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  • The Quennells and the ‘History of Everyday Life’ in England, c. 1918–69
  • Laura Carter (bio)

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Fig 1.

Marjorie Quennell and Charles Henry Bourne Quennell, A History of Everyday Things in England, vol. 3, 1733–1851, London, 1933. Cover by Marjorie Quennell.

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A new social history developed in mid twentieth-century England, one that has seldom been taken seriously by historiographers of social history. The ‘history of everyday life’ involved disparate threads that are challenging to weave together: Arts and Crafts aestheticism, liberal citizenship education, and new teaching methods formulated for mass secondary education and popular heritage tourism. These threads can be united using the life and work of Charles Henry Bourne Quennell (1872–1935) and his wife Marjorie Quennell (1883–1972). The Quennells were the authors and illustrators of a series of interwar bestsellers called A History of Everyday Things in England, which remained in print until the late 1960s.1 (Fig. 1) This article presents a close examination of the intellectual influences, networks of socialization, and practical activities surrounding these books. Its focus on the Quennells and the ‘history of everyday life’ opens an important window into the history of British social history. This episode has been little examined and poorly conceptualized, due to its ambiguous position between the decline of Victorian romantic and Whiggish histories and the rise of ‘history from below’ in the 1960s.

The period between the wars has proven persistently problematic for scholars contemplating ‘the place of the past’ in English culture. Peter Mandler has traced the decline of the nineteenth-century ‘history boom’ to a point of fragmentation, bound up with disciplinary professionalization.2 Paul Readman has downplayed the impact of these changes, arguing that the 1890s and 1900s saw England’s ‘antiquarian sensibility’ deepen.3 The First World War ruptured the fabric of the cultural nation, and popular historical cultures between the wars manifested through a range of new, non-literary media, with the rise of broadcasting, cinema attendance, mass secondary education, and the democratization of museums.4 Modernization and reformist agendas gradually robbed the preservationist movement of the political and international urgency that ‘heritage’ had enjoyed in the late nineteenth century.5 This uneven landscape has not readily lent itself to precise estimations of history’s place in mid-twentieth-century culture. Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994), which championed the ‘un-official knowledge’ of a people’s history, identified many instances of the [End Page 107] ‘history of everyday life’, but did not argue that it was a coherent project with chronological specificity.6

In Theatres of Memory Samuel demonstrates that our focus has too often shifted onto the more manageable course of academic history, carrying the unsatisfactory assumption that historical trends simply trickled down into mainstream society.7 This has had particularly reductive consequences for understanding popular social history. The origins of academic social history, ‘history from below’, lay with a generation of Marxist historians who understood modern British history through the experience of class struggle.8 Their Marxist telling has become the received wisdom: social history is a post-1945 phenomenon, inextricably linked to the rapid social change of that era and to the Left.9 This article shows that an alternative vein of social history predated that movement. The ‘history of everyday life’ had a largely liberal political agenda, and therefore cannot be understood exclusively through either the radical Left or the nostalgic Right. It was built on the notion of an ordered yet participatory democracy, an ideal prevalent among progressive members of the middle class between the wars.10 The liberal ideal of citizenship, a facet of the so-called ‘culture for democracy’, has not been adequately explored by scholars examining the role of history in citizen-making. Their focus has been on ideological extremities: jingoistic and imperialist conservatism or the Leavisite socialism of the adult education movement.11 Even pacifist internationalism, as promoted by some supporters of the League of Nations Union, used history to mould a distinctive breed of political citizen.12 The ‘history of everyday life’ stood quite separate from these movements. It was both a more mainstream and more politically muted...

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