Sinister tales of the countryside

May 18, 2001

She was Norfolk’s answer to Thomas Hardy. But the much-acclaimed novelist Mary Mann has never won the recognition she deserved for her gritty work shedding light on the hardship of life in the countryside. A new edition of her harrowing Tales of Victorian Norfolk confirms a formidable but long-forgotten talent. IAN COLLINS pays a timely tribute on the anniversary of her death.

To anyone first glimpsing the tiny village of Shropham in mid-May, this part of rural Norfolk must look like a kind of paradise – an oasis of calm contentment settled in an almost secret landscape. Juggernauts on the nearby A11 are unseen and unheard, and there is no sign that farm diseases and human deprivation and desperation might mar the beauty of this gentle countryside.

SEARING STORIES: Mary Mann lived at Shropham Manor and wrote haunting tales of the Norfolk countryside.

True, Shropham no longer has a school, shop or pub, but the gardens are bright with flowers and birdsong and a lack of social amenities can have its own attraction. Everywhere, peace prevails. Surely nothing horrible could ever have happened here.

The lane to the ancient church is flanked by a line of poplars – and through the flickering leaves there is one of those breath-taking sweeps of Breckland that few tourist guides mention.

The church stands behind an avenue of cherry trees – and, just now, a blizzard of blossom. But opposite the perfectly preserved 13th century porch there is a scene of scandalous dereliction.

Seventy-two years ago this month the local sexton was preparing to dig the grave of a former lady of the manor who was very well regarded in these parts. She had visited the labourers’ cottages, taught in the school and funded the annual village feast in one of her barns.

MARY MANN: Her superbly-crafted stories with their acute feeling for rich dialect and ruined lives, are as haunting as the East Anglian ghost stories of M R James.

More than just a kindly soul, Mary Mann had been a beady observer, and she had set down many of the evils she had witnessed in a series of searing stories. Her gravestone, now split and crumbling, is an open book. The barely legible epitaph reads: “We bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told.”

Here lies the Norfolk and female version of Thomas Hardy. But her work painted an even harder picture of rural life. At the time of our homespun author’s death English readers were going wild for the Shropshire yarns of Mary Webb, particularly for the lovelorn tale Precious Bane.

Later they would turn in their millions to Flora Thompson’s memories of late Victorian life at Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire. The volume Lark Rise To Candleford remains a bestseller to this day.

But while Webb and Thompson’s warts-and-all portraits retained an affection for rural life of old, Mary Mann hated it. She saw only squalor and something so sinister that her superbly-crafted stories, with their acute feeling for rich dialect and ruined lives, are as haunting as the East Anglian ghost stories of MR James.

The future author was born Mary Elizabeth Rackham, a merchant’s daughter, in Norwich in 1848. After her marriage to Fairman Mann, in 1871, she moved to the village near Attleborough – first to Church Farm, then to her husband’s family seat at Shropham Manor. The shock of leaving bustling Norwich for a rural backwater was compounded by the onset of an agricultural depression which wrecked livelihoods across Norfolk.

At a time when foot and mouth was considered a minor and wholly treatable condition, anthrax was a killer. But much worse were the plummeting prices caused by a flood of cheap grain from the New World. Mary saw the effects locally in overgrown fields, derelict farms and blighted hopes.

Here she produced a series of fine novels, starting with The Parish of Hilby (1883), and four brilliant volumes of short stories (notably the 1902 collection The Fields of Dulditch) drawn heavily on the sufferings and injustices of Shropham and marked by a bitter humour.

The story Ben Pitcher’s Elly deals candidly with a woman who murders her illegitimate child, and Dora o’the Ringolets with an egomaniacal child who frets that her dying mother will no longer be able to arrange her hair (but who later cuts off her curls over the corpse). The anti-hero of Wolf-Charlie takes his name “by reason of the famished look in his melancholy eyes, of the way in which the skin of his lips, drawn tightly over his gums, exposes his great yellow teeth; by reason of the leanness of his flanks, the shaggy, unkempt hair about his head and face, the half fierce, half frightened expression”.

This impoverished stone-breaker acquires an instant family in the form of a deserted wife with one leg and five children. Then, working in the fields one day, he sees the errant husband returning in a donkey-cart.

"'I ha’ got yar wife an child’un," the Wolf shouted aloud to him.
“The driver gazed for a moment at his wretched-looking rival, then turning back to his donkey, belaboured it with a heavy stroke across its ribs.
“‘I don’t keer why th’ devil ha’ got ’em so long as I ha’nt,’ he called out. And so, master of the situation, drove off.”

At her grim best, Mary Mann does not deal in happy endings. There’s a sting in the tale. Grimmest of the grim is Little Brother, where the 13th child of a farm labourer’s wife is stillborn. A charitable spinster, coming to console the mother, finds the body missing from the cot and the children downstairs playing with what seems to be a battered doll.

Chided for allowing such desecration, the mother replies:

“Other folkes’ child’en have a toy, now and then, to kape ’em out o’ mischief. My little uns han’t. He’ve kep’ ’em quiet for hours, the po’r baby have; and I’ll lay a crown they han’t done no harm to their little brother.”

As Byatt, who included this saga in her recent selection for The Oxford Book of English Stories, described it as “plain, and brief, and clear and terrible...she is recording, not judging, but her telling is spiky with morals and the inadequacy of morals”.

The Norwich-raised novelist and biographer DJ Taylor, who is also Mary Mann’s most tireless champion, says: “The best of the Dulditch tales are unlike anything else in Victorian literature – hard-eyed, sympathetic, direct, unyielding.” Ronald Blythe says that by “enduring the misfortune of their birth, their ignorance, their incessant toil and their malnutrition” Mary Mann’s characters receive a “special nobility”.

And he adds: “There was a group of human beings in her world with the dice loaded against their fulfilment and happiness. Dulditch exercises her radicalism. She sees both the admirable and the feckless brought down by circumstances that are entirely out of their control.”

In his study East Anglia, A Literary Pilgrimage, Peter Tolhurst notes that Dulditch was published in the same year as Rural England, a factual account of agricultural devastation by the Norfolk novelist Rider Haggard. He also charts how the crisis affected the author’s own household. Fairman Mann, as the stand-in village squire, took responsibility for the welfare of the poor, becoming a workhouse guardian and school governor. But he struggled – and eventually failed – to support his family on 800 acres of indifferent land.

Again, in the unpublished Dulditch foreword, Mary gave a portrait of her husband as “a man well-to-do, kind and generous once; an excellent husband, father, master, farmer: getting now poorer in pocket, shorter in temper, year by year, a man who has struggled in a dogged, quiet fashion, but who is beaten and knows it, finding the knowledge bitter to a degree...”

Mary’s literary earnings proved vital in supporting her four children, and many of her 35 novels were potboilers written for money. She could still hit the bone, however. The Patten Experiment (1899) was a scathing skit on the efforts of a clergyman and his family to live on the average farmworker’s income of 11 shillings (55p) a week.

RESTING PLACE: "We bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told" reads the epitaph on Mary Mann's tomb.

That novel was much admired by the young DH Lawrence, as was Rose at Honeypot (1906), in which a bored upper-class wife meets a handsome young game-keeper.

Oh yes, Mary Mann had a big impact on English literature! After her husband’s death, in 1913, the author moved first to Winterton and later to Sheringham. But she remained much-loved in Shropham. At her funeral, on May 22, 1929, the church was packed. The characters from her undying stories had assembled to pay their last respects.

All the short stories outlined in this feature are included in Tales of Victorian Norfolk, by Mary Mann, now reprinted by Morrow & Co of Bungay at £8.99.