The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife, 1854–69: A Woman of her Time PDF
Preview The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife, 1854–69: A Woman of her Time
THE DIARY OF A SUFFOLK FARMER'S WIFE, 1854-69 Also by Sheila Hardy PAGES FROM THE PAST STORIES OF EDWARDIAN CHILDREN 1804-THAT WAS THE YEAR ... THE STORY OF ANNE CANDLER ... THE VILLAGE SCHOOL The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer's Wife, 1854-69 A Woman of her Time Sheila Hardy Foreword by Ronald Blythe Consultant Editor Jo Campling M © Sheila Hardy 1992 Foreword © Ronald Blythe 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1992 by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-52409-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21852-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21852-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. For Mitzi Tyler and Tony Copsey, without whom none of this would have been possible Contents List of Plates viii Acknowledgements ix Foreword by Ronald Blythe xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Family Background 6 3 Wife and Mother 25 4 Domestic Life 54 5 Education 79 6 The Social Round 100 7 Travel 123 8 The World Outside 144 9 Religion 170 10 Postscript 195 Elizabeth Cotton's Reading List 197 Bibliography 200 Index 203 vii List of Plates Plates 1-7 are from Elizabeth Cotton's sketch-books, now the property of Mr A. Copsey 1. Brook Street, Ipswich 2. Amor Hall, Washbrook, September 1870 3. Amor Hall farm before renovation in the 1850s 4. StMary's Church, Washbrook, from the vicarage field 5. Washbrook Church, 7 March 1866 6. Evelyn and Blanche in the garden 7. Alice and Bertie Cotton on horseback, 1870 8. The Cotton family some time in the 1870s. Courtesy of the Suffolk Record Office viii Acknowledgements I have received invaluable assistance from many sources during the research for this work. My often rather strange requests for information met with unfailing courtesy and generosity. To each of the following who became involved with me in unravelling the life of Elizabeth Cotton, I offer my very sincere and grateful thanks: Lord Tollemache; Lord Walsingham; M.A. Holding, HM Consul Generat Naples; Dr Patrick Moore CBE FRAS; G.E. Hamilton, Head of Newspaper Library, Colindale; Wallace Morfey; the Clowes family; Neil Clayton; Patricia Burnham; Michael Haxell; Mr and Mrs Peter Haxell (for permission to quote from A Scramble through London and Brighton); Christine Favell (for permission to quote from the Cotton farm ledgers); Louise Abbott; Pat Bryant; Robyn Buchanan; Simon Catterick; F.G. Coniam, Ilfracombe Publicity Department, Devon; Jill Freestone; Brenda Gamlin; Frank Jowett (New Zealand); J.A. Kendrick; Denise Morcom; Richard Pipe; Miss M. Powell, Derbyshire Dales District Council; Sue Rodwell; Richard G.A. Rope; Ipswich Public Library Service; The Kennel Club; The Law Society; the Record Offices of Essex, Norfolk and Lancashire. The Suffolk Record Office deserves a very special mention, as does my long-suffering family. ix Foreword In spite of all the self-exposure, a diarist remains an enigmatic being. 'All' is not told. The imbalance between what happens and what is put down, day after day, is one of the first things one notices when reading a diary. Why put so much about this in, why leave out all reference to that? Historians and novelists are frequently tempted to fill-in the gaps. What is never mentioned becomes so terribly eloquent; what is passed over in a sentence or two remains tantalising. The diary that Elizabeth Cotton kept between 1854 and 1869 is no mere outline, yet there are the usual intriguing spaces. And again one is reminded of those colouring-in books which one had as a child, and in which the pictures remained vague until they were correctly completed. But who best qualifies to write between the lines of somebody else's diary? The social historian? The novelist? In this instance it is a neigh bour in the same locality as the diarist, but from another century, someone who not only knows every twist of the road where Elizabeth Cotton walked, but who is natively familiar with all the twists and turns of her Suffolk thinking. It was this possession of a shared territory that Sheila Hardy saw as her authorisation to interpret in more detail what the wife of a Victorian farmer was often no more than just tentatively mentioning, during those decades which we now like to think of as one of the 'golden ages' of British agriculture. The hungry forties were past, the great 'coming down time' was still way over the horizon. For the Cottons it was a kind of 'bright morning' when the rural middle class could feel stability, if not the wilder forms of prosperity. There was confidence and comfort. Elizabeth was in her mid-thirties, her husband his mid-fifties. Nothing in her diary suggests that they were other than well suited, though not according to our stereotypical view of Victorian marriage. One of the reasons why Sheila Hardy has opened this diary a little wider than Elizabeth intended is to throw light on a scene which we have darkened with our popular myths about the old countryside, and especially about its classic drudge, the farmer's wife. The Suffolk Farmer's Wife is not at all the woman we think we know, the forever toiling, breeding, isolated creature with her old saws and cus toms. She exists, most interestingly and quite unselfconsciously, in a cultivated world between that of what used to be called the 'working farmer' and that of the 'lady', and an intelligent and vital world it was, and a far remove from our dull and stuffy notions of it. In fact, Mrs Herbert Cotton of Amor Hall, Washbrook, a village just outside Ipswich, is far more like the independent-minded countrywoman of today than xi
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