From Chapter XXIII: Norfolk Cottages

“In Norfolk there are still to be found many beautiful cottages, with their quaintly-pointed gable-ends and picturesque chimneys, with their reed-thatching and creeper-covered doorways. But they are daily becoming fewer, and in their place the hideous “penny-bank” architecture is springing up, with all its bye-laws and philistinic perfections. We remember a Suffolk peasant once said to us, “You sketchers always likes rough, sort of housen’;” and so we do, and for artistic purposes we prefer the quaint isolated cottages of Norfolk to the lily-fronted vine-embowered cottages of Surrey. The latter are pretty, and are loved by lady water-colourists, but we do not think Corot or Bastien Lepage would have spent much time on them. We know of one cottage in Norfolk of the Surrey type that has been painted, photographed, and sketched times innumerable, and it is the very worst cottage possible for pictorial purposes. The sentiment is pleasant, and it looks beautiful on a summer day amid the willows, but it never made a picture, and never will. The Norfolk cottages are far prettier than any of the cottages in the other Eastern Counties, judging from those we have seen. In Cambridgeshire the cottages did not please us; in Suffolk they are solid and heavy, like the people. The cottages given in our plates are specimens of Norfolk cottages.” p. 131

…“In our second plate we give a row of old cottages, the white walls beautifully subdued by the grey day-lighting. In front of the cottages stand some haycocks, and a patch of clover still flourishes, ready for the autumn scythe. A pedlar is pressing his wares on the mother, who stands with her baby on her arm at the gate. At another door a child is playing. This quaint cluster of cottages stood far removed from a village.” p. 131