no rural background other than the

accident of place. It was the vanguard of the city black-coats and

proletariat, governed by the mass-mind.

 

Nor is the stratification a simple one. The two lower layers are not

only hierarchical in many grades between squire and labourer, but the

upper one of the pair is dyed a different colour from that of the

natural deposit. This is the sombre tint of Victorian moralism, quite

different from the social ethics of the old order to which it was alien.

Puritanism in rural England was never a home-brew; it was always

imported from the town. The topmost layer of the three had and has no

fixed principles; its aim was quantitative imitation and to ‘keep up

appearances’. Mr. Green of Candleford Green, who read Nat Gould and

Marie Corelli because everybody did, considered the expert craftsman as

inferior in status to himself, sitting on a stool and adding up figures.

 

It is clear, then, that Flora Thompson’s simple-seeming chronicles of

life in hamlet, village, and market town are, when regarded as an index

to social change, of great complexity and heavy with revolutionary

meaning. But this you do not notice until you look below the surface.

The surface is the family lives and characters of Laura and her

neighbours at Lark Rise, inhabited by ex-peasants, and the two

Candlefords, where society is more mixed and occupation more varied. But

the surface is transparent, and there are threatening depths of

dislocation and frustration below it. Flora Thompson’s method of

revealing them is a literary one, as was George Eliot’s; that is to say,

by the selective representation of domestic interiors in which living

personages pass their daily lives. The social document is a by-product

of people’s normal activities and intercourse intensely localized, just

as beauty is a by-product of the craftsman’s utility-work for his

neighbours.

 

Thus, the commonest occurrences, the lightest of words, the very

ordinariness of the home-task are pregnant with a dual meaning. This is

the reverse of a photographic method like that of the fashionable

‘mass-observation’ because it looks inward to human character and

outward to changes in environment affecting the whole structure of

society and modifying, even distorting, the way people think and act.

Her art is in fact universalized by its very particularity, its very

confinement to small places and the people Laura knew. It all seems a

placid water-colour of the English school, delicately and reticently

painted in and charmed by the character of Laura herself. But it is not.

What Flora Thompson depicts is the utter ruin of a closely knit organic

society with a richly interwoven and traditional culture that had defied

every change, every aggression, except the one that established the

modern world. It is notable that, though husbandry itself plays little

part in the trilogy, it is the story of the irreparable calamity of the

English fields. In the shell of her concealed art we hear the thunder of

an ocean of change, a change tragic indeed, since nothing has taken and

nothing can take the place of what has gone.

 

On the bottom layer once rested all England. In the perfect economy of a

few deft and happy strokes, Lark Rise reveals it as surviving

principally in two households, those of Queenie, the lacemaker and

bee-mistress, and ‘Old Sally’, whose grandfather, the eggler, had by his

rheumatism to ‘give up giving’. The old open fields community of

co-operative self-help destroyed by the Enclosures is caught in the

words. Old Sally is so closely identified with her house and furniture,

its two-feet-thick walls making a snuggery for the gate-legged table,

the dresser with its pewter and willow-pattern ware and the

grandfather’s clock, that they can no more be prised apart than the

snail from its shell. In remembering the Rise when it was common land,

Sally was carrying in her mind the England of small properties based on

the land, the England whose native land belonged to its own people, not

to a State masquerading as such, not even to the manorial lords who

exacted services, but not from a landless proletariat. Still less to big

business whose latifundia are the modern plan. Sally is

self-supporting peasant England, the bedrock of all, solid as her

furniture, enduring as her walls, the last of the longest of all lines.

 

Moving on to Candleford, we find in Uncle Tom, the cobbler with his

apprentices, the representative of the master-craftsman who did quite