Jayne Shrimpton scours the pages of Lark Rise to Candleford and the social history insights afforded to the last days of late Victorian rural life
Of all the books recounting bygone eras, few are as evocative as Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), originally published as Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943).
Described by Phillip Mallett, introducing the Oxford 2011 edition, as a ‘lightly fictionalised memoir’ of Thompson’s childhood in the poor Oxfordshire hamlet of Juniper Hill during the 1880s, the trilogy offers family historians a detailed portrayal of daily life for our late-Victorian rural ancestors.
A secluded settlement
The author, personified as the book character ‘Laura’, described Juniper Hill (‘Lark Rise’) as a poor hamlet tucked into the north-east corner of Oxfordshire, the surrounding landscape drab fields of brown clay, until spring green shoots ripened into a sea of golden corn.
It comprised some 30 scattered cottages and an inn forming a loose circle surrounded by a track, a network of pathways connecting separate plots or clusters of houses.
The local road intersecting the hamlet led in one direction to the ‘mother village’, Cottisford (re-named Fordlow), 1½ miles away, where Lark Rise residents attended church and school; opposite was the main turnpike road to Oxford, and the market town three miles away where Saturday shopping was done. Lark Rise itself had a small general shop run from the back kitchen of the inn, selling items such as candles, treacle and cheese.
Little traffic passed directly by and – excepting the innkeeper, a comfortably-placed retired farm bailiff, an elderly man who owned and worked an acre of land, and Laura’s own father, a skilled stonemason – Lark Rise was populated by agricultural labourers and their families. It was a traditional farming community whose routine still followed the natural rhythm of the seasons, but by the 1880s theirs was a subsistence existence shaped by rural deprivation.
Simple cottages
A few hamlet houses were old, pre-Enclosure thatched cottages with whitewashed walls and diamond-paned windows, but most were newer box-like stone or brick buildings with blue-slate roofs. Each had just one or two upstairs bedrooms divided by screens or curtains to accommodate parents and children. The downstairs usually comprised only one room, the poorest living spaces being plain, with simple tables, a few chairs
