Who Owns History?
Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century
Cambridge University Press, 309pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781107670297
reviewed by Jennifer Upton
Carolyn Steedman has dedicated her academic life to exploring how lives from the past can confound our expectations about history, the way it is written, and the meaning of its silences. Her first book, The Tidy House (Virago, 1982), was about a short story written by three working-class schoolgirls in a primary school where Steedman was a teacher before entering university employment. These girls, though writing a fictional story, were also in an important way writing about their lives, and writing within the constraints of what they had been told that their lives could mean – by their parents, by their peers, by adults, by society. This approach has been characteristic of Steedman’s work: she draws her readers into the particularity of one closely-observed story in order to say something about the bigger story of how we write history, and why it matters.
Steedman’s preoccupation with testing the parameters of historical narratives has permeated her work on childhood, historiography, the experience of domestic servants, and her striking personal account of her family history, Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago, 1986). Added to this important body of work is her most recent publication, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century. It is about two men: Joseph Woolley, a stockingmaker, and Sir Gervase Clifton, the magistrate, who lived in a small English town in the early 19th century. Steedman reads Woolley’s copious diaries and Clifton’s magistrate records in counterpoint to each another, in order to provide an account of a working-class man’s understanding of himself and his society that was filtered through the law and literature as much as it was through work.
Woolley’s untranscribed diaries, written between 1801 and 1805 and totalling about 100,000 words, have been available to the public since 1992, when they were placed in the Nottinghamshire County Record Office. While local historians are familiar with them, they have received scant attention from the academy more generally. Steedman explains this by pointing out that the diaries entered the public domain at a scholarly moment when traditional labour history was receding in favour of history written under the influence of post-structuralism and cultural studies. On discovering the diaries, Steedman found herself in the position of being the ‘reluctant gatekeeper of Woolley’s words’, which she tries to compensate for by ‘quoting as much’ of it as she thinks a reader ‘can bear’. Her own approach is situated in the ‘recent ethical turn in historical studies’: ‘there are questions now about the historians’ responsibilities to the dead and gone that were not asked – that were not conceptualised – in the 1980s . . . historians have started to question their relationship to their subjects, asking juridical questions to do with rights, duties, obligation, and ownership. Who owns history?’ The ethical turn might ostensibly be recent, but this concern with who owns history has featured throughout Steedman’s oeuvre.
The titular allusion to EP Thompson’s hugely influential, now canonical The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is important. If the pioneering social history of the 1960s emblemised in Thompson’s study reclaimed the everyday experience of working class people in England and the formation of class consciousness, then An Everyday Life of the English Working Class is a post-Thompsonian examination of working-class life in the early 19th century seen through the life of a worker who does not fit into that liberatory narrative. What is an historian to do when she finds a rich account of an individual worker (one of countless other workers who did not leave accounts as full as Woolley did) who is not ‘as the workers ought to have been’? Woolley ‘did not come with a story of suffering as his passport to the historical record.’ He lived through the Luddite crisis in Nottinghamshire, but was apparently not a Luddite himself. He was a working man who shaped his identity beyond his work as a framework knitter. He did not marry, and thus falls outside the established assumptions of working-class experience in the past as having been shaped by male-dominated households and family life. He left detailed accounts of his acquaintances’ sexual exploits, his purchases and spending, and his and others’ interaction with the law. To write about Woolley, Steedman necessarily found herself writing ‘against many accredited historical assumptions about men like him.’ She did not approach him with the potentially patronising emotion of sympathy, but with the understanding that Woolley’s entry into the historical record challenges the way historians might want to frame him.
Woolley emerges as a reader and writer, ‘not simply as a working man who happened to write, but as “a writer” (as author; as creative writer) with the full cultural approbation that the term acquired during the long nineteenth century.’ He bought books, he borrowed books, and he read books: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and other contemporaneous novels. Steedman shows how these texts offered ways of understanding and expression to Woolley, and his consumption of them details the interaction between 19th-century print culture and its readers. Woolley was also more than a reader. A man does not write 100,000 words of anecdotes, observations and personal accounts without taking satisfaction in the act of writing itself, using the form to reflect and fashion his subjectivity. Steedman treats his words, his writing, as material artefacts from a past that will never be fully recoverable. In the end, all we have are Woolley’s writings that mediate between us and the world he inhabited in early 19th-century Nottinghamshire. The alehouse fights Woolley reported, the religious routines he casually observed and the hypocrisy he mocked (‘all such pretenders to relig[i]on’, he said), the magistrate he referred to – come to us through the records Woolley composed. Steedman’s grappling with the materiality of Woolley’s writing allows her to closely account for his social and political context while dealing intelligently with its elusiveness to the scholar. In a chapter cleverly titled ‘Sex and the single man’, Steedman shows how Woolley acted his part as a storyteller and commentator on social mores. He reported the ‘stark passions of everyday life’, overheard and witnessed tales of coupling and jealousy. He suddenly ends one account by saying ‘there was more of this tale but I have [been too] long at it’. This, as Steedman says, is the writer Woolley at work, aware of the effect of his stylistic choices, evidencing a meaningful acquaintance with function of literary devices: ‘The device of drawing attention to what is not said in an utterance (with “my tale is too long”) is a variant of apophasis: a means of mentioning by not mentioning.’ Woolley himself processed his world by writing, and by treating his writing seriously Steedman offers us a glimpse into Woolley’s social imagination, the circumstances which bore his impulse to write, and a vision of individual experience and everyday life in industrial England that complicates scholarly conceptions of these categories.
