George Sturt

George Sturt combined the work of an English wheelwright with writing published largely under the name George Bourne. A Surrey native, he inherited his family’s workshop near Farnham and recorded the working knowledge, speech, and changing circumstances of people around him. Change in the Village, first published in 1912, studies a parish being transformed from a largely self-reliant rural community into a residential district influenced by nearby London. Sturt compares older habits of labor and mutual dependence with wage work, new housing, and shifting expectations. His perspective joins observation with practical experience: he knew village trades not only as subjects but through the workshop he managed. The book belongs with The Bettesworth Book, Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, and The Wheelwright’s Shop in his sustained account of country work and social transition. Change in the Village is especially concerned with what modernization alters in relationships, knowledge, leisure, and local identity, while resisting an easy sentimental picture of earlier rural life.