Review essay: re-membering the past.

The Likes of Us. A Biography of the White Working Class. By Michael Collins (London: Granta Books, 2004. 274 pp.).

The Long Sexual Revolution. English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975. By Hera Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiii plus 412 pp.).

Our Hidden Lives. The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain. Edited by Simon Garfield (London: Ebury Press, 2004. 536 pp.).

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. By Jonathan Rose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, ix plus 534 pp.).

How do we know what we know? Or, to hew more closely to the historian's point, how do we know what we remember? Is what we remember, what we used to know? What relationship is there between what we remember and what we experienced? Or, is it just the residue of past experience filtered through the bumps of time? The four books under consideration here look at this thorny knot of interpretation from very distinctive viewpoints; and, not surprisingly, give the historian pause to reflect on the value of "primary" memory.

It is, of course, a commonplace of legal journalism that eye-witnesses do not always agree on what they saw; a series of televised, high-profile trials in the USA have made this abundantly clear. And, the nature of trial-evidence is that what gets argued in court is what the prosecution thinks fits its agenda; other evidence--alternate hypotheses of the issue-at-law--can only with great legal-gymnastics be brought into the record. If the prosecution of O.J. Simpson brought this partial construction of "evidence" into the public consciousness, the proliferation of alternative hypotheses on internet web-sites has been largely spawned by a kind of agit-prop dissatisfaction with the narrowness and partiality of the prosecutors' documentation. Historiographically, then, the issue of a knowable present is no less complicated than that of a knowable past.

Jonathan Rose's splendid book on the British working-classes' intellectual life makes a magisterial contribution to educational history, highlighting the inadequacies of "social control" models that issued from the past generation of scholars' revision of the heroic story of gradual evolution and, to be sure, improvement. Or, to put the matter more clearly, Rose's arguments about the thirst for learning among students serves to contradict the supposed hegemony of the regulation of knowledge that administrators sought to impose of pliable young minds. Compulsory education might have been unsuccessful in reaching into the souls of the young and stirring their imaginations partly because it never tried to do that but mostly because such an attempt would have been contrary to the administrative mandates for a peculiarly-defined "moral education".

Edmond Holmes was a Victorian-English schools inspector in the 1870s and 1880s; his memoirs make it clear that his job's measure of success was to be found in its moral regulation of the collective consciousness. Holmes' memoirs, written decades later, reveal him to have been an ardent proponent of 'social control' during his tenure in office. Holmes writes,

  examinees ... belonged to the 'lower orders' and as (according to the
  belief in which I had been allowed to grow up) the lower orders were
  congenitally inferior to the 'upper classes' I took little or no
  interest in my examinees either as individuals or as human beings, and
  have never tried to explore their hidden depths. Indeed the idea of
  their having hidden depths was foreign to my way of thinking, and had
  it ever presented itself to my mind I should probably have dismissed
  it with a disdainful smile. (1)

The moralizing pedagogy provided to the examinees in the British-state's compulsory schools was, he later came to understand, "in the highest degree anti-educational". The average fourteen year-old school-leaver would have been subjected to 2000 "scripture lessons" and 3000 "reading lessons" in the course of her/his "acutely de-vitalizing" schooling. (2) Having survived an educational economy that prescribed endless hours of repetition and hymn singing, successful school-leavers--the products of both private, Malthusian families and a public, moralized pedagogies--were given a 'certificate' which completed their formal schooling and sanctioned their entry into the labour market. To his great credit, when he later came to consider the implications of his life's work, Holmes was appalled by the suffering that this policy had inflicted on the imaginations of its young victims. Yet such pedagogical activities were key elements in the exercise o f formal subordination of these youngsters; their consent was externalized in public declarations and exercises of submission while being internalized in their private thoughts and deeds. The mandate of modern education was made operational by the administrative machinery of the educational-state which was concerned to manufacture, reproduce, and internalize consent by forming its citizens in its own image. This is the usual story told by the social control school of educational history; but it is a story that is contradicted by the collection of former-scholars' memories that form the evidentiary basis of Rose's study.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is both a joy and a pleasure to read. I cannot recommend it too highly. Standing astride the frontier between literary history, popular culture, educational history, and the social history of reading, Rose has consulted almost two thousand autobiographical writings produced by British workers--encompassing literally everything published to the reams of unpublished memoirs collected by David Vincent and John Burnett at Keele University. This means that Rose's sample is not limited to well-known works such as Flora Thompson's classic Lark Rise to Candleford or William Lovett's Life and Struggles for, additionally, he draws examples from a vast array of essentially-unknown works by writers whose destiny was obscure and whose life's struggles were described in long-forgotten, unpublished manuscripts. Many of these manuscripts languished unread and unknown before Burnett and Vincent issued a public request for submissions, rather akin to that issued for demographic materials by Peter Laslett a generation earlier.

