“There had been plenty of misery among peasants when they were tied to the land. Country laborers in every period were accustomed to living from hand to mouth. … It had been a hard, grim life, whose only purpose, year after year, was somehow to extract the bare essentials of diet and clothing from field and pasture. It was lightened only by the occasional holidays and fairs that punctuated the march of the seasons and by an oral folk culture of stories, songs, and superstitions. The “merrie England” conjured up by Christmas cards and popular art is a figment of sentimental sociology, for which some Victorians, in their understandable desire to dramatize present misery by contrasting it with past contentment, must be held responsible. There never was a rural English society in which snug honeysuckle-covered cottages, plum puddings, fresh-faced village maidens, and hearty, rubicund squires joined to form a picture of utter bliss.”
What? No hobbits?
Robert D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas, pp 35-36.
