Spirits of Community

In this book, K.D.M. Snell seeks to investigate the disquiets of modernity. The book examines how and when people recognised a decline in community and belonging particularly in rural settings, and how people came to represent such loss. Snell understands community as ‘social relations in a place or similar spatial area’ or ‘an occupational region or localized network’. Snell is keen to underline that the social relations under discussion may be ‘experienced adversely or favourably’ and acknowledges that ‘community should not necessarily be extolled’ (p. 7). His book also contains a broader purpose: it seeks to show how contemporary concerns over the loss of community are nothing new, but rather have a long history. As such, it contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how people living in England in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries identified changing social relationships and responded to them. Working with a range of cultural productions—from paintings to parish magazines and novels to nature writing—Snell offers a cultural history which tracks how contemporaries came to depict their sense of communities in decline. The early chapters of the book are largely concerned with the parish and its importance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of community. Chapter Two looks at how legal settlement within a particular parish established the administrative structures of community. In the early modern period and even in the eighteenth century, the parish continued to act as the central site of belonging, and created solutions for meeting material needs. As Chapter Three demonstrates, by the turn of the nineteenth century the poor were no longer seen as parish-bound, but rather were on the move, changing the spatial stability of communities. When depicting rural life in the late eighteenth century, artists such as George Morland painted the migrant poor as separate from traditional understandings of parish life, inhabiting the peripheral spaces of woodlands and roadsides. Chapter Four shows that by the mid-nineteenth century the parish, and thus community, had been reconfigured. Focusing on the growth of parish magazines, the chapter demonstrates how understandings of community remained dependent on localities, but also acknowledged mobility on a new scale. Parish magazines allowed greater numbers of people to continue to be involved with parish life, even while away from it in distant lands. At the same time, the magazines contained news of Anglican activities happening at a distance. In doing so, these magazines represented the parish as both local and expansive. While understandings of parish-based communities grew and expanded, by the late nineteenth century the continuance of place-based communities became increasingly vulnerable. Chapter Five demonstrates how the novels of Thomas Hardy, specifically Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Jude the Obscure (1895), reflected the decline of rural belonging. Hardy particularly looked to adult male communities and saw only the ‘memory of mutual and communal activity’ (p. 113)

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