Review Article: The Cambridge Social History of Britain

J . STEVENSON Worcester College, Oxford

The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1850. Edited by F. M. L. Thompson. 3 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Volume I: Regions and Communities, xv + 588pp. €45.00. Volume 11: People ond Environment, xv + 373pp. €40.00. Volume 111: Social Agencies and Institutions, xiii + 492pp. €40.00.

The challenges faced by F. M. L. Thompson and his team of contributors are considerable. The question of defining ‘social history’ given the dev- elopment of the discipline in recent decades is itself daunting. There are also problems of what to leave in and what to leave out, the type of approach and the balance of analysis and narrative.

Social history now represents a large, somewhat inchoate grouping of subjects and subdisciplines: it defies close categorization and many have felt that even as a loose umbrella category it lacks coherence. On the one hand social history could be said to encompass almost every- thing apart from the most determinedly ‘high political’ and abstrusely technical cliometric analyses. Its rationale lies in the proposition that it is concerned primarily with all aspects of history which deal with societies in the aggregate or with those which pertain to them as aggre- gates. The latter is an important qualification for it has allowed social historians to make very detailed investigations of individuals, environ- ments and events, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980) or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1978) or Carnival h Romans (1981), with a view to elucidating broader structures of belief and activity. On the other hand it can be argued that, properly speaking, social history should be the application to the past of social science theory, a form of historical sociology. Few, however, would now accept so narrow a definition - for two main reasons. First, it has been found that attempts to apply theoretical models from the social sciences have often proved extremely arid and, perhaps more importantly, invert the normal processes of historical enquiry. Historians have not, on the whole, been happy with attempts to fit data into a priori models.

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Secondly, the positivist social science which gave itself to this approach has come under attack from within its own discipline and now seems outmoded. Indeed there has been an increasing willingness on the part of social scientists to learn from historians about how theoretically informed empirical enquiry might be carried out.

Vagueness of definition and boundaries has not prevented a continu- ing output of fresh research, a torrent of specialized monograph and article literature and a proliferation of journals concerned solely with aspects of social history. But synthesis in so wide and varied a field presents some special difficulties. Analysis always carries with it the danger of fragmenting the world of experience of real, living people into a series of abstract categories; detailed recapture of such experience may defeat the object of general statements at all, descending into a new kind of antiquarianism. The problem has been tackled in various ways, ranging from studies which concentrate on particular themes to intensive focus upon particular episodes or periods. Others have employed something akin to apointillist technique to build up a broader picture from a myriad of small details and characterizations. Moreover, in spite of some significant studies dealing with lengthy periods, one of the most challenging difficulties faced by social history is that of representing change. The Annales school, in particular, has been criti- cized for its tendency to deal with structures at the expense of change and development. Many of the great classics of the Annales, such as Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean and Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, dealt with pre-modern societies, either relatively stable in themselves or confined within some clearly defined geographical or social setting. Both in terms of the balance between analysis and the reality of social experience and of the relationship between structure and change, the social history of any lengthy period, particularly one of rapid change, presents daunting problems.

Professor Thompson faces up to these problems squarely in his editor- ial preface. Reflecting on the widening remit of social history in the last fifty years, he notes that social history has not developed the coher- ence of the ‘new’ economic history, applying econometrics and models drawn from economic theory to historic economic phenomena, but has drawn freely on concepts from the social sciences and their techniques. As a result, he recognizes that social historians operate in a ‘conceptually eclectic and experimental fashion’ and are likely to be dealing in conclu- sions which are probable or plausible rather than directly verifiable. Organizationally, he has chosen a three-volume format, each volume covering the whole period from a partial viewpoint, dealing, respectively, with regional communities, social environment and social institutions, aiming to provide a balanced and comprehensive coverage of the period via three sets of ‘thematic clusters’.

