Owain Jones' seminar given at Museum of English Rural Life on 12/03/13 concerning childhood stories and experiences of rurla life

1. Little figures, big shadows: country childhood stories
Owain Jones: Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and
environment; Countryside & Community Research Institute
1

2. I am a cultural geographer with interests in how landscapes and places are
imagined, and how they are practiced in everyday life. This includes
thinking about rural childhood in the UK. A very potent cultural idea - or
discourse – or set of intersecting discourses.
I will go through ideas of
‘rural idyll’
‘rural childhood idyll’
Ideas about – ‘what children are’
Literary portrayals of rural childhood
How the countryside and the city are contrasted
How the idea of ‘rural childhood idyll’ is commodified
Is it just a cultural myth?
Gender and ethnic differences
2

3. The Rural Idyll
One of the most powerful cultural discourses
in UK society – the idea of ‘the countryside’.
3

4. Nature and (traditional) agriculture conflated in the UK (no wilderness). Art
intersects with the ‘countryside’ – nature, agriculture, community. A pastoral
tradition – still very active and powerful - still being reinvented.

5. WHY rural idyll?
Deep roots in ancient texts (Raymond Williams)
Countryside and forest seen as areas free from state control (Shakespeare, Robin Hood)
Reaction against urbanisation and industrialisation
Class - Powerful families were firstly
landowning families.
War - countryside used as emblem of nation
at times of national crisis
Memory : nation’s deep collective pre-urban
identity

6. Debates still abound in media and
Literature about the ‘idyll’.
Villages, communities

7. Idyll in Literature: e.g. Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, The Brontes

8. Idyll in Poetry: e.g. Keats, Wordsworth, R S Thomas,
Housman, Claire, Ivor Gurney (many others)
Often about idyll lost

9. Idyll in Art: John Constable, Graham Southerland

10. Idyll in Music: classical, e.g. Vaughan Williams; William Walton; folk (a folk revival going
on at moment)

11. Welly Telly
Escape to the Country (BBC)
“A series which helps prospective buyers
find their dream home in the country”
“Perfect rural location”
Build A New Life In The Country
(Channel 5)
An idea that is recognisable
“The show follows British adventurers
The perfect urban location
who dream of creating homes in perfect
but more uncertain
rural locations” (often moving from
urban
areas

12. The Country Childhood Idyll
A key part of the
wider idea of idyll.
12

13. An ongoing discussion about this notably Colin Ward
13

14. The Country Childhood Idyll
A potent cocktail of:
Freedom
Adventure (Famous Five)
Fresh air
Physical activities (tree climbing)
Contact with nature: animals, plants, landscapes.
Stuff to play with (think of city spaces in comparison)
Places to hide and play (the Just William stories)
Other children (gangs) (Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee)
Places to make their own (dens)
Community

15. A literary creation?
Many examples
(novels) Cider with Rosie
(on curriculum - film, tv, plays)
(night games)
Larkrise to Candleford
Children’s literature
Memoirs and biographies
(My Country Childhood)
15

16. The invention of childhood
It is very arguable that modern
childhood was invented about 2 – 2.5
centuries ago by the Romantics -
innocence, purity, spontaneous,
creative, the best of humanity
Charted in paintings and literature
The Apollonian view of children as
opposed to the Dionysian. (Jenks
1996)

17. Romantic genealogy
Romantic movement: art, literature
and philosophy in late18th century
Western Europe.
In reaction to urbanisation and
Industrialisation.
Invented the ‘nature’ , ‘countryside’
and ‘childhood’.
Childhood close to nature. At
home in the countryside.
Distrust of the urban, dismay at the urban
17

18. So just as children were beginning to be constructed as natural, wild, free, they were
being moved into, or born into, the growing urban dystopias of the industrial
revolution. (Dickens). This tension still remains (Jones 2000)
Blake Blake
Songs of Songs of
Innocence Experience
Urban
Rural

19. Rural –urban comparisons live on
Most children now live in
urban or suburban areas.
(but)
‘the city under modern conditions,
can no longer be dealt with
practically by children’
(Ward 1978: vii).
A nostalgia for other times
and other places.
19

