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In Candleford Green, the same parable of the past is spoken, with a difference. Dorcas Lane, the post-mistress, and her household-workshop with Matthew the foreman of the farriery, the smithy and the wheelwright's shop [Pg xi] and the journeymen sitting below the salt at Miss Lane's table, other symbols of 'an age-old discipline', these have an obvious affinity with Uncle Tom and his little commonwealth. She too has her willow-pattern plate and other bygones. But this household seems embalmed, a show-piece, and we feel it would be a blunder to speak of Old Sally's and Uncle Tom's possessions as 'bygones'. Dorcas's 'modernism', her sceptical outlook and partiality for reading Darwin lends point to the sense of preservation, not use.

In Candleford Green, again, Mr. Coulsdon, the Vicar, and Sir Timothy, the Squire, are held momentarily in the light before they too pass into limbo. But both of them cast a shadow, however soft the illumination of Laura's lamp. They are Victorianized, and it was Victoria's reign that, partly through their agency, but mainly by the growth of the industrial town and the industrial mentality, ended the self-sufficient England of peasant and craftsman. The supreme value of Flora Thompson's presentation is that she makes us see the passing of this England, not as a milestone along the road of inevitable progress, but as the attempted murder of something timeless in and quintessential to the spirit of man. A design for living has become unravelled, and there can be no substitute, because, however imperfect the pattern, it was part of the essential constitution of human nature. The fatal flaw of the modern theory of progress is that it is untrue to historical reality. The frustrations and convulsions of our own time are the effect of aiming this mortal blow at the core of man's integral nature, which can be perverted, but not destroyed.