THE FOLIO SOCIETY

At the end of the 19th century, Lark Rise – an isolated hamlet deep in the Oxfordshire countryside – was a rough and ready place, simple in its routines and narrow in outlook. Its people lived by the land, and the village year followed that of nature’s cycle, as it had done for generations. They laboured from dawn till dusk, and would often find themselves on the brink of poverty, yet, for all the hardship, the inhabitants of Lark Rise led a happy life. A country wedding, dancing on the green ‘until dusk fell and the stars came out’, the gathering of cowslips for the May Day garland, the beauty of the ripened cornfields, the Harvest Home feast of hams, plum puddings and beer – such unselfconscious, joyous moments turned their lives into ones of real fulfilment and pleasure.

Flora Thompson was approaching old age when she wrote her wonderful trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford. Her instinct to set down what she had witnessed as a girl – the England of peasant, yeoman and craftsman, its roots firmly embedded in the soil – was true and heartfelt. She based Lark Rise on her own village of Juniper Hill, and its characters and customs were those of her own late-Victorian childhood. As a piece of social history, this beautifully detailed chronicle of life in pre-industrial rural England is second to none; as an elegy to a vanished world, it is pure magic.