1850, in the time of Charles Dickens – a call for more Allotments

Mr & Mrs Vinegar. Illustration by Arthur Rackham. From the book ‘English Fairy Tales’, first published 1918.

I have often heard the pleasant sound of the spade even by moonlight.

By George Johnson
The Cottage Gardener
Volume 4, London
1850

Excerpt:

There is some spare time for labourers, in the long days when work is over, that might be profitably spent in cultivating vegetables; and this makes it sad to see idle men and boys lounging in a village street, having nothing to occupy their evening hours. The allotments, indeed, where they exist at all, employ many who frequently toil on them till it is quite dark; and I have often heard the pleasant sound of the spade even by moonlight. But still, in a populous village there are a great number who really have no ground to till, except, perhaps, an atom of damp earth behind their dwellings. It would be a work of ‘rational’, doubly-beneficial charity – a means of doing unspeakable good – to let, or rent for the purpose of letting, to the poor pieces of land near every village; so that as many as possible, if not all the cottagers, should have a portion of ground to cultivate. Industrious characters would thus be materially assisted in providing for their families, and men of lazy habits ‘might’ be encouraged to amend.

More of The Cottage Gardener here.