Thursday 15 June 2023
The end of the pastoral age
Before her, if she had but taken note of them, were a lesson in history and the markings of a profound transition in human evolution. Beside the old frame stable was a little brick garage, obviously put to the daily use intended by its designer. Quite as obviously the stable was obsolete; anybody would have known from its outside that there was no horse within it. There, visible, was the end of the pastoral age.
Booth Tarkington – Gentle Julia (1922)
It is easy to forget that railways did not bring an end to the pastoral age. For many decades before cars arrived, those who could afford it would arrive at the railway station via some kind of horse-drawn carriage. They would expect something similar at the end of their journey. Then, as Emile Zola suggested, came the triumph of the motor-car.
He was ever on the watch; and even now was thinking of reverting to the construction of little motors, for he thought he could divine in the near future the triumph of the motor-car.
Emile Zola – Truth (1903)
Lucas spoke of his own car, which lay beyond in the middle of the side-street like a ship at anchor. He spoke in such a strain that Miss Wheeler deigned to ask him to drive her home in it. The two young men went to light the head-lights. George noticed the angry scowl on Everard’s face when three matches had been blown out in the capricious breeze.
George’s car was a very little one, and he was his own chauffeur, and had to walk home from the garage when he had done with it.
Arnold Bennett - The Roll-Call (1918)
Although there were some who never really adapted to the new motoring age.
Bolton watched with a feeling of exasperation that he could never start a car himself with the skilled nonchalance of these youngsters of to-day. It always seemed to him that the motoring age had evolved a specialised type of human to meet its needs.
E. C. R. Lorac - Fire in the Thatch (1946)
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5 comments:
Well worth re-watching Edwardian Farm - it's on YouTube for free!
The trials and tribulations of all the ideals you mention are very well-decribed, and that was their actual livelihood, so must not go wrong - unlike a couple of Minis we owned a few decades ago...
My father was born in 1913, and his first job from the mid 1920s was working on his father's horse-drawn milk round. Most small businesses that needed to get out and about (deliveries, undertakers, taxi to and from the railways) would have had stables in the back streets of towns. That business lasted until 1945, when the task of completing the paperwork for the free milk issued to the public during the war proved too much for my barely-literate grandfather.
After demobilisation, my dad got a job at Vauxhall Motors. That really was the end of the pastoral age!
"Vauxhall Motors": but not fully immersed in the industrial age, eh?
All those motor vehicles buzzing about, clogging the streets of this fine city and filling it with fumes, as they have done with ever increasing magnitude for a hundred years. I will put a stop to it all, mused Sadiq Khan.
Scrobs - thanks, I'll look it up.
Sam - my uncle's father was a coal merchant and my uncle delivered coal using a horse and cart. He retained an interest in horses for some time afterwards - and pubs.
dearieme - when I see a broken down car being attended to at the side of the road I always look at the make. Today it was a Vauxhall.
Tammly - it's time Londoners turfed him out.
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