Stephen Duck's Life In The Country

In response to Thomson’s inaccurate depiction of life in the countryside, Stephen Duck decided to illustrate the exhausting work that Thomson overlooked in his interpretation. Duck’s early life in the country greatly contrasted Thomson’s childhood. Particularly, Duck emerged as the first and most revered untutored genius to originate from humbling circumstances of the working people. As a child, his family was poverty-stricken laborers so his education primarily consisted of his little time at a charity school. In his early adult years, he continued as an agricultural laborer during the day and reading the works of Milton at night (Sterling). Through the arduous toil of working in the fields, Duck’s early life was molded by difficulties, which …show more content…
Those assumptions provoked a response from Mary Collier, a common washerwoman and working-class poet of the 18th-century, who recognized that Duck’s representation placed women in an idle role, which was not the case. Therefore, Stephen Duck’s rebuttal to James Thomson did not fully encapsulate the true lifestyle of working people in the countryside as Duck overlooked the contributions of women. Collier’s own experiences as a working woman, she appears to confirm that not only are working men being misused by the upper-class but so are the women as well (Goodridge). In Collier’s The Woman’s Labor, she corrects and criticizes Duck’s implication that women do not equally contribute to the work. Specifically, Collier reminds the audience that the women work in the field alongside the men and have additional duties even after leaving the …show more content…
Collier wants to highlight this often-neglected duty of men by contrasting the end of men and women’s work days. The “you” from the passage refers to the men eating and then immediately sleeping after finishing their toil in the fields. This is contrasted to the women’s “little sleep” as they must mother the children that “cry and rave” during the time that the men rest despite having completed the same tasks as the men did earlier in the day. By showcasing this extra responsibility, it mocks Duck’s misogynistic version of the division of labor between men and women as he excluded that vital role that usually goes unnoticed. After acknowledging the flaws in Duck’s “truth,” Collier seemingly suggests that the unceasing work is far too extreme to be seen as noble. Purposely, Collier undermines the georgic form of poetry, which glorifies work, to strengthen the argument for greater equality between the working-class and the gentry in Britain. With Mary Collier’s point of view, she completed the cycle as each author presented differing renditions of the truth for the rural lifestyle of the laboring-class as the readers obtained a complete portrayal of diversified perspectives that led to a richer depiction closer to the actual