Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800-1930.

By Barry Reay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxv plus 288pp.).

Dawes spent more on his motor car in 1908 (a Siddeley) than any one of them [the local labourers] was likely to earn in twenty or twenty-five years . . . his shooting costs in 1906 would have supported 600 labouring families for a week . . . his annual dog-biscuit bill was the equivalent of the yearly wage of two agricultural labourers. (p. 15)

Building upon his earlier The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers, which chronicled 1838 events in Hernhill, this current work explains how the sheer drudgery endured by the rural labouring population structured their social experience. Microhistories is about the way that inequality permeated social ties and private relations among the majority of inhabitants in several communities in the Blean, a pays in the Kentish countryside between Faversham and Canterbury. Their exploitation made it possible for landowners -men like Edwyn Dawes - to treat their dogs with more kindness than was offered to their human neighbors. Yet, curiously, Reay really only deals with one side of this equation - the exploiting classes are absent from this account.

Reay's survey considers not only the quality but also quantity of human life. He is concerned with both budgets and demography. The study is based on a "total reconstitution" of the available sources. As he writes, "Microhistories can be read as an experiment in combining the oral, demographic and social-structural, an incursion across borders into territories and traditions of historical research which - to their collective and individual poverty - have too long maintained artificially separate agendas, strategies and personnel." (p. 261) Parish registers provide Reay with a way of creating family-centered databases so that he can connect individuals' life-cycles with the historical contours of the social economy. The vital registers of births, deaths and marriages are supplemented with a rich array of other sources - Parliamentary inquiries, local accounts of almost every description, legal records, estate records, school registers, and so on - and cross-linked with the oral testimonies of many survivors who lived long enough to tell their stories to earnest men and women with tape recorders who were influenced by the post-Thompson surge of interest in history from below. Researchers deposited their materials with the University of Kent's "Oral History Project: Life in Kent before 1914." These interviews were supplemented by others conducted by the author himself in 1991-2. Over and over again, at key points in the text, Reay's sensitivity and the piercing directness of his oral sources create a positive feedback system in which the whole is much more than sum of its parts. Furthermore, some of the parts are wonderful.

Reay's treatment of the demographic profile of social life in the Blean is magnificent. Demography is far too important a part of social experience to be left to demographers who are too often content to dessicate social experience and "explain" its variation. Better than anything else I have read, this book shows social historians how quantitative measures can be - and should be - incorporated into their concerns with the recuperation of lived experiences. In the Victorian Blean, high rates of illegitimacy and bridal pregnancy were a reflection of the early onset of sexual relations which characterized plebeian courtship processes. Marriage was early for women - many were teenagers and fully 75 per cent of brides were under twenty-five. The passion between the sexes - and, perhaps, some improvements in maternal health - ensured a high level of reproduction in the first decade of marriage. In the Blean, early marriage and higher fecundity in a woman's twenties were connected with the beginnings of stopping procedures - such as the "push him off" method of birth control - that were employed to limit total fertility. There is a gaping chasm between the early modern family reconstitution studies and the aggregated analyses of provincial data-sets from the post-1870 period; in the two short chapters on "Fertility" and "Mortality" Reay shows how the long eighteenth-century's Demographic Revolution led to the late Victorians' Demographic Transition. This is no mean accomplishment since most previous commentators have kept each period in isolation from the other to the impoverishment of both. After reading Reay's discussion of Victorian demography it will no longer be possible to do that. Future students of the fertility decline will find this discussion of transitional strategies to be required reading. And always the reader is urged to connect the demographic with the social so that the discussion of mortality is not bogged down in statistics but connected with the physical discomforts and pains of chronically bad health. Not only did the people of the Blean die frequently, but their children were constantly at risk throughout this whole period.

The second part of Microhistories is concerned with the social economy of work and wages, the experience and consciousness of class, and the organization of family life. This is great stuff. In each of these chapters, Reay quite deliberately begins by situating his discussion within - and sometimes against - the historiographical mainstream. Thus, for example, in the fifth chapter on "Class" he wonders if the "demotion of the urban working class" has relevance for his rural folk. While he is willing to take into account Patrick Joyce's qualms about the hegemony of class consciousness, Reay's villagers are shown to have been able to invoke the polarity of "big" and "little" alongside other forms of classification such as occupation, age, or gender whenever these seemed appropriate. Thus, among agricultural labourers there was a hierarchy with the waggoner at the top, followed by the waggoner's mate, second man, third man, second boy, third boy, and so on. Furthermore, labor was organized bi-modally - a few "constant men" and the vast bulk of casual workers. The upshot is that under the microhistorian's focus, neat class boundaries are shown to have been multi-faceted as well as individually constructed in relation to particular contexts. Yet, I could not help wondering why he had not questioned his informants about the ways in which the repressive aftermath of the Battle of Bossenden Wood had conditioned attitudes to authority among the descendants of the convicted rioters. The "rural proletariat" in the Blean - about two-thirds of its population - was coherent in terms of its social and occupational position. This resulted from their almost complete divorce from ownership of both the means of production and the physical plant - the carts, ploughs, horses, hops, oats, and all the other equipments needed to farm the land. In addition, this class was "self-replicating." It was largely endogamous, and rarely moved outside the native pays - roughly three-quarters of the adult population lived within five miles of its place of birth.

