Unquiet Country

Voices of the Rural Poor, 1820-1880

Robert Lee

This table gives the books price, published date, ISBN reference and other details
Price:	£15.00
Published:	November 2005
ISBN:	1-905119-03-8
Details:	PB, 180 pp, illus: 20 b/w

Synopsis

We rarely hear the past voices of the rural poor - the labourers dependent on casual employment, the workhouse inmates, the dispossessed. This book lets them tell their own story. It is, frequently, a story of bitterness and resentment, and one that bursts occasionally into outright rebellion. To many who occupied the early-Victorian countryside, injustice seemed part of the landscape.

Robert Lee draws on a remarkable set of historical sources from Norfolk which show how the experience of poverty could lead people into social transgression and political resistance. Using dramatisations of contemporary accounts he presents a series of disturbing true stories, and goes on to assess what each one can tell us about the reality of nineteenth-century rural society. Insurrection, riot, execution, witchcraft, seduction - Unquiet Country visits the dark side of the Age of Improvement.

Reviews

England never had a revolution like the French, but the years between 1820 and 1880 were dangerous times, and nowhere more so than in East Anglia... Robert Lee lets a number of working-class heroes tell their own stories. Richold Nockolds, charged with four acts of incendiarism, was of course hanged, but his funeral would have rivalled that of the Kray brothers...' Eastern Daily Press