An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century

by Carolyn Steedman

This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley's voluminous diaries and Clifton's magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man's understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999.

Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989.

In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like it

[Kristen Lemaster · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fascinating subject and definitely a good foray into microhistory, but Steedman's writing is just too dense to actually enjoy Joseph Woolley's diaries. The inclusion of the clergyman never justified itself for me, and I would have liked more investigation into the everyday life of women at the time, which Steedman alludes to but does not directly address. Despite its verbosity and circumlocution, the text definitely provides better insight into a time period which too often gets attributed as dark and pessimistic without any acknowledgement that many English working class people still enjoyed life and all that it entailed, from drinking and debauchery to shopping for luxury goods to pursuing other hobbies.