Rose is clever enough to let these writers speak for themselves; and they do so in the most touching manner imaginable. Thus, Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until during her last illness, at age fifty-four. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and "mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read." (5) Rose's eye for the well-positioned quotation gives these working-people voice and, in so doing, stands almost directly opposed to both Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, which decried contemporary popular culture (in the post-war period) as being "full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions", and also to the astonishingly-elitist claims of the past president of M.L.A., Barbara Herrnstein Smith, who claimed that it was an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." (4, italics in original) Indeed, one can only wonder what Herrnstein Smith would make of the following vignette?

  Joseph Keating (b. 1871) read little but boys' magazines and 3d.
  thrillers until he stumbled across Greek philosophy. He was
  particularly struck by the Greek precept "Know thyself," and pursued
  that goal by reading until 3 a.m. As a collier he was performing one
  of the toughest and worst paid jobs in the mine--shovelling out tons
  of refuse for a half-crown a day--when he heard a coworker sigh,
  "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate." Keating was
  stunned: "You are quoting Pope." "Ayh," replied his companion, "me and
  Pope do agree very well." (241)

The Intellectual Life is studded with stories like that of Nancy Sharman's mother's eyes or Joseph Keating's co-worker's sigh, quoting Alexander Pope in the blackness, down the pit. There is not only an individual power to these stories but, perhaps more significantly, a cumulative force to their repetition. They give the lie to ignorant arrogance by providing a telling insight into the liberating force of compulsory education in the lives of the first two or three generations of scholars in the public school system. Quite literally, these youngsters were forced to be free--free from drudgery and the soul-numbing work that robbed them of their childhoods and stifled their imaginative freedom. Schooling might have been inspired by Holmesian demands for conformity and repetition but some kids--how many?--rebelled and in their rebellion found intellectual liberation. This is a most important corrective to the model of educational history which sees only the "social control" aspects of compulsory schooling.

Rose's autobiographers discovered a new world of adventure, liberation, and escape in reading. When they were provided with the tools for cracking the cultural codes of their "tradition" they were both culturally conservative--drawn much more to "classics" like Shakespeare and Dickens than to contemporary authors--and willing to sacrifice both time and money in the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. The predominant sense one has from Rose's account is that those who wrote down their experiences often went without food and sleep in order to exercise their imaginations. And, they did their reading by candlelight.

The overwhelming provenance of these memoirs is concentrated "in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the achievement of mass literacy but before radio and television, [when] working-class culture was saturated by the spirit of mutual education." (83) Of course, these autobiographies are a skewed sample--largely male, overwhelmingly labour aristocrats, and heavily biased towards the respectable culture of improvement and uplift. Interestingly, the Communists come in for very rough treatment from Rose's autobiographers: some like Hymie Fagan (b. 1903) disliked the Party's policing of its members and were skeptical of its intimate connections with Moscow; others like J.T. Murphy (b. 1888) walked away, having concluded that:

  it was as if we had been released from a condition of continuous
  tension, common to the life of Communists, wherein all one's thoughts
  are concentrated on the party and its work, its associations, its
  people, its doctrine, to the exclusion of the larger world around us.
  The more I have thought about the way in which we lived previously the
  less surprised I am that the Communist Party made so little headway.
  (302);

while others disliked the Marxist "smokescreen of jargon", the quasi-Wesleyan revivalism, and the odious personalities of party hacks and their toadies. And their animus towards, and suspicion of, individual communists--"not only unemployed .... but often distinctly unemployable people, with a turn for violent language and a yearning for violent action" (309--was seemingly justified: thus it seems unsurprising that three quarters of the Accrington communists switched sides in 1939 and went over en masse to the local branch of the Fascists which had been opened by Oswald Mosely himself. The atmosphere of furtive shiftiness and moronic bigotry got right up the nose of Margaret McCarthy who was appalled by the "show trials" she witnessed in a Glasgow party chapter-meeting in 1934.

