Change in the Villageorder this book
George Sturt. New introduction by Professor John Burnett.
Price £15.00

"A rare bit of writing, based on literary graces, but on cool observation. His prophecies are all the more impressive for being sober."
Richard Church (Country Life).

This book was first published under the pen-name of 'George Bourne'. Sturt took the name of the Surrey heathland village where he lived - The Bourne, three miles south of Farnham. Change in the Village was first published in 1912 when he was nearly fifty.

As an acute, sympathetic, and wholly unsentimental analysis of the ways and thoughts of village men and women it has never been equalled; and its value remains today, since the consequences of the changes which the author describes are still working themselves out in many country villages all over Great Britain.

Sturt ascribes these changes to the enclosure of the village common in the mid- nineteenth century, the substitution of a new money-value economy for the old peasant thrift, and the arrival of the first new middle- class "villa-residents" in the village. He shows in detail the effects of these events on the labourers and their families; then gives his reasons for hoping that a new and better rural civilization might emerge from the period of transition - a confidence in which the years have shown him to be justified.

From Chapter 9, "The New Thrift":

"One usually thinks of the enclosure of a common as a procedure which takes effect immediately, in striking and memorable change; yet the event in this village seems to have made no lasting impression on people's minds. The older folk talk about things that happened 'before the common was enclosed' much as they might say 'before the flood,' and occasionally they discuss the history of some allotment or other made under the award; but one hears little from them to suggest that the fateful ordinance seemed to them a fateful one at the time.

It may be that the stoical village temper is in part accountable for this indifference. As the arrangement was presumably made over the heads of the people, they doubtless took it in a fatalistic way as a thing that could not be helped and had better be dismissed from their thoughts. Were this all, however, I think that I should have heard more of the matter. Had sudden distress fallen upon the valley, had families been speedily and obviously ruined by the enclosure, some mention of the fact would surely have reached me. But the truth appears to be that nothing very definite or striking ensued, to be remembered. The change was hardly understood, or, at any rate, its importance was not appreciated, by the people concerned."

ISBN 0904573850. Paperback, 206 pages.

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