20. Urban childhood lives in a sort of shadow of the other as an ideal.
A wider discourse too - Raymond Williams -
20

21. Result??? The impossibility of urban childhood
‘The city is everywhere and in everything’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 1).
‘in Britain, the late modern private child [is] predominantly the city child’. (James et
al: 1998: 51)
‘to be a child outside adult supervision, visible on city centre streets, is to be out of
place’ (Connolly and Ennew 1996: 133)
‘it is hard to escape the conclusion that the turn of the century urban child is an
indoor child’ (Ward, 2000: viii)
‘environmental planners have become increasingly aware of the ‘impossibility’ of
urban space for children’ (ESRC, 1999)
‘ I can think of no city that admits the claim of children’ (Ward, 1978: 204).
‘the death of children is a constant thread in the history of London. In more than
one sense, youth is a stuff which will not endure in the confines of the city’ (Peter
Ackroyd 2000: 639).
Where does this leave children?

24. A recently changed history??
Half a century ago youths, in rural areas at least, were freer than those
in urban areas. They were not watched over, they were not always
under the eyes of adults. This is no longer the case. Now when they
leave school they have to return home right away -there are no more
haystacks, quiet hideaways, places where one can go in secret. They
moved from the gaze of adults-teachers to that of adult-parents, to the
gaze of the TV. And they are always closed off in that way. Where as in
the city, it was the opposite is not too long ago. Freedom could be found
in basements, in parking lots, in everything that was underground; that
is, in the unconscious of the city, where a certain sexuality in relation to
the forbidden, including its unfortunate sexist and violent aspects would
take place. There was something really wild about it. Now it is
disappearing because of the control of children’s free time. (Poslianec
1996: 68-69)
24

25. Putting the ‘myth’ into practice?
Counterurbanisation
Moving to the countryside. Some couples move from urban areas when
they have, or plan to have, children.
Bringing up kids (quote from my research):
, “well, you see, he (Jack) couldn’t be a wild thing in St Andrews Road
[their old address] without people telling him off and whatever, whereas
out here he can, can’t he?”
“they can’t do wild things in the city can they without, without sort of
damaging things... Jack running around with a huge stick (here) sort of,
it looks funny rather than menacing doesn’t it”.
25

26. Putting the ‘myth’ into practice?
Taking city children into
the countryside. Various
Organisations do this.
City farms (bringing the
country to the city).
School – farm link
programmes.
26

27. CHILDREN’S FARMS (very quick google search)
LANGLEYBURY CHILDREN’S FARM
Langleybury Lane
Kings Langley
01923 270603
www.langleyburyfarm.org.uk
Open: Easter – End of October
School holidays (weekdays) –
12pm – 4pm
MEAD OPEN FARM
Standbridge Road
Billington
Nr. Leighton Buzzard, Beds
01525 852954
www.meadopenfarm.co.uk
Adult £5.50, Child £4.50, SC £5
Annual tickets available
THURLEIGH FARM CENTRE
Cross End
Thurleigh, Beds
01234 771597
www.thurleighfarmcentre.co.uk
Adult from £2.95
Child from £3.50
See the lambs being hand-reared. Plus lots of young rabbits to
cuddle.
27

28. Comodification
Children’s Books and Toys
1000s of farm/rural based books
For children of all ages
Mostly read to /played with
by urban children
28

29. A myth? A mask?
As the idea of rural idyll is argued to hide all sorts of problems; the rural childhood
idyll might mask all kinds of problems which children face such as social isolation,
lack of access to transport and facilities, poverty, drugs etc.
Isolation
Remote from services
Public transport
Aging populations
Modern agri-business
Rural poverty
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
Harry Crews's memoir of his childhood in rural Georgia, published in
1978, was lauded by critics as an honest depiction of the violence,
29
desperation, and courage evoked by situations of extreme poverty.