The chapter on "Families" starts with a brief tour of what has now become the conventional wisdom about the nuclearity and kinlessness of the "immutable" English family. This framework sets up Reay's analysis of the mid-Victorian censuses which are cross-linked with his other data-sets. Years ago, Alan Everitt wrote about the "cousinage" among the Kentish gentry. These linkages dominated kinship matters by connecting formally-separate households; now, Reay's reconstitution of the kin ties that lay outside the walls of the nuclear family households of the subaltern classes makes much the same kind of point. As he writes so astringently, "There is a warning here for those who would read early-modern conditions into the nineteenth-century rural world. The structures of kinship were in place in Hernhill; families had kin all about them." (p. 167) So much for Macfarlane and Laslett!

The fourth chapter on "Social Economy" is the cornerstone of Reay's study. It is as concerned with the ways of earning money as those for spending it. Thus, the discussion of wages makes fine distinctions that take into account different classes of labor and different times of the year. The weather, too, was significant; in a survey of laborers it was found that, on average, they lost eighty-five days to rain and frost as well as not working Sundays. The upshot was that rural proletarians' family economies were cash-starved - adult male breadwinners were paid miserably which meant that all hands were set to work in a makeshift economy of expedients. For all those families which were not headed by "constant men" - who were not only employed regularly but also received much higher wages than the run-of-the-mill laborers - life was a continual contrivance. Those who are attracted to the recent historiographical concern to show that gender antagonisms took precedence over the centripetal forces holding families together will not find much support for their contentions that the struggle for the breeches was played out with the same intensity as the struggle for survival. In the Blean, the laborers' family economy was their primum mobile. The "enforced vegetarianism" (p. 122) of the Kentish laboring population meant that, for many, even dogs's biscuits might have been appealing fare. Indeed, letters home from emigrants to New Zealand and Australia suggest that dogs got more to eat in the antipodean colonies than laborers did in Kent. Social historians, following the lead of Olwen Hufton, are now cognizant of the catch-as-catch-can nature of the working-class family's "budget." Reay's fourth chapter is a splendid addition to this bibliography which artfully combines archival research with a painstaking analysis of the words of survivors from this world of narrow expectations and close horizons that gave its inhabitants an abiding sense of "social captivity." (p. 149)

The archived words of the survivors from a world we have lost pierced this reader's heart for many of the same reasons that the eyes in the photographs of long-dead Americans affected me when viewing Ken Bums' documentary on the Civil War. It is corny - but still true - to say that their words brought that past to life in a way that is beyond the reach of even the best and most sensitive historian. Reay is sensitive to the nuanced complexities of the past; his study gains immeasurably from his ability to weave these participants' observations into his second-hand reconstruction of their world although I cannot understand why are there no photos of Len Austin, Dorothy Tong, or any of the other people whose recollections were used so often and with such great effect. If eyes are the windows of the soul - and this is shown to almost shattering effect in Richard Avedon's collection of photographs In the American West - then a chance was missed here. These people from the past are somehow not quite fully personalized in Reay's account which is, in the end, that kind of microhistory which abstracts individuals in the quest for group experience. Social historians do not usually get the chance to personalize their subjects but, in Reay's case, the splendid collection of oral testimonies gives him that opportunity. I don't know why he didn't grasp it since this very fine book would have been even better if the structural argument was cross-cut with a few biographical examples to illustrate how the group experiences worked themselves out over time in individuals' lives - in the way that Le Roy Ladurie did with his miniatures of Pierre Maury, Beatrice de Planissoles, Bernard Clergue and the other Occitan villagers. English historians will have to wait a little bit longer to find their Montaillou. Stubborn particularities would have given more depth to this account of social experience.

The third section of this book on "Cultures" - of sexuality and literacy - was not quite as interesting as the first two. The chapter on sexuality is about illegitimacy, bridal pregnancy and youthful proletarians' resistance to the new-Malthusian chorus beseeching them to enact moral restraint on the passion between the sexes. Like the literature it criticizes, Reay's discussion of plebeian sexuality is largely based on deduction since there was obvious reticence on the part of his informants about what are perceived to be confidential parts of their lives. This chapter is, therefore, long on quantification and the public record from depositions offered in court cases but, alas, short on evidence about what we might term non-deviant affairs. The penultimate chapter on literacy and orality meticulously details who could read and who could write to confirm the historiographical commonplace that taking a signature as a proxy for literacy is simple-minded and that "Graphs can be misleading." Furthermore, the mere ability to sign or mark is put in its place - it was a skill that testifies more to the organization of knowledge through schooling practices rather than to much else. In the Victorian Blean, most of the reading materials were connected to prescriptive religious knowledge and seem to have come off second-best in relation to the "resilient orality" of its population. In both of these chapters there is an air of special pleading which sits oddly with the informed sensitivity that marks the rest of the text.

English social historians will find it instructive to consider Microhistories alongside a re-reading of the relevant chapters from W. G. Hoskins' The Midland Peasant. It is a comparative exercise that shows Reay's achievement to its best effect. Since Hoskins' book is deservedly called a "classic," I anticipate that Microhistories will be seen in the same way forty years after its publication. Could one give Reay's study higher praise? I think not.

David Levine OISE/University of Toronto