The blend of initial attraction--but ultimate repulsion--that characterized the autobiographers' experiences with the Communist Party is indicative of their essential "Englishness". They were largely cut from a Labour Party/Nonconformist cloth that valued independence, that found inspiration in incremental self-improvement, and that, as Cromwell would have said, "fought for what they knew and knew what they loved". Reading about these people gave me a strong sense of deja vu, all over again: E.P. Thompson's great essay "The Peculiarities of the English" [in The Poverty of Theory] argues strenuously that in order to understand the collective character of the English working class it is necessary to jettison the tidy Platonism of "Parisian philosophies" and come to grips with the culture of a class of people who were attracted not only to the genius of Shakespeare and Dickens but also to independence and respectable self-control championed by popular classics such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels as well as Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. These were the stuff of the British plebeian imagination. And, Rose provides tables of statistics to buttress this assertion.

The heroic period of working-class intellectual life was from about 1870 until the end of the 1940s. This was the period of the "traditional" British working class--cloth caps and tweed jackets, seaside holidays and fish-and-chips, two-up/two-down housing with their front parlours kept "for best"; it was also the period of working-class political awakening, massive urbanization, the penny post, the daily newspaper, the "wireless" radio and, latterly, the cinema. Rose does a wonderful job explicating how a sample of plebeians experienced this historical moment. He is less surefooted, however, in setting this moment into its historical context--so while we hear a bit about the Empire and the Industrial Revolution--we actually learn next-to-nothing about their working lives, other leisure activities, their families, or their personal emotions. The Intellectual Life is concentrated on thinking individuals who emerged from a quite distinctive cultural milieu, and while Rose is generally adept at handling its more obvious elements, he is not so much clumsy as neglectful in addressing the larger forces that led to the invention of this "traditional" working class as well as its demise. But this is a niggle; the overwhelming sense I gained from reading Rose's account of these autobiographers was not a condescending pity towards the quiet desperation of their lives but, rather, a profound admiration for their steadfast determination to be heroes in their own lives.

Hera Cook's, The Long Sexual Revolution provides a kind of reverse-image to Rose's male memoirs. If Rose's book is largely about what males were thinking about their intellectuality, Cook's book is mostly about what females were doing (and not doing) with their sexuality. Yet, curiously, these two books' concerns dovetail rather neatly. To be sure, Cook's "data" are focussed on demographic statistics but Rose's monograph makes it plain that there is enough anecdotal information for her to have ventured more bravely into the realm of conjectural history. In this regard, she is caught in a researcher's dilemma since there is a silence on issues pertaining to sexuality in many Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies and memoirs but other historians have been able to remedy this lacunae. David Vincent's discussion of working-class autobiographies from the pre-1850 period provides a relevant example (3); so, too does Wally Seccombe's use of survey materials in his article "Starting to Stop" (4), and the voluminous correspondence directed to Marie Stopes. For a social historian, this kind of direct personal testimony has to be privileged over the more accessible marriage manuals and sex guides which told people what to do--a different matter from what they actually did.

Carlo Ginzburg tells us that "if you start with different problems you have to look for different evidence ... I think that you also have to change the rules of historical method in some ways because you have to learn how to handle that different evidence. So you also have to change the standards of proof." (5) Cook's resolutely empirical analysis precludes much in the way of conjecture. This is a pity because her book provides a brilliant examination of the various elements in a multi-dimensional interaction that need to be considered in coming to terms with the massive shifts in reproduction that took place between the 1820s and 1930s. Anyone interested in the historical experience of declining fertility can benefit from reading Cook's work. It is, quite literally, good to think with.

One is led to wonder how specific these changes were to England (and the English) since the decline of fertility was a trans-Atlantic phenomenon, that encompassed rural- and urban-dwellers, bourgeois and proles alike. To be sure, the timing of the decline varied among classes, regions, and nations but the overwhelmingly-significant aspect of this process is its universality. Sociologists have been quick to label this concatenation of social forces as "modernization"; historians have been equally quick to point out the extra-ordinary glibness of their colleagues' heuristic construct. Yet, the remaking of social and geographical public landscapes seems to have been paralleled by the remaking of internally-disciplined private arenas. And, if the English example so artfully explicated by Cook points towards a system of control/abstinence then what does this novel surveillance of the body have to do with "modernization"--the large-scale processes of rapid means of communication and mass education, public heath movements and social welfare legislation, mass consumerism, the intrusion of science (and pseudo-science like eurgenics) into social-policy making, and the more generalized phenomenon of nationalized mass societies triggered by the militarization of national economies in the second half of the nineteenth century? Furthermore, if Cook's argument concerning the female-controlled 'method' of abstinence is given its due then what, exactly, are we to make of apparent differences in patriarchy between, say, England, Spain, and Poland when all three countries displayed roughly-similar demographic trajectories, over roughly-similar time frames?

