The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860–1920 by Martyn Lyons (review)

As a college student, I spent a year abroad in France. Lonely and too poor to pay for phone calls, my primary source of contact with those back home was the written word—hundreds of letters handwritten on blue aerograms. They now sit in the attic of my home. I have a much smaller stack from my stint as a PhD student in Bordeaux. In subsequent trips, I have kept in touch primarily by telephone or in emails, both ephemeral. As a historian whose first book was based on family correspondence, I mourn the disappearance of this form of communication.

In writing to loved ones, I was following in the footsteps of the millions who have sought to maintain ties from a distance. In this book, Martyn Lyons affirms the importance of personal writings, especially those of “ordinary” people, which served a number of essential functions: “for personal communication at a distance, for business transactions and for maintaining family networks” (1). Noting that until recently “only the writings of educated people attracted the serious attention of cultural historians,” he seeks to bring the same attention to “the writings of the semiliterate and partly educated” (2).

Professors teach their students that the elite disproportionately shape our understanding of history because they were the ones who produced the sources we read today. To understand the lives of ordinary people, scholars have turned to indirect sources—generated by the Church, the legal system, political authorities, and folklorists—or to demographic data through which the inarticulate might speak. Lyons, however, argues that even individuals with little education felt urgently the need to write and found ways to do so. He expresses surprise that “even historians who were capable of enormous sympathy with the culture of ordinary people in the past seemed surprisingly unaware of the rich subterranean world of ordinary writings” (6). Lyons is especially interested in the period during which the democratization of writing took a giant leap forward—between 1860 and 1920. “[T]he sheer volume of lower-class writings generated by enforced separation from one’s family multiplied exponentially,” and, equally important, “lower-class writers were no longer confined to skilled craftsmen; they now included the peasant masses who were forced into the trenches in 1914–1918, or who chose the ‘American option’ of transatlantic migration” (8).

Lyons focuses on the scribal cultural of peasants, workers, and artisans from three west European countries with substantial archives devoted to popular writings: France, Italy, and Spain. He sees similarities in their experiences during the time period under consideration that invite comparison. All were predominately rural and becoming increasing literate. Spain and Italy experienced considerable out-migration, while Italy and France both experienced a long and grueling war.

The first part of Lyons’ book examines in some detail the theoretical frames that shape his methodology, in particular the “new history from below,” which he sees as more individualized and sensitive to the voices of the poor and the ordinary than the earlier Annales school or the British neo-Marxist school. Lyons outlines both the difficulties that the poor faced in carving out the time and space to write as well as the strong desire that pushed many to do so, even in the face of obstacles: “For the completely illiterate, third parties could be enlisted as proxy writers or readers. The urgent need to write and to receive had to be satisfied somehow. Writing materials had to be found, time to write had to be carved out of the day, and suitable places in which to write a letter or a diary entry had to be improvised” (35).

The central chapters of the book focus on two events that led to a flood of writing by the poor and the semi-literate: the First World War (in France, the Postal Control Commission—military censors—kept careful records of the correspondence of poilus, ordinary soldiers; in Italy, various archives house rich...