The Farmer's Year: A Calendar Of English Husbandry

by Clare Leighton (Engraver), Patricia Jaffé. (Afterword)

From the front-inside dustcover:

“In the early 1930s Clare Leighton began work on twelve wood engravings portraying traditional farming practices. England was in the grip of the Great Depression and with increased mechanisation, life on the land was changing.

Clare Leighton was already well established as a powerful and innovative engraver, but this time she was persuaded to write a text to complement her prints. This proved a watershed and no other book involved her so intensely. She engraved, wrote and designed the book, producing stunning chapter openers and tail pieces. The result was this unusual and immensely successful record of the toil and triumphs of farm labourers before the demands of the Second World War were to change the face of rural Britain.

The Farmer’s Year was first published in Britain and the USA in November 1933 and by February 1934 had run to three impressions. The book was launched to great critical acclaim. Frank Rutter, Art Critic of The Sunday Times wrote: “The sincerity of her work is as unmistakable as to its excellence.” Eric Gill commented: “…no one in our time has succeeded better in presenting the noble massiveness and breadth of the life on the earth on a scale so grand.”

The Farmer’s Year has not been reprinted since 1934, making the present re-issue long overdue. This [1992] edition has a new afterword by Patricia Jaffé.

Large Format: 285mm (h) x 363mm (w) x 15mm (b).

Genres: British Literature

56 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1933

Reviews

[^ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clare Leighton’s evocative text weds and binds itself fast to her breathtaking and exquisitely executed dark and powerfully glorious illustrations. The large-sized serif text is of a proportion that looks absolutely natural set against the woodcut on the opposing page. That very size will be especially valued by those readers with poor eyesight.

Each month begins with a full-page woodcut (boxwood); with an additional smaller block to decorate the initial letter of the text. As a when the text doesn’t finish against the bottom margin of a page, a third woodcut informs and decorates the void. The inscription inherent in the nature of the serif font used to print the text exquisitely complements the woodcuts. For the month of November, the sheer strength of hard sinew within the muscles of the ploughman steering the horses is viscerally felt.

This is a book unmistakably of its time; of a period of very great change that saw both the introduction of the petrol engine and the Great Depression. No quotas, no set-aside. No combine harvesters. Apples picked by hand. The last gasp of a safeguard of centuries. Cows are known by their names, the sheep are sheared by hands unassisted by electricity, new cut hay is tossed and turned, ridged and cocked; all by human hand,

“…the long wooden rakes endure, and no modern machinery can injure or hinder the gambols of the small children as they play hide and seek under the haycocks (p.28).

But this is no bucolic, idealised countryside. Death is ever present, approaching closer still for the rabbits who have taken shelter in that central small square of standing stubble … whilst September is devoted to picking the Kentish apple crop:

“The gatherers come early, when the dew on the heavy grass and nettles wets their legs and bediamonds the leaves, and there is a mysterious gloom and depth of shadow along the aisles of trees” (p.41).

This is a deeply powerful book, possessing a realism of life which touches the very soul. Whilst never risking descent into pastoral kitsch, Leighton deliberately chooses to use language which could almost have sprung forth from the King James Bible (AV).

This is a bewitchingly good read, for all ages.


Note: http://preview.tinyurl.com/oj5udna may also be of interest.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 2018 published facsimile of a 1933 book on the farmer's year, that was a well known book in its time. I think most people look at it not for the writing, but for the woodcuts - as Clare Leighton was a leading and pioneering artist with woodcuts - and they are very fine. Given she was working only with black and white it is amazing how much expressive detail is in those prints.

Accompanying the prints, there is a short piece of prose for each month of the year, or I suppose better put, the Farmer's year.

The text is a fictonalised representation, (at least I assume it is fiction), but it is not meant to represent a fictional world but more the real world sort of thoughts that those involved in farming might have had - herdsmen, ploughmen, shepherds, farmers, fruit pickers and so on. These pieces are rather sweet. They reflect a changing world, for the world of farming of the 1930s England is a far cry from farming today - but even when it was written the characters are well aware of how the farming of the 1930s was different from how it was a generation ago.

The nostalgic yearning for the old days is nothing new. But its not just the farming that has changed, so has the environment - show for example by the frequent references to Elm trees, now virtually unknown in the UK since the era of Dutch Elm disease.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful woodcuts, one for each month, with a page (sometimes two) of text about the farm work taking place during that month. It was absolutely gorgeous both in the art and the writing and I was very glad to see it had been reprinted so that I could pick up a copy of my own.

[Callum Osment · Rating 3 out of 5]

nice pics