Milli mála - 2015, Blaðsíða 32

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

36
tic landscape and the sublime in nature, as seen in
panoramic treatments of woods, valleys, mountains – and
even seashores, for his friend the naval veteran Clarkson
Stanfield was a noted Victorian painter of Romantic
seascapes. Fern’s suffering, seen close-up at Lady Bowley’s
banquet, must give her guests a very different interpretation
of the life of the Dorset cottager from that derived from
painterly and nostalgic renditions of English cottages such
as those of Helen Paterson Allingham (1848-1928), who was
coincidentally the illustrator for Hardy’s serial run of the
pastoral novel Far from the Madding Crowd in the 1874
numbers of the Cornhill. The plight of nineteenth-century
agricultural workers was rather the opposite of the bucolic
ideal of Constable’s landscapes such as The Hay Wain
(1821). Seen at a distance in an oil painting that emphasizes
the beauty of the English landscape, the rural cottager
would seem to the uninitiated to be leading a harmonious
and tranquil existence amidst an idealised version of Eng-
lish rural scenes. Seen close up as Fern is seen by Lady
Bowley’s aristocratic dinner guests, the peasant is hardly
quaint, for Fern is a bitter social malcontent who feels him-
self exploited by amateur artists such as those in Stanfield’s
drawing. Will Fern’s radical, anti-landowner sentiments ac-
cord well with a denizen of the region known for gov-
ernmental transportation of the agricultural union-
organizers who became the Tollpuddle Martyrs in 1834.
Their attempts at trade and agricultural unionization seem
relatively benign to us today, as their seditious behaviour
was nothing more than asking members to swear a secret
oath as members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural La-
bourers. In his introduction to the two-volume Penguin edi-
tion of Christmas Books, Michael Slater notes that, since
Dorset had been much in the news in the early 1840s as a
consequence of outbreaks of rick-burning in that county