Marrin's Bookshop

Synopsis

With twelve illustrations.

Item Description

8vo. 8 x 5.25 inches. x + 261 + [1] pp. colophon + [2] pp. publisher's advertisements. Bound in original red cloth, gilt. Some wear to extremities, a few damp stains, spine and board edges sunned. Page edges and margins foxed, but otherwise a very good copy. 1918 signature and later one on first free endpaper. Illustrated by 12 black and white photographic plates, including frontispiece, protected by tissue guard. A radical indictment of the power exercised by rural landowners and farmers over the lives, employment and housing of agricultural labourers. It includes case studies from the Downs, the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey. Frederick Ernest Green (1867-1922) worked in the City before moving to Newdigate, Surrey to farm, serving on the county Wages and Small Holdings Committees. Green also wrote The Awakening of England (1912) and The History of the Agricultural Labourer 1870-1920 (1920). 'Through his descriptions of rural villages and rural labourers' daily lives, Green demonstrates the depressed conditions and lack of social mobility which existed in rural Britain at the time of publication and examines the causes of this, providing valuable information for the study of changes in rural societies' (Library Hub).