This is an ingenious attempt to reflect the complexity and diversity of British social history and to reconcile the elements of continuity and change over a lengthy and rapidly changing period. Volume I is

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concerned to present the histories of different regions, reflecting the major contribution that local history has made to the development of British social history. The ‘regions’ chosen are to some extent representa- tive: the north-west (J. K. Walton) for major economic and social change, London and the home counties (P. L. Garside) for its unique concen- tration of wealth, and the north-east (D. J. Rowe) for violent changes in economic fortune. Scotland and Wales are treated as a whole, with two chapters for the former, divided at 1850 (R. Mitchison and T. C. Smout), and one for the latter (D. W. Howell and C. Baber). Two chapters on town and city (F. M. L. Thompson) and the countryside (W. A. Armstrong) attempt to bridge the gaps. These essays are, almost unfailingly, masterpieces of concise, high-level exposition of complex and diverse material. Both of the chapters on town and city and on the countryside could scarcely be bettered for their range, balance and sensitivity. F. M. L. Thompson proves himself as adept at the discussion of urban society as of nineteenth-century landed society. In spite of an end-date of 1950, some of his observations on the developments of urban society range up to the 1980s, properly for some of his themes about the transition from a situation in the eighteenth century where ‘town’ meant London to one in which urban society has become synony- mous with the nation at large. Although both Scotland and Wales con- tain clearly defined subregions, the three chapters devoted to them are enormously helpful in bringing together within a short compass a mass of detailed work on Scottish and Welsh history which will be unfamiliar to many English readers. In a masterly account, T. C. Smout makes a convincing case for regarding the real caesura in recent Scottish social history as being the Great War, precipitating the decay of the heavy industrial base upon which Scotland’s burgeoning prosperity had been built for the previous century or more. We must be grateful for the five regional chapters, especially for Garside’s admirably comprehensive account of London and the home counties, probably the best single survey of London’s development that exists. As with Smout and other contributors, Garside is prepared to take a broad view of social history and to include important political developments, such as London radicalism in the late eighteenth century, the development of metro- politan government and the recurrent debate about planning for London and its region from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s and beyond.

Excellent as these chapters are, it is difficult not to escape a sense of unease at the inevitable patchiness of the coverage. The claims for discussion of the south-west, the midlands, East Anglia, Yorkshire, and of the more fluid and indeterminate regions of southern England, are obvious enough. The editor’s argument that parcelling the volume into a series of regional histories would reduce social history to a sub-branch of local history does not really meet the principal concern, which is that we get very little sense of the physical and economic geography of Britain as a whole and its influence upon social history. Both the

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chapters on urban and rural development make a brave attempt to fill this gap, but there are dimensions of the geographical context which are missing and which are of some concern. Much of Britain’s social development has been shaped by the distribution of its highland and lowland regions, both in the broad and in detail, by the distribution of its fossil fuel resources, especially its coalfields, and by the inherited position of London from the early modern period as not only one of the largest cities in Europe, but one which already contained a higher proportion of the total population than any other European country, with the possible exception of the Netherlands. The ‘metropolitaniza- tion’ of Britain, a theme touched on at several points in these volumes, is precisely the kind which a more broadly based introduction might have tackled. So, too, is the relatively favourable ratio of population to resources which allowed early modem England to break free from the threat of famine almost a century earlier than France and to support largely from domestic agricultural output a trebling of population between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Moreover, some long-term perspectives are helpful in assessing the development of British society even in a period which is apparently marked off by that complex of changes known as the ‘industrial revolution’. As Arm- strong notes, lowland England was already a country with a peculiar social structure in European terms, a ‘land without peasants’ made up of landlords, tenant farmers and landless or virtually landless labourers. The origins of this peculiarity - one which persists to the present day in the United Kingdom having by far the highest average size of agri- cultural holding of all EC countries - lie long before 1750.

But if the ‘peculiarities’ of the British, or at least the English, have a long history, it might also have been helpful to have a more sustained view of the economic context in which British society developed, rather in the same way that Smout attempts for Scotland. Volume I, the editor suggests, offers more economic history than the subsequent volumes, provided largely in relation to agriculture and the fate of particular regions. But too great a divorce between economic and social history always runs the danger of leaving the ghost out of the machine. The lives, prospects and material existence of millions of our forebears were governed by such factors as the productivity of agriculture, the rate of growth of national wealth and its distribution and, increasingly, the operation of the trade cycle and world economic conditions. The divorce of economic history from social history is a telling problem here, depriv- ing us of any understanding of how and why Britain seemed to turn a corner in national prosperity at some point after 1850 or, again, after 1918 or, yet again, after the Second World War. Nor do we get much appreciation of the economic impact of wars or of the reasons why individual regions of Britain have had widely differing experiences in the twentieth century. Similarly, overshadowing much of the history of Britain in the twentieth century is the question of decline, not just in world status and influence, but in economic performance, and,