Cook's book is about "contraception and sexuality, the relevant physical sexual event is heterosexual penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse. For variety, this act is also referred to as coitus, intercourse, penetrative intercourse, sexual intercourse, and sex." (5) Alas, this is a love-less sexuality; the question of romance hardly breaks the surface, which is problematic since the modernization of marriage has pivotted on the sentimentalization of the marital bond and the intensification of emotions within the nuclear family unit. In contrast, Cook approaches the subject by arguing that one can--indeed, one must--begin the discussion by referring to demographic statistics: "alterations in fertility rates also tell us more than any other evidence can about the sexual experience of the majority of women but historians of sexuality have ignored reproduction." (12) For Cook, this oversight has had significant costs in that for most women in the past, heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse and its material consequences (i.e., pregnancy and childbearing/rearing) have been activities in which "desire is peripheral and risk is central." (12) The issue of risk is, therefore, central to Cook's argument.

At the outset, Cook introduces the reader to "Gross Reproduction Rate 1751-1976" in Figure 1.1 on page 15. This graphic illustration of the massive shifts in the number of births per woman during the past 250 years depicts a roller-coaster ride in which fertility rose to a peak in the early nineteenth century, then inexorably declined to its low-point in the 1930s, rising again to a new peak in the 1950s, before making its recent plunge in the context of reliable birth-control provided by the estrogen pill. The initial rise, from 1750 to the 1820s, is of little interest to Cook and is treated rather cursorily in comparison with her main focus on the Victorians' culture of control which led to a truly epochal change in sexual behaviour that persisted into the second quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed, the discussion of this "culture of control", its repression of sexuality, and the growth of "learned ignorance" about the body and reproduction is probably the most interesting part of the book. Cook's discussion of this "culture of control" also parallels Rose's focus on working-class intellectuals and their imbrication in new methods of cultural reproduction. So, that is what I will focus upon in these comments.

Taking the long view, Cook argues that while the element of risk always made sexual intercourse a game of jeopardy for women--because they were the ones who bore the consequences, as it were. Victorian women acted energetically to control that risk. Because abstinence was the only reliable method of birth control, Cook argues that the massive declines observable in the Gross Reproduction Rate can only be explained by highlighting the reduction in heterosexual, penile-vaginal relations that would have led to pregnancy. Single women of all classes--for their own reasons--were less likely to engage in sexual intercourse before marriage; married women--for their own reasons--were less likely to engage in sexual intercourse after marriage or, to be more precise, after getting their reproductive ducks in a row.

Cook, then, contests the Foucauldian claim that sexuality was "everywhere" in nineteenth-century society. (6) Well, she partly-disputes this claim; what Hera Cook suggests is that sex was evacuated from the respectable orbit of social relations and siphoned into the burgeoning sex-trades. Cook notes that while syphilis had a low rate of mortality, there were actually high death rates from syphilis "among men of the unskilled labouring class and men of the middle and professional classes". (80) Deaths from syphillis rose especially rapidly in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While Cook never says so--in so many words--male sexual 'needs' are assumed to have had an almost-metronomic constancy which could only be met by the expansion of the sex-trade, outside marriage and also outside the orbit of respectable social relations. (7) Were prostitutes--like sewers and soap--thus crucial to creating the bourgeois culture of inner and outer cleanliness?

This is hardly a new argument; in fact, Henry Mayhew's surveys of London street life in the middle of the nineteenth century suggested it; so, too, did the campaigns against the "Contagious Diseases Acts" which criminalized women workers in the sex-trades but not their customers. Indirectly, the massive growth of sexually-transmitted disease--principally syphillis--can be charted from the fact that as late as 1924 (some fifty years after the mid-Victorian scare) mortality from syphillis was higher than from cancer and tuberculosis. (94-95) Unfortunately, Cook never delves into the details concerning the spread of syphillis during the third and fourth quarters of the nineteenth century. This would have been an illuminating addition to her discussion because of the key role that the mid-Victorian scare played in promoting the new climate of sexual fear-and-loathing that led to the increase in abstinence and learned ignorance in their havens from the heartless world.

