In this sense, then, the intellectual cult of the rural folk was a nostalgic fantasy of a time working people recognized their inferiority and acknowledged due deference to their social superiors.
As John Carey (1992: 105) observes of intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, they "preferred peasants to almost any other variety of human being, since they were ecologically sound, and their traditional qualities of dour endurance, respect their betters and illiteracy meant that the intellectual's superiority was in little danger from theme.