620 



KECENT WILTSHIRE BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, 

 RETICLES, &c. 



[N.B. — This list does not claim to be in any way exhaustive. The Editor 

 appeals to all authors and publishers of pamphlets, books, or views in 

 any way connected with the county to send him copies of their works, 

 and to editors of papers and members of the Society generally to send 

 him copies of articles, views, or portraits, appearing in the newspapers.] 



A Wiltshire Village. By Alfred Williams, author of 



" Songs in Wiltshire," " Poems of Wiltshire," etc. London : Duckworth 

 & Co., Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. 1912. 



Or. 8vo., linen, pp. xv. + 305. Billing & Sons, Printers, Guildford. 

 Price 5s. net. 



This' is the first published prose work of the hammerman Poet of 

 Swindon and South Marston, the latter being the village described in 

 its pages. The country is that on the borders of Wilts and Berks, 

 where Wiltshire touches the Vale of White Horse. Naturally the book 

 will be compared with much of the writings of Richard Jeflferies ; it deals 

 with much the same subjects, though the human element here is more 

 to the front than in the majority of Jefferies' books. The country and 

 the people are practically the same ; for South Marston, the home of 

 Alfred Williams, is no more than four or five miles, as the crow flies, 

 from Coate, the home of Richard Jefferies, and both writers deal with 

 the things which actually surrounded their own early home life. The 

 author himself began work in the fields as a boy of eight, at 2s. a week. 

 He has worked for years on the farm, and for years in the G.W.R. 

 Works, at Swindon, and he tells us over and over again in this book 

 that his deliberate opinion is that the agricultural labourer is better 

 off, physically, mentally, and morally, than the higher paid artisan or 

 labourer in the works at Swindon, that farm work is really the happier 

 work, that the slower country children will in the long run beat the 

 quicker town children in the practical business of life, that as far as 

 health is concerned there is no comparison between the two lives. He 

 even scoffs at the notion that the small thatched cottage of the old- 

 fashioned labourer, at which the Social Reformer's hands are at present 

 held up in horror, was or is half as insanitary as a very large number of 

 the town dwellings provided for the labourer who flies from the country, 

 to the " better conditions of life " in the town. Indeed he roundly says 

 in the plainest of language what many other country dwellers feel, but 

 have not the courage to say, viz., that the townsmen who legislate for 

 the country have in nine cases out of ten no knowledge whatever of what 

 the realities of the country are. The author is, indeed a vehement 

 champion of the Country v. the Town, according to him there are few 

 bad things about the former and few good things about the latter. And 

 it is to be remembered that he has a right to his opinions which 



