Sweet Auburn

The allure of the past

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain

Thus wrote Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village in 1770. Auburn’s best days were behind it. The fictional village had become . . . deserted. Goldsmith didn’t explain exactly why, but his readers understood.

Since time out of mind large expanses of the land in England had been held in common, available for the use of rich, middling and poor alike. The common land was much of what kept the middling from becoming poor and the poor from becoming desperate. On the common land, villagers could graze livestock, gather firewood, harvest nuts and fruit, and otherwise supplement their incomes.

Yet these common rights kept the rich from becoming richer. Mechanization was making the textile industry more efficient and increasing the value of its inputs, including wool. The rising price of wool tempted the well-connected to expand and enclose pastures for their sheep. This “enclosure movement” — privatization, in effect — sometimes gained the sanction of law and sometimes proceeded through the simple audacity of local big shots.

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green

The common lands supported the villages. Deprived of access to these lands, the villagers sank into poverty and moved away. Some went to America, others to the growing cities of English industry. In the latter, the villagers became laborers tending machines and marking their lives by the time clock rather than the rising and setting sun.

This side effect of enclosure — the creation of an urban pool of cheap labor — was for some influentials of the era not a side effect at all but the principal purpose. Hence Goldsmith's sweet Auburn was caught in a vise of modernization, with one jaw representing the landlords and the other the industrialists.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied

Goldsmith's elegy for the English village struck a chord with his contemporaries and subsequent generations. The poem became an enduring commercial success and a touchstone of a simpler, better time.

Yet the people who bought and read it rarely went back to the old villages. Nor did they show much practical desire to reset the clock to that earlier time. The modernization that enclosure encouraged made England rich and powerful. More than a few of the beneficiaries were the children and grandchildren of Goldsmith’s villagers. Before enclosure, much of England was trapped in the tragedy of the commons, where investment was futile because the returns on investment couldn't be captured. Enclosure facilitated greater farming efficiency via economies of scale and the introduction of new breeds, techniques and equipment.

The rich got richer. Some of the poor got poorer. But others of the poor got richer, if not as rich as the rich.

A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more:
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth

Some of Goldsmith's readers wondered if he had ever actually lived in a village like Auburn. In fact he had not. Born in Ireland, then under British rule, he came from a family of well-educated ministers and was sent to college at the age of sixteen. He acquired a taste for gambling and carousing before being kicked out of college for rioting. He studied medicine in Scotland, dropped that and embarked on a busking tour of continental Europe, playing a flute and taking odd jobs. After further peregrinations he wound up in London's Grub Street as a pen for hire. Poems, plays, novels — he churned them out as fast as he could, selling them for whatever price they would command. He made friends with Samuel Johnson and adopted Johnson's motto: None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

The more the traditional English village retreated into the mists of memory, the more appealing it became to purchasers of poems and novels and plays, and therefore to the likes of Goldsmith. His novel The Vicar of Wakefield, which conjured similar sentiments, was even more successful than The Deserted Village.

Goldsmith professed to hope that the example of Auburn would enlighten current and future generations.

Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain,
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him, that states of native strength possest,
Tho' very poor, may still be very blest

It was a fond vision, which has had its counterpart in every culture experiencing rapid change. The American equivalent in the late 19th century was the vanishing frontier. The American counterparts of Oliver Goldsmith were Zane Grey and Owen Wister.

Golden ages were never so golden as in the literature about them. Authors who understood this could capture a bit of gold for themselves.