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Chapter 12‘The Ruined Cottage’I. Incipient Madness: Far from the Madding CrowdGod made the country, and man made the town.What wonder then, that health and virtue, giftsThat alone make sweet the bitter draughtThat life holds out to all, should most aboundAnd least be threatened in the fields and grovesThe peasants are miserably poor; their cottages are shapeless structures (I may almost say) ofwood and clay - indeed they are not at all beyond what might be expected in a savage life. 1Life in the country is supposed to be idyllic, and Wordsworth had left the city and the corruptattitudes of its citizens, to retire to ‘his’ country villa at Racedown. But although he and Dorothydescribed themselves as ‘perfectly happy’ in their solitary retirement when they first arrived, theywould have soon realised that it was not the romantic Arcadian setting Dorothy had anticipated (EY146-150), nor could it be described as pleasant pastoral. Although she later remembered Racedown as‘the place dearest to [her] recollections upon the whole surface of the island’ (EY 281), she was alsoaware of the sharp contrast between the ideals of country life and the realities of the actual situation.Life for the rural poor in Southern England in the late 1790s reflected the impact of the war withFrance and the ‘miserably poor’ peasants were in genuine despair. Two bad harvests, an extremelycold winter, and the drain on the economy caused by the war, had left some of the local people near tostarvation. A shortage of flour had seen bread prices double, and those with little money could noteven afford their daily bread. In the verse fragment ‘The Baker’s Cart’, Wordsworth gives voice to thepoor as a starving girl exclaims: ‘the wagon does not care for us’. He would have appreciated that thesituation was similar to events he would have known about in Blois in 1792 when a flour merchantwas murdered by the hungry mob, and in the riots that followed thirteen people were killed. 2In the ‘The Baker’s Cart’ passage, Wordsworth represents an English counterpart to the‘hunger-bitten girl’ he encountered with Beaupuy in France (Prelude IX 511). Her appearance can beseen as another apt figure of admonishment, bearing in mind his sincere belief, in 1792, that suchinjustice would soon be overcome (IX 518-529). The English girl has not even a cow to her arm;instead, she carries a pitcher that she has just filled from the spring – from nature’s freely givenbounty. But in her famished state Wordsworth notes that her mind was beginning to lose its grip onreality:1 Cowper The Task (I. 749-53); Dorothy Wordsworth (EY 162)2 Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years p. 71.245