Lark Rise to Candleford

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Lark Rise to Candleford is a trilogy by Flora Thompson , compiled from her three earlier autobiographical novels and first published in 1945. In fictionalized form, she describes the social history of the rural population of Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th century based on their own childhood and youth experiences the same time.

Subject matter and character of the presentation

Here she describes as the sole author of this time, both living in the hamlet , village and town and not only individual lives, but also of the groups. The special thing about Thompson's portrayal is that it depicts all people and relationships with sympathy, without embellishing anything homely.

She characterizes the social situation in the hamlet with the image of a fortress besieged by need and want, which can only withstand the onslaught with the help of strict customs and social control. As a typical example, she tells of the small economic revolution in the hamlet, when a beer dealer broke the monopoly of the pub by delivering their own kegs to households. This means that not only the men drink a beer in the pub every day, but also the women occasionally in the more emancipated domestic situation (otherwise this only happened on high holidays) and that the men occasionally drink more than one glass. It soon became clear that the household budget of the average household was overwhelmed by this despite the lower beer price. Because of the payment difficulties of his customers, the beer trader gives up his deliveries. The old prerogative of men to alcohol and the monopoly of the pub are returning. Thus the attack of progress on the precarious financial equilibrium of the landless farm worker families has been repulsed.

On the other hand, Thompson's portrayal does not take the form of a social accusation, rather it records precisely the dying customs of the agrarian world in the awareness of which culture was lost at the time. She reports that the farm workers enthusiastically sang “ God bless the people's William ” because Gladstone seemed to represent their cause unlike the conservatives, and that an eighty-three-year-old recited the folk ballad “An outlandish knight”, first recorded in 1776 from oral family tradition which one only listened to out of respect for one's age. She sees these chants, which still united the pub-goers in a community, as a sign of the "lost art of being happy with a little."

Edits

Keith Dewhurst wrote the plays Lark Rise and Candleford based on these novels, which were performed at the National Theater London in 1978/79 with the participation of the folk rock group The Albion Band .

In 2008, a television series of the same name based on this ten-episode novel was broadcast. The fourth season so far appeared in 2011.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "none of thesis authors singly Achieved the triple revelation of the hamlet, the village, and the market town", HJ Massingham 1944 in the introduction to Lark Rise to Candleford , Penguin Books Oxford 1981, p. 8
  2. ↑ "She is the recorder of hamlet, village and country town who was of them but retached from them, and whose observation of their inmates by intimacy by no means clouded precision of insight and objective capacity" HJ Massingham 1944 in the introduction, p. 8th
  3. ↑ half pint
  4. ↑ This ballad connects the Blaubart motif with the Judith motif of tyrannicide ( http://www.contemplator.com/child/outland.html )
  5. ↑ "The singers were raw and uneducated and so poor as you can no longer imagine today, but they deserve to be remembered, because they understood the art of being happy with little that has been lost today." F. Thompson: Lark Rise to Candleford, Lark Rise to Candleford , Penguin Books Oxford 1981, p. 75.

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