Prompted by a reference in another forum to the straitened circumstances of some of the farm workers of the 19th Century, I have just looked up a poem called The Man with a Hoe, which I have long revered and which I can't read without a few tears. Here is a link to it, for those who don't know of it.
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~wyllys/manwhoe.html

Gordon,

You might find Markham's essay interesting: Markham's Reflections on Writing 'The Man with a Hoe'

Thanks very much for the link, Linda Sue. Of *course* the man knew what he was writing, and the painter knew what he was painting. However could their critics even suspect that their subject didn't exist in the world? Their suspicion (their *judgment*, in reality) betrayed an ignorance of the world outside their own dominions.

In the mid-1960s, and our mid-twenties, my later-wife and I hitch-hiked through much of the Middle East, and "travelled cheap" through much of Europe. We met The Man with a Hoe and his urban cousins in several countries. When I came across the poem and the portrait many years later, I recognised the subject immediately, and have been a slave to human-rights ever since!