Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Síða 31

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

35
lived experience of the peasant’s miserable existence “close
up,” so to speak. Anticipating Ruskin’s political attack on
this kind of quaint picturesqueness in Modern Painters, IV,
Dickens, then, is using the rhetorical Fern as a device to
work against Stanfield’s elegant landscape sketch; the writer
shifts our attention away from a clipped and orderly English
landscape towards the workers who sustain the land.
Taken against the illustration, Fern’s voice is antiphonal,
striking a note of social realism and Chartist protest against
his social superiors’ reconfiguring his life as some sort of
Wordsworthian or Rouseauean idyll for their own enjoy-
ment. He refuses to permit the aristocratic outsiders to re-
gard him as merely a quaint figure in a picture of traditional
country life:

“Now, gentlemen,” said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and
flushing for an instant in his haggard face, ‘see how your laws are
made to trap and hunt us when we’re brought to this. I tries to
live elsewhere. And I’m a vagabond. To jail with him! I comes
back here. I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks – who
don’t? – a limber branch or two. To jail with him! One of your
keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden,
with a gun. To jail with him! I has a nat’ral angry word with that
man, when I’m free again. To jail with him! I cuts a stick. To jail
with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It’s
twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road. To
jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper – anybody – finds
me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he’s a va-
grant, and a jail-bird known; and jail’s the only home he’s got.” 9
So much for the validity of the construct of the Noble Sav-
age and the inherent virtue of those who live close to Na-
ture, away from the moral corruption of European cities. In
short, in the midst of the Hungry Forties, the Liberal writer
enables an actual peasant to deride the notion of a Roman-

9 Ibid., “Third Quarter,” pages 122-23, immediately after the wood-engraving
dropped into the text.