Unquiet Country: Voices of the Rural Poor 1820-1880

We rarely hear the past voices of the rural poor - the laborers dependent on casual employment, the workhouse inmates, the dispossessed. This book lets them tell their own story. It is, frequently, a story of bitterness and resentment, and one that bursts occasionally into outright rebellion. To many who occupied the early-Victorian countryside, injustice seemed part of the landscape. Robert Lee draws on a remarkable set of historical sources from Norfolk which show how the experience of poverty could lead people into social transgression and political resistance. Using dramatizations of contemporary accounts he presents a series of disturbing true stories, and goes on to assess what each one can tell us about the reality of nineteenth-century rural society. Insurrection, riot, execution, witchcraft, seduction - Unquiet Country visits the dark side of the Age of Improvement.

Dr Robert Lee teaches social history at the University of Durham.