for   a    fair-haired   child.    Peace    and   quiet,   beauty    and
fruitfulness, prevail everywhere.

The longing of the sophisticated for a simple life, and of
the urbanised for a rural one, had already taken hold.
Against such a strong mental image of peace, contentment,
healthy hard work and honest fare, no evidence to the
Royal Commission about the grinding poverty of the
countryside could make much headway.

Although the bulk of the rural population was very poor
- their average weekly cash wage in 1851 was nine shillings
and seven pence - their lives were made supposedly more
bearable by farmers improving workers various privileges
by upping beer and ‘nutrients’ allowances to two quarts
(four pints) a week. The claim was essentially true if
slightly evasive. Beer was often looked on as an all-round
food, never mind that it offered small comfort from its slim
scope of minerals and vitamins.

Employers often blatantly manipulated the working
lives of their employees; defiance meant dismissal and
there was nothing particularly attractive or stimulating
about rural life. Pleasures and recreations were very few
and  drunkenness was endemic, but this  has to  be
understood in the context of the general impoverishment of
any social life. It required relentless effort just to be able to
pay the rent let alone feed oneself and a family.

As the splendidly named G.J. Monson-Fitzjohn, a
correspondent writing for the Illustrated London News,
noted of the villages of Suffolk and north Essex:

 “Drunkenness  in  these  remote  hamlets  is  a  recreation  for
those whom it has become habitual. Hard workers  have little

else  to attract  them and regularly go  on  periodical  drinking
sprees  even though  they  are scarcely able to  afford to  bring

home enough money with which buy bread with. It gives great
riches to the  brewer of beer. If it  is good  beer then so much
more is his wealth.”