The outpouring of novels about regional and rural Britain that peaked in the 1930s had as its context a more broadly social cult of the countryside that generated all kinds of extravagant proclamations about the powers of rural life to define an urban nation and global empire. Among the most notorious of these statements was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s toast to members of the Royal Society of St George, a group devoted to advancing English patriotism, at their annual meeting at London’s grand Hotel Cecil on 6 May 1924.

‘The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, it is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked for in the years to come,’ George Sturt writes in Change in the Village (1912), his observations on rural social history. In the book's final section, ‘The Forward Movement’, he sets out his ideas for what he sees as a shift in outlook among the people he observes toward the changing world around them:

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention puts the focus on this new outlook and new ambitions through a study of writers, artists and other agents that investigated and helped to instigate the changes that Sturt saw coming among the rural people he writes about. Quiet and inconspicuous activities are considered in the context of dramatic changes in material and social conditions throughout Britain in order to examine the histories of relations between rural and urban places, economies, classes, identities, images, arts and cultures. The overarching goal of this project is to promote rural people and places as important yet often-ignored subjects for studies of British modernisation, modernism and modernity.

In the early twentieth century, rural areas experienced economic depression, the expansion of transport and communication networks, the rollout of electricity, the loss of land and the erosion of local identities. Who celebrated these changes? Who resisted them?

Agnes Miller Parker's wood-engraved illustrations and the books that were built around them bring together materials, personalities, geographies and technologies that seem to challenge conventional understandings of modern artists’ relationships to the forces of modernity. Her 1936 Through the Woods and its 1937 sequel, Down the River, with texts by the popular regional novelist and Country Life journalist H. E. Bates, were best-sellers, confirming in the public imagination the associations of the black-and-white forms of wood engraving with rustic landscapes and natural subjects even as they were seen to ‘elevate’ into art the mass-marketed books in which they appeared. The success of these books represents the symbolic consolidation of Miller Parker's reputation as one of the best wood engravers of her generation, as well as validation of claims by art historians that the years between 1919 and 1945 ‘will be remembered above all as the great period of autographic wood engraving’. This chapter is an investigation into this generally unknown history that lies between modern art and British book illustration. It seeks to understand the curiously shifting cultural status of wood engraving as a symptom of and inspiration to the cult of the countryside that so preoccupied interwar readers, revealing how circulations between historic ‘craft’, modern reproductive print technologies and rural subjects place Parker and her art at the centre of the drama of modernity even as she tried to conduct a quiet life on Britain's rural peripheries.

This chapter builds its argument about Agnes Miller Parker's participation in and witness to rural modernity in large part out of the research and critical readings of art and print historians. Such an approach raises several questions about the everyday practices of artists and the people who write about them. Where do illustrators fit in the hierarchies and judgements of literary critics and cultural taste makers, both in the 1930s and today? How do we gauge the value and meaning of texts that ask us to read them as verbal and visual objects? Miller Parker's prints, illustrations and blocks – the material objects testifying to her years of specialised art practice – suggest answers to these questions, but they also redirect us to the materials of her life.