30. So is it just a myth?
No. That is too simplistic a conclusion.
“There is a big gap in equality of access to high quality natural
environments between children from rural backgrounds and children
from urban backgrounds” (Demos and Green Alliance, 2003).
“There is also a suggestion that across England, children in rural areas
may be more active than other children (Pretty and others 2009).” Play
England (2012)
The myth, when acted out, can become a sort of reality.
(Counter-urbanisation) those moving to the country today might well be
wealthy middle class families with significant resources.
Children in some instances do have degrees of freedom.
30

31. A complex picture
Cider With Rosie is definitely an account of Idyll but there is detailed description of
extreme poverty and violence in it. There are glimpses of one disabled child who
just disappears
Idyll is in part about community and belonging
As depicted in film….
Whistle Down the Wind. Brian Forbes
Will it Snow at Christmas?
Sandrine Veysset
31

32. Glimpses of ‘Allswell’ (case study in South West England)
Lots of children, some quite free to ‘play out’ at quite early age
The “micro geographies” very important – roads, paths, arrangements of
houses
STUFF TO PLAY WITH. SPACE TO PLAY IN
Parental/adult attitudes variable but key
32

33. It did look like ‘The Famous Five’ sometimes
33

34. Theoretically: this is very much a cultural geography approach where discourse
and social construction is to the fore. But as the pictures show, it can also be
about embodied practice. The two are always entangled in social formations of
what ever kind.
34

35. Control and a kind of freedom
By choosing to live in such a place, where what children can encounter
is controlled by the environment, parents exert a form of control which
in turn lets some children have a degree of freedom.
The case study, very much a middle class idyll. There might well be
other, wilder, idylls.
In either case, these allow children to make their own local geographies
which suffuse through adult spatial patterns.
35

36. Differentiated country childhoods
Ethnicity (n.b. Ingrid Pollard).
Ability
Individual and family
Gender
Where?
36

37. Boys and girls and come out to play?
The girls played their part of invitation and show, and were rather more
assured than we were. They sensed they had come into their own at last.
For suddenly they were not creatures to order about any more, nor the
make shift boys they had been; they possessed, and they knew it, the clues
to secrets more momentous than we could guess. (Laurie Lee).
I became aware when writing about city children that boys experience,
explore and exploit their environment much more than girls do. This is even
more true in the country. The range of activities thought appropriate for
boys is far wider than for girls, who are also subject to a wider range of
parental prohibitions (Ward p. 13)
37

38. Need to radically rethink what children are, and what cities are, and how they (can)
come together
Children not “Apollonian” (innocent) or “Dionysian” (corrupt) (Chris Jenks 2005)
but ‘other’ (Jones, 2008). Strange, partly unknowable, weird creatures who need to
be left to their own devices, spaces and becomings as much as practicable
Higonnet (1998)

39. Conclusions?
Ideas and practices of country childhood are a highly complex and potent mix of
powerful ideas of nature, nationhood, romantic childhood, concern over the cities
and so on.
These flows of meaning get tangled up in the everyday lives of children and families,
and shape everyday life.
But they do not shape everyday life completely or in simple, direct, ways. Many
other factors are important too, such as the specifics of personal and family
geographical life.
There are differences in ethnic and gender experiences and the shifting contexts of
globalised culture, economy and technology (which I have not mentioned) are also
important.
39

40. Key references
Bunce, M. (1994) The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American images of landscape, London:
Routledge.
Bunce, M. (2003), Reproducing the Idyll, in P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions, London: Pearson
Education, 14-30.
Davis, J. and Ridge, T. (1997) Same Scenery, Different Lifestyle: Rural Children on a Low
income, London: The Children’s Society.
Demos and Green Alliance (2003) a child’s place: why environment matters to children,
Demos: London
Horton, J. (2003) Different Genres, Different Visions? The changing countryside in postwar
British children’s literature , in P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions, London: Pearson Education.
73-92.
Jones, O. (1997) ‘Little Figures, Big Shadows, Country Childhood Stories’, in P. Cloke and J.
Little (eds.) Contested Countryside Cultures, London: Routledge, 158-179.
Jones, O. (1999) ‘Tomboy Tales: the rural, nature and the gender of childhood’, Gender, Place
and Culture, 6, 2, 117-136.
Jones, O. (2000) ‘Melting Geography: Purity, disorder Childhood and Space’, in S. Holloway
and G. Valentine (eds.) Children’s Geography: Living, Playing Learning, London:
Routledge.
Jones, O. (2002) ‘Naturally Not! Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism’, Human Ecology
Review, 9. 2. 17-30.
Philo, C. (1992) ‘Neglected rural geographies: a review’, Journal of Rural Studies 8, 2, 193-
207.
Ward, C. (1990) The Child in the Country, London: Bedford Square Press.
Williams, R. (1985) The Country and the City, London: The Hogarth Press.
40