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ultimately, in living standards relative to other countries. Just as one of the contributions to British political stability and continuity in the past might be seen as a relatively successful economic performance and the wealth it created, so some scope needs to be given to the economic constraints which have latterly affected social developments and often, in turn, aroused political debate. The tendency to discuss social and political outcomes without the economic factors which underlay them can reduce the explanatory value of social history to that of the mere description of consequences, rather than giving an understanding of the parameters within which these consequences lay. The editor, for example, gives attention to the sometimes acrimonious tensions between central and local government in the twentieth century over levels of spending. But such acrimony derives not only from almost inevitable disputes over jurisdiction, but also in large part from constraints over resources, constraints which in the inter-war period, as in the past twenty years, have owed a great deal to the failure of economic growth to match rising expectations of welfare and competition for scarce resources within a national budget unable to meet all the demands being made upon it. In the same way, debate on the decline of Britain’s economic performance has become increasingly embroiled in a series of questions about the social and cultural milieu out of which the ‘first industrial nation’ took shape. Have Britain’s industrial and economic problems in the twentieth century their origins in the nature of British society and culture in the previous century or more, as suggested by Martin Wiener?’ These are issues of concern not merely to economic historians, but to anyone concerned with the development of British society as a whole.

Volume 11, People and Environment, presents fewer conceptual diffi- culties, although ‘Environment’ in this context is distinctly ‘pre-Green’ in connotation, a not unimportant change in meaning with which some future synthesis will have to come to terms. The volume includes chapters on the social implications of demographic change (M. Anderson), the family (L. Davidoff), work (P. Joyce), housing (M. J. Daunton), food, drink and nutrition (D. J. Oddy) and leisure and culture (H. Cun- ningham) of a uniformly high standard. Anderson develops some fascinat- ing insights about life expectancy and the changing age-distribution of the population. This is an area where sometimes arcane statistics reveal findings of immense social significance, such as the changing ratio of economically active to non-active age groups of the population and the full dimensions of an ‘ageing population’. For those who struggle to keep abreast of the rapidly developing field of historical demography, this is an admirable summary of the current state of play, not least for Anderson’s mastery of material relating not only to England and Wales, but also to Scotland. This permits Anderson to bring out the

‘ M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of rhe Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 198 1).

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different population histories of England and Scotland during industrial- ization, with much higher mortality in Scotland well into the mid- nineteenth century, including periods of ‘crisis mortality’ brought about by epidemic disease. The emphasis of the ‘demographic transition’ for England and Wales is now squarely on an increase in fertility from the 1780s to the 1820s, combined with a rapid fall in mortality in the first part of the nineteenth century. Anderson’s chapter is also helpful in dealing with the vexed question of ‘household’ size. The view of the ‘nuclear family’ as the historic ‘norm’ is somewhat modified by the evidence that although the average size of households was relatively small, a majority of persons from the early modern period right to the end of the nineteenth century lived in households which were by modern standards large (and crowded), usually numbering over six people.

