For a small, rural backwater like Chiddingly, 1830 was an exciting year, what with riots, a Vestry meeting chaired by an Earl and labourers’ wages almost doubled (in theory, at least). For Richard Lower personally, though, the event of the year must have been the publication of his first book: TOM CLADPOLE’S JURNEY TO LUNNEN, shewing the many Difficulties he met with, and how he got home safe at last; Told by himself, and written in pure Sussex Doggerel, by his Uncle Tim.

Richard published it himself; that is to say, he had copies printed by Bread’s of Hailsham and arranged for their distribution and sale through Bread’s, Nye’s of Tunbridge Wells and “the Principal Booksellers of the County”. Over the years, new edition followed new edition. One copy – undated – in the Library of the Sussex Archaeological Society was “Printed and Published for the Author by Joseph Farncombe, Market Street, Lewes” and Farncombe evidently became his regular publisher, for after his death they issued two more editions of “The Jurney” before 1900 and a third – again undated – somewhere around 1930. That the book was a quick and lasting success in East Sussex is in no doubt. What is remarkable is that its purchasers were very often cottagers with little or no money to spare for luxuries and rarely of a book-buying habit. “I have heard it recited,” wrote the Reverend A.A. Evans in 1933, “a score of verses at a time by men who knew no other book but the Bible.” It became almost a folk tale, appealing to Sussex farm workers because it was written in their own language and was a clear and familiar insight into their own ways of thought.

It tells the story of a young farm labourer who decides to take time off from work in the fields to visit his sister in service in London, even though he has to walk all the way. (Being in service was the only future open to most country girls until they married.) As explained in Chapter 5, the narrator, Tim Cladpole, deals right at the start with the relationships between rich and poor in the same kinship group and there must have been scores of his readers who said: “There! That’s us! Those up at the big farm – they’re no better than what we are!”