posted on 19 Feb 2017

Four and Twenty Toilers with verses by E.V. Lucas and illustrations by F.D. Bedford

This large landscape folio book for children provides us with a genuinely fascinating look at the class structure of Edwardian England. This was a time when the social class divide was experienced in very tangible, everyday ways and where the relatively affluent and socially aspirant bourgeois middle class would have virtually no social interaction with the working class unless it was to order or receive a service of one kind or another.

For middle class parents books like this were a valuable way of explaining the role of the decent, hard-working working classes on who so much of their social infrastructure depended.  You can probably best think of this as a sort of ‘field-guide’ to what constitutes the life of the reliable artisan or the decent retainer.

The world of the four and twenty toilers – different manual professions by and large – is a simple one and often one –dimensional. Their jobs and their aspirations are captured in simple verses that accompany the full page colour illustrations of their professions and we get a flavour of how these workers are thought of. Lucas has this to say about the builder:

 

 

It’s very hard upon the field

On which a builder gazes,

For brick and stone are more to him

Than buttercups or daisies…

……

The town has many houses now,

In point of fact too many;

The fields grow fewer every day

And soon there wont be any

 

So what we are seeing here is a glimpse into the anxieties prevalent in Edwardian Britain – especially the loss of the rural idyll that England has been to this date. The builder, who has no imagination or feeling for nature, is the potential instrument of the destruction of England’s green and pleasant land.

Equally, we discover that the working classes, most in need of education, have no real interest in it. They are set only on making the teacher’s (Dame’s) life a misery and falling asleep at their desks:

This girl will let her eyelids close…

And one will after-schooltime plans

In stealthy whispers frame;

One boy will think of fishing

And one invent a game…

 

 To the modern eye the presentation of the working class here will be both patronising and faintly absurd but if you want to understand just how deeply rooted the British class system is you could do a lot worse than take a look at a book like this.

Having said all that, the book is very beautifully done. The illustrations are sumptuous if a little flat in a sort of echo of Kate Greenaway but they have an undeniable nostalgic charm – this is an England where everyone knows their place and are happy with it, where there is no dirt and deprivation and where the authors and the readers hope the sun will never set.

Copies can be purchased on line and as I have noted elsewhere on this site, the modern reprints although adequate simply don’t do justice to the texture of the original illustrations. Copies in very good condition can push close to three figures but you probably can get a copy for much less if you’re prepared to hunt it down.

 

Terry Potter

February 2017