Concentration on Anderson’s piece is justifiable because the advance of historical demography into what is virtually a subdiscipline of its own has been one of the most notable developments of social history in recent years, scarcely conceived of by those who wrote social history even thirty years ago. It provides the skeleton for much of what follows in volume 11. Davidoffs adept and succinct summary of research on the family puts flesh and feeling on to the bare bones of demographic movements and household structure. Joyce’s discussion of ‘work’ is both more limited and more wide-ranging. An analysis of occupational struc- ture and its change prefaces an extended discussion of the historiography of labour. Here Joyce raises some important questions about the way in which we should conceptualize class relations within an economic structure which showed more continuity and was more transitional than was once assumed, one in which factory production did not predominate until the latter part of the nineteenth century. He notes, too, how tradi- tional labour history has been engulfed by a wider social history, so that it is no longer credible to study labour either in isolation or as a story of activists and leaders, leading on directly to the development of ‘modern’ organized trade-union and political movements. The study of an activist minority and of formal labour organizations has been increasingly replaced by the study of the relationships between groups and classes, whether at home or in the workplace. Concepts such as ‘popular culture’, ‘social control’ and the constitution of ideology and consciousness have widened the conception of how the ‘history of labour’ might be understood. These are important issues to raise, not least because it is the only point in these three volumes at which such issues are considered. It must be said that they are discussed at the expense, perhaps inevitably, of fuller examination of the experience of work and a concentration, acknowledged by Joyce, on the nineteenth century. If continuity is one of Joyce’s themes, Daunton’s study of hous- ing reminds us that social history has its own turning-points or, at least, points from which new trends can be seen to emerge. He emphasizes the significance of the 1915 rent control legislation which marked the beginning of the ‘tenurial revolution’ in British housing and the trend

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away from the overwhelming predominance of private rented accommo- dation towards owner-occupation and renting from local authorities - ‘council housing’. Daunton’s essay tends to concentrate more on the nature of housing policy and housing tenure than upon the qualita- tive experience of housing over the period. There are evocative first-hand descriptions of housing conditions from the late eighteenth century and a veritable flood of ‘exposes’ of housing conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A little more use of them might have added another dimension to Daunton’s otherwise admirably thorough account.

Both Oddy on food, drink and nutrition, and Cunningham on leisure summarize their wide-ranging material effectively. Oddy is particularly sensitive to the regional, class and gender variations in diet and eating arrangements. Few things remind us more that the past is a foreign country than accounts of what people ate and how they organized their domestic routine. As late as 1909, the inhabitants of a Wiltshire village were reported to eat only bread with cold meat and cheese as everyday fare and it was apparently exceptional there to find a woman who cooked every day, once or twice a week being the norm ‘but perhaps more often when potatoes were plentiful’. Until the nineteenth century a mid- day dinner was the main meal, taken at any time between 11.00 a.m. and 3.00 p.m., only gradually being usurped by an evening dinner and the ‘hedonistic’ invention of ‘high tea’ taken in the late afternoon. Oddy’s analysis of nutritional standards is an excellent piece of succinct exposi- tion and one which neatly combines the evolution of scientific nutritional knowledge with the sometimes patchy information on diet in the past. In particular, he highlights the poor standard of nutrition which still obtained in the early part of this century and which allowed only a third of men examined by the military after the introduction of conscrip- tion to achieve a ‘full normal standard of health and strength’. It is a pity that Oddy’s work was completed before we had the evidence of the detailed investigation of the stature of English people drawn from institutional records, a useful comparative complement to what is presented here about nutritional standards.’

Cunningham’s detailed survey of leisure and culture is prefaced by a discussion of the working day and hours of work. Usefully, it embraces the full span of the period covered by the volume, though, again, com- pletion came too early to include Borsay’s volume on the ‘urban renais- sance’ of eighteenth-century England with its rich survey of the growth of urban leisure and recreational facilities. Borsay’s work, like the wider study by Peter Burke of popular culture in early modern Europe, has important points to raise about the existence of distinct plebeian and patrician cultures, one of the themes touched on by C~nn ingham.~ None the less, Cunningham ranges across his wide field with considerable

’ R. Floud, K. Wachter and A. Gregory, Height. Health and History: Nutritional Status the United Kingdom, 1750-1980 (Cambridge, 1990). See P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1990); P. Burke, Popular Culture

in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1978).

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economy and clarity. This is one essay which the student reader will find an excellent introduction to the subject.

