Cider in literature

The first substantial English writing about cider is not literary in intent but is written by people with strong literary habits. The Royal Society circle of the 1660s took a serious interest in cider as a national product, and the works that came out of that interest — the Pomona annexed to Evelyn’s Sylva, Worlidge’s Vinetum Britannicum, Beale’s account of Herefordshire orchards — combine practical instruction with argument about what England ought to be growing and drinking. The overlap between them is closer than the three titles suggest: Beale is one of the contributors to Pomona, which the Society published as a collaborative compilation rather than as a work of Evelyn’s own.

The argument matters as much as the instruction. These writers were making a case: that English orchards could produce a drink to rival imported wine, that this was a matter of national economy, and that the gentry should take orcharding seriously. They wrote in a period of interrupted wine imports and of enthusiasm for improvement, and their rhetoric is shaped accordingly.

They also record method in enough detail to be usable as historical evidence — press design, bottling, keeping — which is why they appear in CiderHQ’s source register as historical sources rather than only as literature.

Cyder, published in 1708, is the most sustained literary treatment cider has received in English. It is a georgic: a poem of instruction about husbandry, following the model of Virgil, in which the elevated style is applied deliberately to soil, grafting, pests, pressing and fermentation. Philips writes in Miltonic blank verse, and the effect — high diction applied to the management of an orchard — is the point of the exercise rather than an accident of it.

The poem sits inside an early eighteenth-century vogue for the form, and it carries the usual georgic freight: national pride, the dignity of cultivation, and a strong regional attachment, in this case to Herefordshire. It also contains a good deal of genuine orchard content, which makes it readable alongside the technical writers rather than only against other poems.

Its existence is the clearest single piece of evidence for cider’s standing in polite culture at that date. Nobody writes a two-book georgic about a drink that is beneath notice, and the engraved cider glasses of the same century make the same point in another medium.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex fiction uses orchards and cider making substantially, most conspicuously in The Woodlanders, where a central character travels with a portable press and mill, working from farm to farm. Hardy is precise about the work, and the itinerant cider maker is a real occupation accurately observed. He is also doing something with it: the character’s trade marks him as belonging to an older rural order that the novel is watching disappear.

That association hardens over the following century. By the time Laurie Lee published Cider with Rosie in 1959, cider in English writing carries a strong charge of rural childhood and irrecoverable past. The book is a memoir of a Gloucestershire village before and after the First World War, and the scene that gives it its title — a drink shared under a hay wagon — is among the most widely known passages in twentieth-century English autobiography.

It is worth being clear about what that scene is and is not. It is a piece of carefully constructed memoir prose about adolescence, not a documentary account of cider drinking, and Lee’s book has been discussed at length for the distance between its remembered village and the documented one. As evidence about cider it establishes what the drink meant to a mid-century readership rather than what it was.

Across four centuries of English writing, cider is put to a consistent set of uses. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it stands for improvement and self-sufficiency — a good thing England can make for itself. In the nineteenth it stands for an older rural economy under pressure. In the twentieth it stands for a lost childhood countryside. In none of these is it primarily a drink; it is a marker for a relationship to land.

The absence is equally informative. Cider is scarcely present in urban English fiction, in industrial novels, or in most twentieth-century writing about drinking, which belongs overwhelmingly to beer and spirits. The drink’s literary range maps closely onto its actual geography, and the places where it is absent from literature are the places where it was absent from life.

Continental literatures place it differently. Norman, Asturian and Basque writing treat cider as ordinary and local rather than as elegiac, which is what one would expect of traditions in which the drink never became a symbol of something that had gone.