Rural Life In England, Photographed By William Morris Grundy in 1855

The rural life in England during the Victorian era is depicted in these images captured by William Morris Grundy. Grundy, born in Birmingham in 1806, started his photography career in 1855, producing numerous stereoscopic photos featuring posed genre scenes of activities like hunting, fishing, and farming.

The London Stereoscopic Company acquired around 200 of Grundy's negatives, and individual stereographs from this collection still exist. However, Grundy is most renowned for the twenty original albumen prints included in the compilation Sunshine in the Country, A Book of Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from Nature (London, 1861).

Despite the urbanisation of towns, certain aspects of Victorian Britain remained distinctly rural. The affluent land-owning aristocracy resided comfortably on their country estates, supported by their household staff, while those who profited from industry or commerce often chose to invest their earnings in land.

Family life, represented by the young Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their nine children, was highly romanticised. However, for the extremely impoverished, it remained an unattainable fantasy as social disparities deepened and solidified.

The advent of industrialisation led to swift transformations in daily life that impacted every social stratum, resulting in Victorian society being characterized by stark disparities and striking contradictions.

In cities, new building work and affluent development went hand in hand with overcrowded slums where people lived in appalling poor housing conditions, worked long hours and died prematurely.

In the countryside, wages for farm labourers were low and as the workers increasingly lost jobs to machinery, they swelled the ever-growing movement from rural areas to towns.

Ideologically, the Victorian era witnessed resistance to the rationalism that defined the Georgian period and an increasing turn towards romanticism and even mysticism with regard to religion, social values, and arts. Technologically, this era saw a staggering amount of innovations that proved key to Britain’s power and prosperity.

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