Jon Lawrence

In Histories of Everyday Life, Laura Carter offers a fresh and compelling take on the origins and popularization of social history in Britain in the decades after the First World War. Carter argues that this was a story located firmly in schools and cultural institutions rather than universities, and that its pioneers were mostly amateur rather than professional historians. Her central argument is that liberal educationalists and writers saw the history of everyday life as a popular, broadly non-political vehicle for engaging with ‘the masses’ as Britain embraced full democracy after the First World War. The history of everyday life was thus, in Carter’s terms, a central component of Britain’s ‘educational century’, with its peculiar mix of liberal paternalism and popular democratization. With good reason, Carter frames her important study in the context of the pioneering work of Alison Light on inter-war conservatism, Claire Langhamer on mid-century domesticity, and Helen McCarthy on education for citizenship. Women are at the forefront of her story as educators, writers, and broadcasters, and she portrays the histories of everyday life they produced as part of a broader cultural shift inwards, away from the imperialist expansionism of the previous century towards Light’s ‘history from inside’. Carter also stresses the centrality of place to her story. Histories of everyday life fed on, and helped sustain, local and regional loyalties at a time when politics and culture were otherwise becoming increasingly centralized. Intriguingly, she is adamant that, down to the 1960s, this was no less true for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland than for England (pp. 58, 130, 154).

This is Callum G. Brown’s fourth book-length intervention in the debate about secularization in modern Britain in less than two decades. The series began with his influential study The Death of Christian Britain (2001) and also includes Religion and the Demographic Revolution (2012) and Becoming Atheist (2017). Here, Brown turns his focus to the powerful revival of Christian moral conservatism in postwar Britain and its sudden collapse, from the midsixties onward, in the face of an assertive secular liberalism and shifting popular attitudes. As in his earlier work, Brown is keen to place social, cultural, and, in this treatment, political context center stage in his analysis of the ebb and flow of religious influence over national life. As he makes clear from the outset, Brown sees himself as writing against a tradition in the history of religion that focuses first and foremost on theological debate within organized religions and that, he argues, thereby overstates the importance of liberal Christianity in the defeat of conservative moralism and hence in the transformation of modern Britain.

This article introduces the ‘Environmental Scan’ as answer to the question of hidden biases in digital heritage collections. Its substantive focus is digitized nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers, and in particular the JISC corpus, a popular, publicly-funded resource for scholars. While multiple papers have meticulously investigated the genesis of such newspaper collections, in the process highlighting the often unacknowledged politics of collection, preservation and dissemination via microfilm and now digitization, our aim is to explore questions of representativeness and bias in new ways by enriching computational analysis of digital corpora with the historical insights that can be derived from a contemporaneous reference source: namely, the Victorian newspaper press directories.

This is a tightly organized intellectual history of the middle decades of the twentieth century seen through the distinctive and culturally important lens of Penguin Books. The fact that it is available as a trade book from Manchester University Press is an added bonus. Although it does not purport to be a history of Penguin Books, it does draw many significant insights from the Penguin Archive now deposited at Bristol University. Shifts in editorial and commissioning policy at the press are well covered and we also gain some useful information about how well (or badly) particular titles sold (Abrams and Rose’s Must Labour Lose? sold barely 10,000 copies). But at heart this is an intellectual history not a publishing history or a cultural history of popular reading. Inevitably, this means that many interesting avenues in the history of paperback non-fiction remain largely unexplored. Blackburn’s central argument posits the rise and...

Between May 1978 and December 1983, the sociologist Ray Pahl conducted seven extensive interviews with a couple from Sheppey that he called “Linda” and “Jim.” These not only informed a key chapter in Pahl’s classic book Divisions of Labour but also evolved into a uniquely intimate account of how a family used to “getting by” (though never “affluent”) coped with the hardships and indignities of long-term reliance on welfare benefits. Perhaps inevitably, fascinating aspects of Linda and Jim’s testimony were left unused in Divisions of Labour, primarily because they were marginal to Pahl’s principal aim of demonstrating how the state welfare system could trap a family in poverty. We deliberately retain the narrative, case study approach of Pahl’s treatment, but shift our focus to the strategies that Linda and Jim adopted to cope with the emotional and psychological challenges of life at the sharp end of the early 1980s recession. How they retained a strong orientation toward the future, how they resisted internalizing the stigmatization associated with welfare dependency in 1980s Britain, and how their determination to fight “the system” ultimately led them to make choices in harmony with the logic of the New Right’s free market agenda.