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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 RISEPart One of the trilogy “Lark Rise to Candleford”
by FLORA THOMPSON
Introduction to the trilogy byH. J. MASSINGHAM
INTRODUCTIONBy 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
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