Guilty landscapes and the selective reconstruction of the past: Dedham Vale and the murder in the red barn

In July 1828 the journalist James Curtis travelled from London to the Stour Valley in Suffolk. His impressions on arrival centred on the rain of a wet summer, as the flooded Stour carried away the recent hay harvest and with it the ‘hopes of the husbandman’. The sight drew expressions of concern from Curtis, as he reflected that ‘many humble cottagers’ had been deprived of that which might have carried their solitary cow through the winter. 1 Further reflection on his part might also have elicited fear, as the loss of a significant part of the harvest was not usually borne stoically by poor agricultural labourers, who perpetually lived on the borders of starvation, anger and violence. East Anglia in the early nineteenth century was marked by a continual climate of violence. 2 In 1816 – the ‘year without a summer’ – the failure of the harvest led to food riots, machine-breaking and incendiarism as the rural labourer ‘found himself caught between unemployment and scarcity’. 3 A similar pattern of events was repeated throughout the subsequent decades.