ABSTRACT
The urban experience of modernity worked through a wide range of contemporary concerns about class, race, gender and social mobility and surfaced in different forms in the images that have been considered. The culture of ruralism began this process and resulted in acts of both colonization and commodification. The final outcome in this case was a representation of rural life that was, largely, labour-free. Emerson's remark that 'you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if labourers are digging hard near by', has been quoted to account for the important perceptual shift in which 'landscape' was progressively replaced by 'terrain'. Rural England had, by 1914, already been safely and effectively emptied out and then resettled and the rural poor, if they were allowed to appear at all, took the form of the quaint rustic types depicted by Alfred Munnings.
