All Creatures Great and Small: Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

THE MILK LORRY In the 1920s and 1930s, a truck called a "milk lorry" collected full chums (large jugs) of milk from farms. The lorries then transported the milk to butter and cheese factories, and to market places for immediate sale, Today, the lorries have been replaced by tanker trucks that use pipelines to move the milk from the farms into the trucks.

by James Herriot

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Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Farms. The most striking difference between the Yorkshire farmland of the 1930s and that of the 1970s was the disappearance of the small farm. The advent of large business and the increasingly mechanized techniques applied in farming to stimulate productivity created a vastly different world. Horses were replaced by tractors, hand-milking was replaced by machines, and in Herriot's view, a bit of the personality of the people was lost:


I think [the farmers] have altered most of all; the hard-bitten old characters with their idiosyncrasies and their black-magic cures who formed such a fertile source for my writing are very hard to find now. They have been largely replaced by the new breed of highly knowledgeable young men whose skill has made British agriculture so efficient, but who are not as interesting as their fore-fathers.

(Herriot, The Best of James Herriot, p. 22)


Agricultural technology. Technological advances have largely changed the farming industry, decreasing the amount of labor needed and increasing the yield of crops and livestock.

A mechanical milker was introduced to northern England in 1939 at the Great Yorkshire Show, held at the time in Halifax. The original contraption was powered by an oil-fueled engine. Though electricity did not reach the Dales until the 1940s and 1950s, and despite the relative slowness of the first machine (which took about eight minutes to milk a cow, the same time as a person) it was the first step toward mechanizing the dairy farmer's tasks. Quickly improved upon, the machine became popular.

The most visible, and audible, development in farming, however, was the tractor. Though the tractor had been invented earlier, it took quite a while before it became a fixture in York-shire. Economic slumps in the 1930s and 1940s, along with an abundance of cheap labor, made their use superfluous. There were about 55,000 tractors on English farms in 1939. A subsequent need to produce a large quantity of food during World War II, coupled with the shortage of labor, caused a quadrupling in the number of tractors in use by 1945. The advent of the tractor brought an enormous increase in the productivity of British agriculture and helped spark the replacement of much manual labor by machines.

Reception. "When I first started to write at the advanced age of fifty," wrote Herriot, "I thought it would stop at one book and nobody would ever discover the identity of the obscure veterinary surgeon who had scribbled his experiences in snatched moments of spare time" (Herriot, James Herriot's Yorkshire, p. 22). Despite his modest expectations, Herriot's first book went on to sell 50 million copies in twenty countries.

The reception of All Creatures Great and Small was almost universally positive. A main reason for the book's popularity was its tenderheartedness and the simple honesty of the stories told. "What the world needs now, and does every so often, is a warm, G-rated, down-home, and unadrenalized prize of a book that sneaks onto the bestseller lists for no apparent reason other than a certain floppy-eared puppy appeal" (Doerner, p. 88). This gentleness in Herriot's writing allowed readers an easy familiarity with his book's stories. Each new story, explained one critic, was like meeting an old friend again and feeling as if no time had been spent apart (Gillebaard, p. 4).

Negative reviews mentioned the moralistic quality of Herriot's tales, the repetitiveness of some of his stories, and his use of abrupt plot shifts. Perhaps reflecting an urban reaction to rural life, some reviewers faulted the monotony of farm life and the veterinarian's tendency toward "Disneyization, i.e., rule by lovable animals" (Lingeman, p. 13).

By and large, however, the public loved the stories of the country vet, and All Creatures Great and Small was an immediate bestseller. The author himself felt like it was almost too much of a success. Though he was grateful to fans who wanted his autograph, he said on at least one occasion that he much preferred his privacy.