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Abstract
This article makes the case for a centenary restoration of George Sturt’s classic study of British vernacular craft at the end of the nineteenth century, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923). It considers how the craft knowledge Sturt describes relates to his other craft – writing. It documents the book’s changing relevance to readers a century after publication. Approached by way of contemporary ideas about environmental sustainability, material culture, and ecological psychology, Sturt’s book deserves renewed attention from twenty-first century readerships.
Acknowledgements
I owe particular acknowledgements, and sincerest thanks, to the following colleagues and collaborators for their invaluable advice during the preparation of this article: Simon Olding and Greta Bertram at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham; Alexander Langlands; Isabel Hughes, Oliver Douglas and Caroline Benson at The MERL, University of Reading; David Hyde; Josh Godfrey at The Museum of Farnham; and the distinguished editors of this journal.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: the Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), 85
2 See especially Denys Thompson, “A Cure for Amnesia (1933)”, in A Selection from Scrutiny, ed. F.R. Leavis, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), ii. 219–227; W.J. Keith, The Rural Tradition: William Cobbett, Gilbert White and other Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Hassocks: Harvester, 1975), 149–170; John Fraser, “Sturt’s Apprenticeship”, in The Name of Action: Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193–205; and David Gervais, “Late Witness: George Sturt and Village England”, in Literary Englands: Versions of “Englishness” in Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 102–132.
3 See Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 201.
4 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City [1973] (London:Vintage, 2016), 375–6.
5 Collini, Nostalgic Imagination, 60–1.
6 The exhibition catalogue is Shoulder to the Wheel, ed. Glenn Adamson and Simon Olding (Farnham: Crafts Study Centre, 2019).
7 George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 91. Further references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the main text.
8 I discuss the imperial and colonial implications of Sturt’s writing in “Re-Reading The Wheelwright’s Shop”, in Shoulder to the Wheel, ed. Adamson and Olding, 23–28, at 27.
9 Leavis and Thompson, Culture, 91.
10 Wheelwright’s Shop, 24; cf Farnham Museum MS 148/B07a/vii fol.3: “{timber disclosed qualities} hardly to be found otherwise” – “disclosure” is a late refinement.
11 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 53-4; Christopher Frayling touches on these issues in relation to Sturt in On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus (London: Oberon Books, 2011), 23–50, at 42-6.
12 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 110.
13 Journals of George Sturt 1890-1927, ed. E.D. Mackerness, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), i. 453 (28 December 1904)
14 Ibid., ii. 865, using the title (itself borrowed from Darwin) of T.H. Huxley’s famous essay of 1888.
15 Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 15.
16 Wheelwright’s Shop, 91; cf. 148: these were “things for eyes and hands to learn, rather than for reason, and my eyes and hands were already too old”; cf. also Journals, ii. 869 on starting five years too late.
17 Ibid., 33, 66–7.
18 George Sturt, Change in the Village, (London: Duckworth, 1912), 122.
19 OED “ecology” (1a) gives H.G. Wells’s popularizations in 1932 (“Economics is […] a branch of ecology; it is the ecology of the human species”) and 1933 (“Of human ecology he betrays no knowledge”).
20 Bryan G. Norton, Sustainability. A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 363.
21 Bryan G. Norton, “Ecology and Opportunity: Intergenerational Equity and Sustainable Options”, in Fairness and Futurity. Essays in Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, ed. Dobson, A., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118–150, at 146–47.
22 Journals, ii. 865.
23 Wheelwright’s Shop, 192; cf. 29.
24 Wheelwright’s Shop, 31; see 33, wood kept “for longforseen uses.”
25 Wheelwright’s Shop, 202; cf. Sturt, Change, 123: “And thus the succession of recurring tasks, each one of which seemed to the villager almost characteristic of his own people in their native home, kept constantly alive a feeling that satisfied him and a usage that helped him.”
26 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered [1973] (London: Vintage, 2011), 127.
27 On Appropriate Technology see Kevin W. Willoughby, Technology Choice: A Critique of The Appropriate Technology Movement (London: Routledge, 2019); on TEK see Fikret Birkes, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Perspective”, in Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Concepts and Cases, ed. Julia T. Inglis (International Programme on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, 1993), 1–10.
28 Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2017), 17.
29 Journals, i. 131; cf. Journals, ii. 865 on “generations […] labouring in their environment of materials”.
30 Ibid., i. 219 (6 November 1892).
31 Ibid., ii. 639.
32 George Sturt, A Farmer’s Life: With a Memoir of the Farmer’s Sister (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), 172.
33 Ibid., 173.
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Paddy Bullard
Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. Formerly he was a research fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (Voltaire Foundation, 2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope (forthcoming).