Volume I11 is concerned with ‘social agencies and institutions’, with essays on government and society, 1750-1914 (P. Thane), society and the state in twentieth-century Britain (J. Harris), education (G. Suther- land), health and medicine (V. Berridge), crime, authority and the police- man state (V. A. C. Gattrell), religion (J. Obelkevich), philanthropy (F. K. Prochaska) and clubs, societies and associations (R. J. Morris). The first two chapters discuss, in combination, one of the major themes of the last two centuries of British history, the growth of the power of government and its increasing influence over the lives of the popula- tion as a whole. Thane notes the important revisions of the historio- graphy of the eighteenth-century British state. An older perception of a state limited in its activities and ambitions has always sat oddly with Britain’s emergence as the dominant commercial and maritime power during the series of wars fought against the Spanish and French over the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Work on fiscal policy has revealed that the eighteenth-century British state was able to extract a higher rate of taxation from its citizens than its more openly absolutist European neighbours. In the 1760s it appropriated 20 per cent of the national output in taxation, almost twice the figure for France. This is suggestive and it is only ill luck that the publication of John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power4 and its fuller exposition of the ‘fiscal-military juggernaut’ came too late for inclusion in this discussion. Both Thane and Harris provide clear paths through this highly complex subject, providing between them an excellent survey of this major theme. Harris, in particu- lar, defends the view that the structure and theory of government and shifting perceptions of the role of the state are properly part of the concern of ‘social history’. Her characterization of struggles for control of government in the twentieth century taking the form of a horizontal contest between different sectors of the professional middle class rather than a vertical struggle between two different social classes is the kind of insight which is a healthy corrective to views which too glibly see class as the principal determinant of twentieth-century British politics.

Sutherland on education fills an important gap in the secondary litera- ture with a chapter which will provide a starting-point for all those interested in this subject. In the discussion of literacy, perhaps a little more might have been said at the outset about the contribution of Margaret Spufford’s and Victor Neuberg’s work on the circulation of chapbooks and other cheap reading-matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This suggests that a large reading public existed irrespective of the evidence relating to writing based upon people’s ability to sign their names in parish registers or attendance at schools. As Sutherland notes, reading and writing were separate skills, but more

‘ J. Brewer, The Sinews ofpower: War. Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York, 1989).

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stress could be laid on the evidence from the chapbook market alone that reading was already widespread quite a long way down the social scale. At the other end of the period, it is a pity, too, that the survey has to end in 1950, just as criticism of the Butler Education Act of 1944 and the tripartite division of secondary education was beginning to gather pace. As a result the great debate on comprehensivization which dominated the educational scene in the 1950s and 1960s has to be largely ignored. These are relatively minor criticisms of an essay which stands easily as the best overview of educational development currently available.

Berridge opens her section on health by noting that the social history of medicine, like most social history, is primarily a development of the past two decades. From a traditional, doctor-orientated teleology domi- nated by heroic breakthroughs and great men and women, the subject has expanded to examine the cultural significance of medicine and dis- ease and, under the influence of the sociological critique of, amongst others, Michel Foucault, to treat the ‘medicalization’ of society as a historical phenomenon in itself. His argument that medicine had ‘expro- priated’ health and ‘constructed normality’ in the name of apparently objective and value-free scientific knowledge had immense implications for the social history of areas such as mental health, the medicalization of childbirth and the growth of the ‘health services’ as institutions of power and control. In this reading, the hospital and the asylum, like the penitentiary and the school, were emblematic of shifting patterns of sociopolitical power, usually towards the state and the professional ‘expert’. Although criticized in turn as over-reductionist, these views have helped the subject break free from the limited framework of the ever onward and upward ‘advance’ of medicine to a more sensitive assessment of how sickness and health was conceptualized in past societies. The concepts of health and disease are now being used to examine general issues of social relations and popular belief. As a result, the social history of medicine is seen increasingly as an integral part of, and structured by, the perspectives of social history as a whole. Berridge provides a thoughtful summary of these issues at what is clearly one of the current frontiers of research in social history. Her chapter ends with some helpful signposts to the directions which further research might take.

