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

Unique and fascinating account of English working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century by celebrated historian Carolyn Steedman.

Carolyn Steedman (Author)

9781107670297, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 December 2013

312 pages, 8 b/w illus. 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

'Woolley's diaries might have lingered unseen in the Nottinghamshire Archives if not for Steedman's recognition and reevaluation of these works.' Dawn Whatman, John Clare Society Journal

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.

Prologue: what are they like?
1. An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is, what it is like, and what it is not like
2. Books do furnish a mind
3. Family and friends
4. Fears as loyons: drinking and fighting
5. Sex and the single man
6. Talking law
7. Earthly powers
8. Getting and spending
9. Knitting and frames
10. The knocking at the gate: General Ludd
11. Some conclusions about writing everyday.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1]