Two Hundred Years Ago

I've been reading a few pages of Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals for the past several weeks, and was just thinking how very different things are between then--1801-02--and now, 200 years later.

They walked everywhere, miles and miles, in all kinds of weather, night and day. Supplies moved between towns in carts pulled by horses. If you had money, you could travel in a coach with no springs, and if you didn't quite have enough, you could ride up on top with the driver, exposed to the weather.

But at the moment what's really striking me is the visible poverty. I know there's a lot of rural poverty--wages around here are simply pathetic and a lot of family farms are barely hanging on--but around here it's virtually invisible. Back then soldiers and sailors came back from the Napoleonic wars maimed and crippled, and had no other recourse than to beg from one town to the next. Whole families were being displaced and roaming the roads begging. Dorothy gives them ha'pence. I can't imagine a few ha'pennies were enough to do more than barely keep body and soul together. But, I hasten to add, I think she was as generous as she could afford to be, and probably more generous than many, although she tells of one gentleman who, when a little orphan's cloak was caught in the wheels of his gig and torn to pieces, "left money with respectable people in the next town" to buy her a new one. I hope that's what those respectable people did with that money.

Even if you had a home it was only about two steps above living in a cave, with those drafty walls and windows and maybe one fireplace in a cottage so that the water in the ewer in your bedroom froze in the winter, and the thatching leaked if it rained. Those were hardy people!

About every 2nd or 3rd entry to the journal begins "Baked bread and pies." Washing took 3 days--washing and drying one day, starching the next, ironing the 3rd. Plus mending everything by hand. I don't believe I've read yet that she ever knit stockings, but she does mention making herself a pair of shoes! And she and William's fiancee spent several months working on "William's warm waistcoat" and I can't make out quite why it took so long--whether it was knit or quilted or what.

William's fiancee, btw, seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time living unchaperoned with the Wordsworths. Although I suppose Dorothy could be considered a chaperone. And they had known each other since childhood, but still... It seems very odd. Mary and William were always wandering around the countryside together while Dorothy stayed home baking bread and pies.

They carry cold mutton in their pockets. Do you suppose that's a pocket like we have, or do you think it's more like a pouch or bag?

And medical knowledge was, in today's terms, nonexistant. If you or someone you knew was sick or injured, you nursed them as well as you could, but you never really knew what was wrong, and either the person recovered or they didn't. If you had money you went to Bath and drank the waters, or to Southern France or Italy or Greece for the climate, but all you had to rely on was your own constitution. Of course, they had real food back then, and no doubt the exercise and hard living helped build them up, but still--consumption or whooping cough or smallpox or pneumonia or various fevers could still do you in. And if you were foolish enough to actually go to a doctor you got bled and dosed with mercury and arsenic and emetics and purgatives.

But the beggars... Not gypsies or jolly beggars like Robin Hood in the archery contest, but soldiers with one arm and sailors who spent 40 years at sea and have no pension and tired women trying to keep track of 3 or 4 kids under 12 while trudging after her husband and carrying a year-old child on her back? We think of them as not traveling much, but these were people wandering the length and breadth of Britain, until they wound up--where? Dead under a hedgerow?

Sometimes she does very minute descriptions of people she's met on the roads, down to the patches of darker cloth where buttons had been.

Good reading.