Gattrell’s chapter on crime, authority and the policeman state deals with another area in which the ideas of Foucault have made a consider- able impact through his view of the importance of institutions of control, notably the penitentiary and the professional police. At the same time, the interest of the Annales school in rnentulifks stimulated an enormous interest in the study of crime and disorder as a window into the world of sections of the population who otherwise remained hidden from his- tory. Few areas of research have seen so dramatic an explosion of interest as those concerned with crime, riot and protest. It must be said that Gattrell is more concerned with the institutions of control than with

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the thrust of that fertile body of research in which the names of George Rude and E. P. Thompson loom large. Collective violence and protest are largely ignored and even some of the largest and best-known episodes of popular disturbance, such as the Luddite outbreaks, do not feature in the index. Given that we now have some excellent monographs on individual episodes of popular disturbances as well as longer-term sur- veys, it is a pity that the contribution of this area of crime to wider social questions was not considered, at least briefly. This is important because the study of popular disturbances is one of those areas which has helped to link the study of crime to wider social history, throwing into sharp relief some of the values and assumptions of the populace at large. What Gattrell offers is a somewhat narrower focus on the development of the ‘policeman state’ and a sophisticated commentary on the interaction between crime and policing. No one who has worked in this area will underestimate the formidable difficulties of assimilating the burgeoning amount of research on crime, policing and the judicial process into the coherent, long-range summary which he provides. It is also alive to the human face of crime, most of it petty, banal and unglamorous.

Obelkevich similarly draws together the complex threads which make up the religious history of Britain in the two centuries since 1750. This is particularly valuable in a field in which denominational histories have often made it difficult to obtain a clear overview of the general picture. Obelkevich largely eschews theoretical debate, properly perhaps in a field which has assimilated statistical methodology but largely resisted the kind of sociological inputs generated in areas such as medicine and crime. Some attention is paid to ‘folk belief‘ and ‘popular religion’, though it is clear that the debates which animate such discussions amongst early modern historians are less active for the modern period. As one of the ‘losing sides’ of history, the history of religious belief and organization has received less attention than it might have from social historians. For example, the links between popular religious belief and attitudes towards the rites of passage of birth, marriage and death in an increasingly secular society are still only partially explored. AS Obelkevich notes, by the mid-twentieth century survey evidence sug- gested that most people believed in God, but only half believed in an after-life; few believed in the last judgement and in the existence of hell, but horoscopes were extremely popular and some estimates sug- gested that a quarter of the population held an essentially ‘magical’ view of the universe. Was it always so? This perhaps is the challenge which faces the social historian of religion with the greatest difficulty. While it is no fault of Obelkevich that he is prevented by the time-frame of his chapter from reaching further back for perspective on the modern period, at some point it will be a useful exercise to link the findings of those engaged in the study of popular religion in the early modern period with those of later centuries.

The remaining chapters in volume I11 are concerned with two themes,

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philanthropy and clubs and associations, which are of particular concern to British social history. It is scarcely conceivable that a volume con- cerned with ‘social agency’ could omit two aspects of British society which run like a thread through the past two centuries. Prochaska does an excellent job in pulling together the disparate material on phil- anthropy and rescuing it from the obscurity to which it has often been condemned because of its unfashionable hierarchical values and pieties. The voluntarism and individualism which formed such a major charac- teristic of the nineteenth-century philanthropic response has left its mark on the character of twentieth-century British society. Much of what is done in other countries by state agencies is still done in Britain by voluntary bodies, sometimes now with government support. Prochaska is sensible about the question of whether philanthropy was a form of ‘social control’, suggesting that this is an inappropriate description for organizations which maintained their activities outside periods of social unrest and were so closely attuned to the needs of the society around them that they defy simple categorization. Moreover, much philanthropy extended not to the ‘dangerous classes’ but to the helpless and unfortu- nate, as well as to distressed sections of the middle and upper classes, to animals, and, in the National Trust, to the national heritage of build- ings and countryside. Prochaska also shows that the working class were not only the recipients of charity but also actively involved in philan- thropic activities. Many of these were an outgrowth of neighbourliness and informal acts of assistance to kin and members of the community or workgroup. Servants set up charities for distressed ex-servants while navvies established sick clubs and visiting societies complete with navvy officials. In one of the poorest districts of London, Seven Dials, a group of working men, set up in the early nineteenth century the West Street Chapel Benevolent Society run by a committee of twelve, where Bible study and philanthropy went hand in hand. Decline of religious commit- ment and growing state intervention has altered but not abated philan- thropic activity in twentieth-century Britain; in 1976 an estimated five million people were involved in some form of charity work and in the personal social services the voluntary sector provided more hours of activity than did the state. A new range of charities has sprung into existence since the Second World War, some of them combining pres- sure-group activities with charitable work, groups such as Age Concern and Shelter, as well as organizations dealing with issues as diverse as third-world poverty and sick hedgehogs, Particular disasters, whether foreign or domestic, and annual events promoted by television and the mass media, have vastly extended the scope of philanthropic action. Arguably, they have channelled it in a more commercial direction, in which the larger charities, in particular, have taken on the characteristics of a business enterprise, in which management skills, advertising and public relations now play a large part.

