Mary Mitford was the leading writer of the early nineteenth-century sketch in English. Published originally in literary journals and annuals, she collected her sketches in the five volumes of Our Village. The sketches display their own limitations, both in their subject matter and the treatment of the village’s unchangingness. Mitford also stations her work as secondary in her use of quotations by earlier authors. Yet simultaneously the sketches contain gentle social criticism that their own form conceals, what I call a “licensed criticism” of English rural life in the period.