Intriguingly, Cook notes that the 'feedback' from the purchase of extra-marital sexual services needs to be linked with the increasing control over sex in marriage, which is witnessed by the long decline in fertility, from the peak in the 1820s to the nadir in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Cook doesn't try to quantify this feedback by providing more analysis of the numbers of prostitutes, the numbers of clients, and the way in which these two categories were linked to sexual abstinence within marriage. In a sense, then, Cook gives us a list of the players but doesn't set them in motion; there is, thus, a static quality to this discussion. Something of the acuity and--dare one say?--penetration of her argument gets lost in the process.

These comments largely reflect my concerns; Hera Cook's book is far richer than I have indicated. Her treatment of "qualitative sources" such as sex manuals, social scientific surveys, biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and novels makes for fascinating reading. Having recourse to this kind of documentation gives women's own, lived experiences a central role in her discussion, thereby significantly enriching this account. However, there is a problem of chronological balance with this material: Cook's reliance on mid- to late-twentieth-century sources rather unbalance the book's treatment of its subject since perhaps two-thirds to three-quarters of its pages deal with recent times--since 1930--as opposed to the last two generations at turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the real action took place as fertility was brought within the calculus of conscious choice. That said, I was particularly impressed with Cook's discussion explicating the mid-twentieth century fertility rise that emerged after the nadir of 1933 (when there was a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.72 births per woman) and were engulfed in the post-war 'baby boom' as well as her discussion of the impact of the estrogen pill in contributing to the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, Cook is more willing to venture into the contested terrain of conjectural history.

Cook's venture into conjectural history is greatly aided by the much greater willingness of late-moderns to talk about themselves, their feelings, and their experiences in detail--endlessly, in the confessional mode that has become such a widespread feature of contemporary 'reality culture'. Too much data can be as troublesome and confusing as too little; the scholar who investigates the Victorian/Edwardian silence would be astonished (and appalled) at listening to late-moderns who frequently open their mouths only because they like to hear themselves talking. Their expectation that all experience must to be 'authentic', doesn't mean that what they say can be taken on its own valuation. Like all historical data, the logorrhea of psycho-babblers needs to be evaluated in the context of other evidence.

The massive, twentieth-century project of seeing history from the bottom-up has been greatly facilitated by the creation of enormous data-sets--such as, for example, the American narratives of former slaves collected under the auspices of the WPA in the Depression--that have been explicitly created to give voice to the marginal, dispossessed, and usually-silenced majority. In earlier centuries, only unique documents gave us a comparable kind of insight into the ideas of "men of the people" like a Pierre Maury or a Domenico Scandella. The force of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's account of the Cathar villagers of early fourteenth-century Montaillou and the Friulian miller's cosmography in Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms are both directly attributable to the sheer rarity of the insights they afforded into lost mentalities. Questions of 'representativeness' were begged, to be sure; but such questions were small potatoes in comparison to seeing the light that still shone from these long-dead stars. Learning about these obscure and peculiar men greatly expanded our understanding of the complexity of the past. Could Bakhtin, for example, have claimed that atheism was "impossible" in the Renaissance if had he encountered Rabelais' near-contemporary Menocchio and read about his thoughts on the origins of life?

One of the great projects in preserving the voice of the common people in the twentieth century was the English Mass Observation Archive, which began in 1936 when Tom Harrisson decided that the everyday world of his neighbours in Bolton, Lancashire, was just as interesting for an anthropologist as the more exotic society of the cannibals he had studied in the South Pacific. In pursuing his goal of getting ordinary people to put down their thoughts on ordinary matters, the impact of the war and its reverberations in social life were the primary issues that hundreds of volunteer diarists focussed upon. (8) Simon Garfield has edited five of these diaries in Our Hidden Lives; they start in May, 1945 and peter out in the spring of 1948, although one of the correspondents assiduously kept sending in his observations until the height of Beatlemania in 1965.

The overwhelming impression drawn from these five diaries is one of soldiering on, as Britons were urged to try to win the peace with the same spirit, steadfastness, and courage that had helped them win the war. The usual elements in the story of the age of austerity--rationing of food, fuel and electricity, shirking and skyving, and tendentious impatience with governmental regulations--are, of course, touched upon by these diarists. So, too, is the widespread anti-Americanism (9) and--quite surprisingly--an anti-Semitism that was both visceral and nauseatingly-pervasive, even in the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. (10) Overall, this book was decidedly less than the sum of its parts. My dissatisfaction may stem from shortness of the correspondents' sometimes-daily accounts. Garfield has presented us with a collection of snippets, almost completely lacking in anything beyond the humdrum of quotidien realities. Is that what history is to become in the age of late modernity--knowing more and more about less and less?

