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Lark Rise to Candleford
In response to my previous plea for books taking place in a rural/pastoral setting in which nothing happens to give to my mother for Christmas, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fuchsoid recommended Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. It was available on PaperBackSwap.com, and now I've got a copy of it in my hot little hands. Naturally, I'm reading it before I give it to her. :)
Lark Rise is an omnibus of three books, Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green, published between 1939 and 1943. They're autobiographical novels of rural English life in the 1880s and 1890s, right before modernization really set in; the dying days of the pastoral life that Tolkien celebrated with his hobbits.
I'm partway through the first book, and it reads as ethnography rather than autobiography, albeit with a constant refrain of "We were poor but we were happier than in these modern times!" (The other two books are more autobiographical, going by a quick poke through them.) I'm liking it quite a lot - Thompson has the trick of describing daily life but making it fascinating at the same time. So far, a few of the hamlet's residents have been described but none of them have been characterized deeply enough to stick in my mind, but that contributes to the sense of timelessness and a centuries-old lifestyle. They were written 40 years later, and the details can't really be trusted so it's not a true ethnography, but instead her years growing up as seen through memory and nostalgia.
(I'm really going to have to find a website somewhere that compares rough costs of living between then and now to get a handle on the money and the poverty level. I know it's really impossible to convert because so many factors of life are different, but I have no clue how much ten shillings or one penny meant to someone in the 1880s, much less a pound.)
fuchsoid recommended Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. It was available on PaperBackSwap.com, and now I've got a copy of it in my hot little hands. Naturally, I'm reading it before I give it to her. :)Lark Rise is an omnibus of three books, Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green, published between 1939 and 1943. They're autobiographical novels of rural English life in the 1880s and 1890s, right before modernization really set in; the dying days of the pastoral life that Tolkien celebrated with his hobbits.
I'm partway through the first book, and it reads as ethnography rather than autobiography, albeit with a constant refrain of "We were poor but we were happier than in these modern times!" (The other two books are more autobiographical, going by a quick poke through them.) I'm liking it quite a lot - Thompson has the trick of describing daily life but making it fascinating at the same time. So far, a few of the hamlet's residents have been described but none of them have been characterized deeply enough to stick in my mind, but that contributes to the sense of timelessness and a centuries-old lifestyle. They were written 40 years later, and the details can't really be trusted so it's not a true ethnography, but instead her years growing up as seen through memory and nostalgia.
(I'm really going to have to find a website somewhere that compares rough costs of living between then and now to get a handle on the money and the poverty level. I know it's really impossible to convert because so many factors of life are different, but I have no clue how much ten shillings or one penny meant to someone in the 1880s, much less a pound.)
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Or you could just go mad with the many links on this site (http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html). *is probably being overly helpful*
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(I mainlined Mom's DVDs of the Mrs Bradley mystery series over Thanksgiving - mostly to watch the costume designers top themselves with each subsequent hat that Diana Rigg wears. XD)