The Everyday Uses of Class

The title of Carolyn Steedman’s latest book makes clear that class is back on the historiographical agenda. In fact it never went away. While historians have debated the relevance of class for the last three decades, the heated discussion itself has kept class at the forefront of theoretical discussion. And in practice most historians of modern Britain have continued to use class in their work, as a form of description if not as a means of analysing social relations. Recently, a new wave of historiography has returned to the study of both experience and social class.¹ Carolyn Steedman’s study of the ‘everyday life of the English working class’ is a powerful and welcome contribution to this. This is not only because she focuses on a period neglected by other scholars of class, but also because she interrogates the meanings of both class and experience in a manner that is much needed in late modern British scholarship.

Like Steedman’s earlier work, this book is exceptional in drawing on the insights of literary and cultural studies to reinforce, rather than to undermine, ‘experience’ as a legitimate and indeed essential topic for historical investigation. Steedman’s focus on ‘everyday life’ is to be welcomed. Many historians have treated this realm as distinct from class analysis. This is particularly true of scholars of modern Britain: we have some excellent books on daily life in working-class communities, and an older body of work that deals with class relations but rarely with the everyday life of those people who were not labour-movement activists. More recently, everyday life as an analytical concept has become the focus of many cultural and literary studies, notably in the work of Joe Moran on twentieth-century Britain.² But this focus on the everyday has failed to interrogate why or how daily life has changed over time and, more precisely, who changed it. Insofar as they are studied at all the agents of change tend to be elites: politicians, writers, architects. We badly need more analysis of how ordinary people contribute to, or even enact, social and political change.

There are some admirable exceptions to this, including the work of Raphael Samuel, Jerry White and Carolyn Steedman herself. In The Radical Soldier’s Tale, Steedman provided a pioneering analysis of the relationship between working-class experience, writing, and political identity and action.³ She has continued to explore elements of that relationship in her impressively large and diverse body of work. But her most recent book develops this analysis further still. By placing the law, and writing, at the centre of her study of working-class life, she convincingly argues that only through understanding class as a relationship central to people’s lives – not just their work – can we understand modern history. And by analysing the connections between self, behaviour and writing within a framework of class analysis, she offers a compelling and comprehensive methodology for examining that much contested term, experience.

Steedman’s analysis is brought to life by her microhistory of the Nottinghamshire stocking maker Joseph Woolley. The account of his voluminous diaries that we are offered here challenges the limited attention that working-class people and their concerns receive in the historiography of law and political life and in histories of writing. As Steedman points out, many working-class people chose to write about their lives, and historians therefore need to pay closer attention to reading and writing as key elements of working-class experience. Her sensitive analysis demonstrates how Woolley used his everyday life to reach conclusions about the political and social relationships within which he found himself embedded. But she also shows how these conclusions were shaped by the process of writing – an activity that encouraged reflection on everyday events. In writing, Woolley created a coherent story out of myriad incidents and daily routines. In analysing his diaries, Steedman critiques the prevailing fashion for analysing everyday life as a set of fragmented...