| The nineteenth century English rural worker, stereotypically known as "Hodge," was often very poorly paid, landless, dependent on weekly wages, subject to ill health, and lived in substandard housing. But a variety of written texts created a confused, contradictory, and often negative set of representations of the workers amongst readers. Gaining power, the representations of the rural workers informed public opinion about issues such as education, voting, the economy, and poor relief.;A variety of public texts came together through the nineteenth century to construct public knowledge and opinions about the rural labourers; fiction and essays by Thomas Hardy, poems by Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, newspaper and magazine articles by writers such as William Cobbett and Richard Jefferies, Parliamentary commission reports, parish records, and enclosure awards. When viewed together, these varied textual pictures form a dissonant, confusing collage of representations that add up to an overall negative picture.;The representations of rural laborers in these kinds of texts combined to create a confusing and contradictory picture of lower-class life in the countryside. Research on media, public opinion formation and psychology has shown that, even when texts are written without a purpose of overt persuasion, they can influence opinions and attitudes in those who read and discuss them. Contradictory, but largely negative, representations of the countryside workers in the texts---even those texts that seemed sympathetic---created a dissonance about the relationship of these people to readers' ideas about Englishness, morality, gender, and poverty. The representations did not change much over the century. "Hodge" became even more Hodge-like as the inevitability of agricultural workers voting grew nearer. The aggregate effect of the representations on readers was an uncertainty about the need for reforms that would help the rural workers live decent lives. |
