There is a yearning for the pastoral idyll that lies at the heart of Howards End, but Forster’s veneration for the rural is often complicated by its dependence on lower-class characters who do not feature prominently within the text. Instead, the author’s penchant for pastoral imagery is more commonly aligned with his upper-middle-class protagonists, who come to find peace and beauty among the natural surroundings of the English country-house. This paper seeks to examine the degree to which Forster might have been conscious of this displacement of the “very poor” within the novel, and to critically untangle his offhand-claim that he was “not concerned” with the lives or livelihood of such people who nevertheless contribute their labour in service of an idealized pastoral landscape he so passionately admires. In determining Forster’s intentions behind contrasting two so distinctly opposing socio-economic groups, we might also unearth some of the author’s more intricate anxieties about the Edwardian class system, and how the author might reconcile what many critics have labelled his ‘bourgeois-liberal guilt’ with his unmistakeable admiration for a rural working-life so emblematic of the pastoral condition.