This memoir also contains a potted family history that stretches further back into a kind of ersatz history of sheep farming in the Lake District, which is located in the north of England. Very early on, Rebanks positions himself in contradistinction to William Wordsworth, the first-generation Romantic poet who made this part of the world famous in his writings, and especially in his poetry. I found it hard to see what problem Rebanks might have with what Wordsworth did especially considering the parallel trajectories the two men’s lives took. Both were born in the area and then went on to one of the UK’s old sandstone universities (Wordsworth to Cambridge, Rebanks to Oxford). Rebanks doesn’t see this kind of connection or, if he does see it, he doesn’t say anything about it.
Wordsworth’s descriptions of a farmer handling a sheep dog in the 1805 version of his autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’ are possibly the first time that such a feat had even been attempted in any literary production in any country. I certainly cannot remember reading anything similar by anyone else that precedes that passage. Its existence is testament to Wordsworth’s deep and abiding connection to his native region, and his understanding of the people who, still today, inhabit it.
The niggling resentment that Rebanks feels about his famous predecessor (who he curiously calls a “dead white man”, borrowing a rhetorical trope from the language of the metropolitan progressives he elsewhere positions himself at odds with) seems to have been part of the author’s life from the days of his earliest memories. When he was 13 and still at school, Rebanks says he felt his teachers’ scorn for the farming life and admits that it is difficult for him to remember if he felt resentment at that time, but he certainly felt it when he decided to sit down and write his book. In fact resentment about perceptions that people who come from outside the local community have about farmers seems to be a kind of leitmotif in the work, stemming from its importance for the way that the author thinks about himself. Resentment as identity politics, if you like.
One thing that is remarkable at the outset is that Rebanks is often not as good at explaining things as he thinks he is, or as his editors and readers have told him he is. The economics of sheep farming is explained but a novice will still struggle to understand its intricacies having read the passages in question. You are on surer ground where he explains the art of making hay. So the quality of the work is patchy just as the author himself is a deeply flawed, and very human, character in his own production.
I’ve read another book by a farmer, ‘The Cow Book’ by John Connell, which came out in 2018 (it was reviewed on this blog on 8 September of that year). Connell, like Rebanks, puts much stock in the longevity of animal husbandry, in Connell’s case in a part of Ireland, and there is a narrow kind of cultural exceptionalism that creeps in in both works to muddy the waters with a certain kind of – you guessed it – resentment.
Farmers declaring the legitimacy of their industry based on how long their forefathers have been doing it seems like a perfectly natural reaction in the face of sometimes noisy and usually misguided attacks that metropolitan progressives periodically launch in the direction of people living in rural communities, but it’s not exactly endearing. Rebanks ended up being, in my mind, a prickly cove.
Wordsworth’s descriptions of a farmer handling a sheep dog in the 1805 version of his autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’ are possibly the first time that such a feat had even been attempted in any literary production in any country. I certainly cannot remember reading anything similar by anyone else that precedes that passage. Its existence is testament to Wordsworth’s deep and abiding connection to his native region, and his understanding of the people who, still today, inhabit it.
The niggling resentment that Rebanks feels about his famous predecessor (who he curiously calls a “dead white man”, borrowing a rhetorical trope from the language of the metropolitan progressives he elsewhere positions himself at odds with) seems to have been part of the author’s life from the days of his earliest memories. When he was 13 and still at school, Rebanks says he felt his teachers’ scorn for the farming life and admits that it is difficult for him to remember if he felt resentment at that time, but he certainly felt it when he decided to sit down and write his book. In fact resentment about perceptions that people who come from outside the local community have about farmers seems to be a kind of leitmotif in the work, stemming from its importance for the way that the author thinks about himself. Resentment as identity politics, if you like.
One thing that is remarkable at the outset is that Rebanks is often not as good at explaining things as he thinks he is, or as his editors and readers have told him he is. The economics of sheep farming is explained but a novice will still struggle to understand its intricacies having read the passages in question. You are on surer ground where he explains the art of making hay. So the quality of the work is patchy just as the author himself is a deeply flawed, and very human, character in his own production.
I’ve read another book by a farmer, ‘The Cow Book’ by John Connell, which came out in 2018 (it was reviewed on this blog on 8 September of that year). Connell, like Rebanks, puts much stock in the longevity of animal husbandry, in Connell’s case in a part of Ireland, and there is a narrow kind of cultural exceptionalism that creeps in in both works to muddy the waters with a certain kind of – you guessed it – resentment.
Farmers declaring the legitimacy of their industry based on how long their forefathers have been doing it seems like a perfectly natural reaction in the face of sometimes noisy and usually misguided attacks that metropolitan progressives periodically launch in the direction of people living in rural communities, but it’s not exactly endearing. Rebanks ended up being, in my mind, a prickly cove.
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