Our Hidden Lives has the distinction of being based on " hard" historical evidence--primary documents generated by members of the ordinary, common people. Michael Collins' The Likes of Us is different; the author traces his roots in Southwark back to his great-great-great-grandfather's birth in 1816. Collins got great good-fortune when the Lions of Millwall somehow found themselves in the FA Cup Final against the mercenary millionaires of Manchester United at just the time when this book was published. For a fortnight it was the Millwall Davids going up against the Goliaths from OldTrafford; Collins was very fortunate to have had his book published in this heady atmosphere of topsyturvydom. In the tribalized world of football, Millwall FC is very much a local representative of south-east London's "White Working Class" (the book's subtitle). Collins' Southwark was a small world, hedged in by the Thames and the railway lines; but it was hardly cut off from flows of people and/or information. Traffic was ever-present; it had been a constant in this part of the capital since Chaucer's pilgrims set off for Canterbury from Kent Street.

Collins locates the unremarkable lives of his forebears who lived in close proximity to the Elephant and Castle until the massive, post-war urban regeneration of the Borough's heart turned the intimate warren of Southwark's streets and alleys into an Alphaville wasteland of traffic and shops. It was in this intensely-urban, Goddardian setting that Thomas Larter's descendants lived out their lives of Thoreauvian 'quiet desperation'. Unfortunately, Collins reach far exceeds his grasp; before his grandmother's earliest memories--dating from the turn of the twentieth century--he knows nothing about his earlier predecessors other than the almost-biblical "begats", burials, and their names. The Larters' demographic events are knit together into a "skeletal story" from parish records and census enumerations (16), and they are swaddled in a series of loosely-connected anecdotes and diversions. But nothing actually comes from the writings of the people-in-question. Like so many genealogically-identified ancestors, their names and dates exist outside their own experience. The modern interest in authenticity is blended with the late-modern fascination with feelings in the curious belief that if these long-dead predecessors can be identified then their lives can somehow be valued. Frankly, I don't get it. To be sure, these people experienced their own sufferings and satisfactions but we get no nearer to them by knowing their name or their date/place of birth or even their occupation. What is missing in this attempt to breathe authenticity into the past is these people themselves--their faces, their body-language, their reputations and nick-names, their feelings, their thoughts, and so on. Nonetheless, these names-from-the-past become like spectres haunting the past-in-the-present but unlike Pierre Maury or Domenico Scandella, their lives and thoughts have no experiential reality which we can appreciate and appropriate.

The best parts of The Likes of Us stem directly from Collins' grandmother's reminiscences. She was one of those proletarian women who had played many roles in the life of the neighbourhood but who ended up as attendants in its memory-museum, harbouring

  a knowledge of the history of its paving stones, bricks and windows
  that was encyclopedic. They remembered the accidents, fights, funerals
  and marriage break-ups that were played out before these walls,
  doorways, windows, kerbs and drains. It was a secret history, an oral
  history of the London that almost nobody knows. (181)

Nell Hall, born Caroline Larter in 1892, lived in that self-contained working-class world that was so intriguingly-different to university-educated men like Tom Harrisson, and several generations of explorers into Darkest England that preceded him. Places like Elephant and Castle were repeatedly 'discovered' by middle-class, university-educated men--first as authors in search of authenticity and then, a generation or two later, by social analysts in search of an organic popular culture. But what they found in Southwark was a newly-invented tradition. Collins writes that "The pattern of urban working class life and culture that was in place by the 1890s was one with which the tribe would be associated throughout the first half of the following century.... It was a culture created in isolation, distinct from the official culture of the country." (54) And yet--in direct contradiction to this statement, much of what Collins discusses was the response to national events such as Mafeking and the Blitz as well as national trends such as cinema-going, radio-listening, newspaper-reading, and urban redevelopment that all bulk large in this account.