Carolyn Steedman, like her subject in An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, is a writer. Perhaps she would call herself an historian who happens to write, but any reader of her work will know that Steedman is a writer, crafting histories in beautiful prose that is calibrated by her immunity to jargon. She treats her subjects with respect. Who owns history? Steedman asks. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class evidences, above all, that people from the past posses their stories in ways that can ever confound, complicate and sharpen present attempts to own them.
Steedman’s preoccupation with testing the parameters of historical narratives has permeated her work on childhood, historiography, the experience of domestic servants, and her striking personal account of her family history, Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago, 1986). Added to this important body of work is her most recent publication, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century. It is about two men: Joseph Woolley, a stockingmaker, and Sir Gervase Clifton, the magistrate, who lived in a small English town in the early 19th century. Steedman reads Woolley’s copious diaries and Clifton’s magistrate records in counterpoint to each another, in order to provide an account of a working-class man’s understanding of himself and his society that was filtered through the law and literature as much as it was through work.
Woolley’s untranscribed diaries, written between 1801 and 1805 and totalling about 100,000 words, have been available to the public since 1992, when they were placed in the Nottinghamshire County Record Office. While local historians are familiar with them, they have received scant attention from the academy more generally. Steedman explains this by pointing out that the diaries entered the public domain at a scholarly moment when traditional labour history was receding in favour of history written under the influence of post-structuralism and cultural studies. On discovering the diaries, Steedman found herself in the position of being the ‘reluctant gatekeeper of Woolley’s words’, which she tries to compensate for by ‘quoting as much’ of it as she thinks a reader ‘can bear’. Her own approach is situated in the ‘recent ethical turn in historical studies’: ‘there are questions now about the historians’ responsibilities to the dead and gone that were not asked – that were not conceptualised – in the 1980s . . . historians have started to question their relationship to their subjects, asking juridical questions to do with rights, duties, obligation, and ownership. Who owns history?’ The ethical turn might ostensibly be recent, but this concern with who owns history has featured throughout Steedman’s oeuvre.
The titular allusion to EP Thompson’s hugely influential, now canonical The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is important. If the pioneering social history of the 1960s emblemised in Thompson’s study reclaimed the everyday experience of working class people in England and the formation of class consciousness, then An Everyday Life of the English Working Class is a post-Thompsonian examination of working-class life in the early 19th century seen through the life of a worker who does not fit into that liberatory narrative. What is an historian to do when she finds a rich account of an individual worker (one of countless other workers who did not leave accounts as full as Woolley did) who is not ‘as the workers ought to have been’? Woolley ‘did not come with a story of suffering as his passport to the historical record.’ He lived through the Luddite crisis in Nottinghamshire, but was apparently not a Luddite himself. He was a working man who shaped his identity beyond his work as a framework knitter. He did not marry, and thus falls outside the established assumptions of working-class experience in the past as having been shaped by male-dominated households and family life. He left detailed accounts of his acquaintances’ sexual exploits, his purchases and spending, and his and others’ interaction with the law. To write about Woolley, Steedman necessarily found herself writing ‘against many accredited historical assumptions about men like him.’ She did not approach him with the potentially patronising emotion of sympathy, but with the understanding that Woolley’s entry into the historical record challenges the way historians might want to frame him.
Woolley emerges as a reader and writer, ‘not simply as a working man who happened to write, but as “a writer” (as author; as creative writer) with the full cultural approbation that the term acquired during the long nineteenth century.’ He bought books, he borrowed books, and he read books: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and other contemporaneous novels. Steedman shows how these texts offered ways of understanding and expression to Woolley, and his consumption of them details the interaction between 19th-century print culture and its readers. Woolley was also more than a reader. A man does not write 100,000 words of anecdotes, observations and personal accounts without taking satisfaction in the act of writing itself, using the form to reflect and fashion his subjectivity. Steedman treats his words, his writing, as material artefacts from a past that will never be fully recoverable. In the end, all we have are Woolley’s writings that mediate between us and the world he inhabited in early 19th-century Nottinghamshire. The alehouse fights Woolley reported, the religious routines he casually observed and the hypocrisy he mocked (‘all such pretenders to relig[i]on’, he said), the magistrate he referred to – come to us through the records Woolley composed. Steedman’s grappling with the materiality of Woolley’s writing allows her to closely account for his social and political context while dealing intelligently with its elusiveness to the scholar. In a chapter cleverly titled ‘Sex and the single man’, Steedman shows how Woolley acted his part as a storyteller and commentator on social mores. He reported the ‘stark passions of everyday life’, overheard and witnessed tales of coupling and jealousy. He suddenly ends one account by saying ‘there was more of this tale but I have [been too] long at it’. This, as Steedman says, is the writer Woolley at work, aware of the effect of his stylistic choices, evidencing a meaningful acquaintance with function of literary devices: ‘The device of drawing attention to what is not said in an utterance (with “my tale is too long”) is a variant of apophasis: a means of mentioning by not mentioning.’ Woolley himself processed his world by writing, and by treating his writing seriously Steedman offers us a glimpse into Woolley’s social imagination, the circumstances which bore his impulse to write, and a vision of individual experience and everyday life in industrial England that complicates scholarly conceptions of these categories.
Carolyn Steedman, like her subject in An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, is a writer. Perhaps she would call herself an historian who happens to write, but any reader of her work will know that Steedman is a writer, crafting histories in beautiful prose that is calibrated by her immunity to jargon. She treats her subjects with respect. Who owns history? Steedman asks. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class evidences, above all, that people from the past posses their stories in ways that can ever confound, complicate and sharpen present attempts to own them.