Another variant of "Merry England" was promoted in the "organic community" of F. R. Leavis by which he seems to have meant a community with a deeply rooted and locally self-sufficient culture that he claimed existed in the villages of 17th and 18th century England and which was destroyed by the machine and mass culture introduced by the industrial revolution. Historians of the era say that the idea was based on a misreading of history and that such communities had never existed.