There is some necessary overlap between the Prochaska survey and Morris’s important discussion of clubs, societies and associations. Some

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years ago E. P. Thompson described the English working class as im- mensely ‘clubbable’. This is amply brought out in Morris’s fine survey. Friendly Societies alone had almost a million members by 1815, the vast majority drawn from a working class which was still a long way from organized in other respects. In more general terms, formal volun- tary associations were a response to an increasingly complex society in which associational organization was one answer to the weakening of community and kinship networks of mutuality and support, replacing them with the formal rules betokened by such words as association, club, society, committee, agenda and constitution. Clubs, associations and societies catered for a wide range of needs and groups, many purely recreational but others with cultural, philanthropic, trade or political purposes. The working men’s political societies of the 1790s, one of the more significant landmarks in British sociopolitical history, clearly grew out of a world of trade and benefit clubs common to many of the skilled artisans of the eighteenth century. For the more well-to-do, political clubs dated from the late seventeenth century and by the 1720s an evening club of ‘opulent manufacturers’ was already in existence in Manchester. By the end of the century bodies such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society had emerged and with them one of the most successful forms of association of the eighteenth century, the Masonic Order. Originating in the late seventeenth century in England and Scotland, the Freemasons developed rapidly in the eighteenth, forming a Grand Lodge in1717, headed from 1721 by the Grand Master.

The century after 1780 brought a huge expansion in the number and nature of voluntary associations, broadly divided between the neigh- bourhood societies favoured by the working classes and the subscription- based associations favoured by the middle classes. The Anti-Slavery Society created the characteristic forms of the modern pressure group - public meetings, petitions, and a symbiotic relationship with the press - and these were developed further by the Anti-Corn-Law League and many more. The last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an enormous expansion of club and associational activity, much of it religious in inspiration, of which the Boys’ Brigades are only the best known. The churches responded to the secular competition of sport, the music hall and the pub by refining and specializing their recreational activities to meet the needs of different ages, sexes and classes. One example, St Mary’s Free Church in Govan, had Sunday schools, Bible classes, a literary society, male and female fellowships, the Boys’ Brigade, Gospel temperance and a penny savings bank. In the run-up to the Great War many church-based societies began to run out of steam, losing out to the increasingly popular offerings of commercial leisure and professional sport. But new movements, less closely associated with the churches, had astonishing success, notably Scouting with its winning blend of semi-imperial glamour and moral regeneration through self- discipline and contact with the ‘outdoors’. No less than 34 per cent

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of males born between 1901 and 1920 claimed to have belonged to the Scouts. Like other successful associational movements, Scouting had a leader with a flair for publicity and stressed its opposition to class antagonism. The twentieth century was marked by an increase in the density of organization in spite of two world wars, large-scale urban clearance and suburbanization. Hobbies and leisure became an increased focus of club activity while almost every occupational and interest group was organized into an association. Theorists of urban and industrial society who expected widespread anomie and alienation in the face of rapidly changing social and economic conditions were proved wrong, at least in Britain. New formal organizations were created and existing patterns of association adapted to meet a multiplicity of new environments and conditions. This is a splendid essay, an invaluable analysis of an area of British social life which has hitherto been largely neglected.