Collins' sections about the quintessential little Cockney, Charley Chaplin, and his importance in the changing the imaginary horizons of Nell Hall, who had left school for work as soon as she could be ticketed out, is perhaps the point at which this account comes closest to the story drawn from Rose's didacticized, working-class autobiographers. But unlike Rose's subjects, Nell Hall was not a reader. She was a cinema-goer and a wireless-listener. These new technologies opened up the wider world--beyond the Elephant and Castle--to her imagination in much the same way that reading had done with an earlier generation. With Chaplin's little tramp, "improvement" looked like it might be given a radicalizing twist; but Collins is insistent that security in their sense of place gave Nell Hall and her cohort a strong sense of belonging and a distrust of radical politics of any stripe. That sense of belonging only disintegrated in the frenzy of post-war development which began in earnest after Attlee's Labour Government was ousted by Churchill's Tories in 1951: "after the bombs brought people together, the bulldozers pushed them apart." (254)

When E.P. Thompson inadvertently sounded the clarion call to the late modernization of social history, he sought to rescue plebeians from the "enormous condescension of posterity" that marginalized their intellect, their seriousness, and their sensitivity. After this famous mission-statement, he went on to write:

  Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to
  the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their
  communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary
  conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these
  times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations
  were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were
  casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as
  casualties. (11) (My emphasis)

The democratization of historical writing did not start in 1963 with this assertion but Thompson's claim was transformational in its impact. Here, in a short paragraph, an interpretive Pandora's Box was flung open. Afterwards, claimants for expanding the past would find legitimation for their views by referring back to the validity of "their own experience". This gave legitimacy not only to the "subaltern classes" but also to diverse elements such demography, climate, and work processes that were part-and-parcel of the kaleidoscopic arrangements that organize social life in both the past and the present.

Wanting the validate "their own experience" made it almost inevitable that researchers would look for documentation that went directly to their own words--in writing or else copied by an interviewer. Documentary remnants from the past that might never have been esteemed to have been worthy of archival protection have been sought out in order to try to get closer to "their own experience". To a significant extent, therefore, the books under review here fit into this historiographical tendency which seems to me to be so characteristic of late modernity. Each one examines elements of social experience to make sense of how ordinary people tried to square their aspirations with the constraints of their circumstances. But in very few instances are we actually given a fully-rounded portrait of these people but, rather, aspects of their lives--and the lives of their contemporaries--are assembled into group portraits, describing mentalities and representative lived experiences. (12)

These "representative" portraits are built upon a statistical appreciation of norms and averages to which social life conforms in the roughest approximations. In the process, something is gained in relation to the generalities of past experience but, equally, something is lost in terms of the peculiarities of these individuals. Perhaps this is an inevitable trade-off; evidence does not exist--indeed, it can not exist--that would enable us to reach back across time to locate the gazillion bytes of information needed to reconstruct their uniquely-individual images in the Seurat-like style of "historiographical pointillism". Yet the impossibility of this search for authenticity exerts a beguiling fascination for us--why?

Department of Theory and Policy Studies

Toronto, Ontario

M5S IV6

Canada

ENDNOTES

1. In Quest of an Ideal. (London, 1920), 64.

2. What Is and What Might Be. (London, 1911), 144, 146, 41.

3. "Love and death and the nineteenth-century working class," Social History 5 (1980), 223-247.

4. "Starting to Stop: Working-Class Fertility Decline in Britain," Past and Present 126 (1990), 151-188.

5. Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, "Carlo Ginzburg: An Interview," Radical History Review 35 (1986), 104.

6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York, 1980).

7. This line of argument is essentially parallel to Thomas Laqueur's method of "historicizing" Freud (Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [Cambridge, MA, 1990]).

8. A new Mass-Observation Project was begun in 1981, with more than 3,000 correspondents, who have written about mobile phones, Saturday afternoon recreations, and also their own perspectives on the great events of the times such as the Falklands War.

9. See, e.g., 16, 23, 84, 87, 89, 97, 101, 103, 145, 205.

10. On the viscerality of anti-Semitism see, e.g., 59, 119, 132, 169, 257, 430, 431, 432-433, 509; on more passive forms of anti-Semitism see, e.g., 25, 125, 166, 152, 244, 269, 298, 305, 328-329, 376, 453, 469.

11. The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth [reprint--originally published in 1963] 1991), 12.

12. Collins' portrait of his grandmother, Nell Hall, comes closest to achieving this; indeed, his book might have been better if he had used her words and experiences as the central point of attraction in the force-field of social experience in Southwark in the past century.

By David Levine

OISE, University of Toronto