Local History from Below

Carolyn Steedman's Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age and K. D. M. Snell's Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity, and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950 are, in most ways, radically different books. Snell's book is based largely on quantitative evidence while Steedman's brings literary, social, and cultural analysis together in intriguing ways. Yet both use the local to contextualize large-scale social and economic changes, and both are interested in how small cultural and administrative units can bring insight into national shifts in social and intellectual life. While Snell's book covers a much longer period, both examine the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of industrialization, class formation, and national centralization. Finally, both books bring innovative approaches to a social history from below, in an attempt to give voice to the working poor who were at the center of these dramatic shifts.

Carolyn Steedman situates her study at the juncture of two books that she sees as myth-making (26): Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Both tell stories about the West Riding of Yorkshire in the last years of the eighteenth century. In this industrializing yet isolated region, Steedman suggests, the dramatic intellectual and social changes of the era can be seen by studying three individuals and their personal histories. The tale Steedman tells is most centrally about a servant, Phoebe Beatson, and her elderly employer, the clergyman and retired schoolmaster John Murgatroyd. In 1802, Beatson became pregnant, and her lover, George Thorp, refused to marry her, despite contemporary notions of decency and recurrent attempts by Murgatroyd to exert his authority in the matter. Murgatroyd allowed her to continue living in his house, to give birth there, and to raise her child. When he died a few years later, he left Beatson and her daughter, to whom he had clearly become attached, an inheritance that allowed them to live independently. Steedman wonders how all of this happened: how people behaved so differently than they might be expected to given our understanding of the time, place, and social actors in question.

This is a tantalizing story, but one for which, as Steedman readily admits, there is very little information available. Her main source is the extensive writings of Murgatroyd, who noted the events in question in his diary. She supplements this with parish and other local administrative records in order to learn as much as she can about Beatson, her family, and everyone connected to her. This fascinating combination of sources, however, at times yields somewhat uneven results. Beatson herself wrote nothing down, and we know next to nothing about her relationship with Thorp. The motivations for their affair and their behavior after it remain mysterious. Steedman's valuable attempt to rehabilitate the agency of a perhaps illiterate female servant, then, remains only partially successful.

The book thus serves not so much as an analysis of these actors' stories, as a contextualization of them. One chapter covers the local wool and worsted trade, in which Beatson participated as a spinner, and connects local economic conditions to notions of romance and passion. This is highly speculative, but Steedman makes a convincing point that love and attraction are locally and socially specific. In another chapter, she examines the changing nature of the church within the context of the Enlightenment, and suggests that a gradually shifting notion of an Anglican God may have allowed Murgatroyd to act so compassionately towards his servant despite her behavior. She also suggests that E. P. Thompson's account, despite its emphasis on "experience," ignores the importance of Anglicanism. Steedman insists on connecting religion to other elements of local...