Assessing these volumes as a whole it is important, first, to recognize that they represent a magnificent achievement on the part of the editor. To marshal a team of twenty or more contributors, all of them leading practitioners in their fields, is a triumph in itself. Although the first volume raises some misgivings, the volumes taken as a whole offer a remarkably thorough survey of most of the important themes in modern British social history. As noted in several cases, there are inevitable problems in covering the precise period allocated: some contributors would have been assisted by a fuller discussion of the period before 1800 while there is a certain raggedness about the terminal date, some contributors going as far as the 1980s, others ending just after the Second World War. Some contributors are clearly happier on the main period of their interests, though all make a brave attempt at covering the period they were given. Levels vary too: some chapters are valuable introduc- tions which one would be happy to recommend to students; others are difficult, if usually rewarding, pieces aimed at fellow academics. Com- bined, however, with the excellent bibliographies, they have the enor- mous merit of establishing some kind of base line - a state of the art - from which further research can proceed.

What do they tell us about the current state of social history in Britain? What is apparent is that British social history remains firmly anchored in the empirical and, at least in intention, ideologically neutral traditions of British history in general. Although many of these pieces are informed by the social sciences, few engage directly in theoretical debates or orga- nize themselves around a given set of theoretical positions. Nor is this history in the manner of the Annales school; one reason is that the last two centuries offer changes of such scope that there is little room in what are relatively brief survey chapters for any of the contributors to dwell too long on structures and mentalitis. This involves some loss, not only in consideration of some of the longue durie of climate, econ- omic resources and topography, but also of the persistence of aspects of popular culture and belief. By its very nature, the analytical structure

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of the volumes limits the discussion of particular social and mental worlds, though these are sometimes glimpsed and clearly acknowledged to exist. There is also little room for the often stimulating and revealing analysis of particular incidents, rituals and ceremonies. These are very difficult to fit into a work organized in this way, but their absence is a loss none the less. Within its own framework it was surely a provocative decision to omit a chapter or chapters on wealth, social structure and class. The last of these is touched on many times, but any society which talks and has talked so much about class and which, to many outsiders, has often seemed obsessed with social distinctions, requires a more sus- tained and comprehensive analysis than is offered here. The burgeoning field of gender and women’s studies is also bound to feel a little short- changed at not receiving separate attention, although almost all the essays pay some regard to gender differences. There is, too, a nagging sense that much of the day-to-day experience of work, of domestic life, of ‘getting and spending’, is somehow lost in the chapters of these volumes, although several deploy interesting and revealing examples of this kind. It is almost certainly asking too much of any large-scale work both to be comprehensively analytical and to represent the texture of daily life, but it is the latter dimension that one sometimes feels is missing.

These volumes also prompt consideration of the directions in which social history will develop next. Of the areas represented here, the social history of medicine and that of popular culture and association clearly still have much to offer. Gender and women’s studies have also developed a momentum of their own irrespective of the status they are accorded in volumes such as these. The social history of work in the broad context of social relations as a whole, including those of the home, is still develop- ing, to some extent at the expense of traditionally conceived ‘labour history’. More scope, too, will have to be given to people as consumers, not just as producers. Urban history seems now an increasingly diffuse sub-category, more akin to ‘everything that happens in towns’ than the narrow taxonomy of urban development, but local studies of many of the themes discussed here still have a major part to play. Historical demography also seems to have an inexhaustible fund of questions still to ask about the key mechanisms of population change and structure. Fears that cliometrics would dominate social history were, on the evi- dence here, unfounded. Many of the contributors use statistical material, some in a highly technical way, but statistics, like other tools, such as sociological theory and oral history, have generally become just part of the battery of techniques employed by social historians. It is, more- over, somewhat ironic that one of the areas in which social history is likely to develop is through a refinement of literary-based sources so recently viewed with disfavour for their impressionistic and partial view of the past. The excavation of great bodies of neglected literary and other works, combined with some of the new techniques of literary analysis, have brought literature back into the reckoning as a significant

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source. Shaken free of its associations with an elite of ‘great’ writers, this is an area which social historians may wish to attend to more in the future. For example, a glance at some of the work being produced on literature written by women in the eighteenth century, or on nine- teenth-century working-class autobiographies, suggests some fruitful new openings and fresh opportunities to examine material largely ignored in the past. As this should remind us, definitional disputes within and between disciplines can be some of the most arid intellectually. Whether ‘all history is social history’ or not matters less than that histor- ians, of all kinds, keep an open door to whatever contributions may assist in understanding the past.