An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853 by Christopher Ferguson (review)

Many scholars have argued that Britain was essentially stable during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christopher Ferguson's An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853—which is well-organized, mostly well-written, based on solid research, and abounding in shrewd argument—offers a reminder that for people who lived through those decades, stability might not have been what struck them most. Ferguson, gently taking issue with historians who argue that political, social, and economic change has been exaggerated, encourages another look at claims about the political ascendancy of conservative values and the idea that the early nineteenth century is best studied as part of a much longer period, as seen in works by Linda Colley, James Vernon, Richard Price, and Margot Finn. Reconceptualizations of the Industrial Revolution by such authorities as Nicholas Crafts, E. A. Wrigley, Martin Daunton, and Joel Mokyr should also be evaluated anew, Ferguson suggests, as should treatments of class and gender by Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce, David Cannadine, Amanda Vickery, Beverly Lemire, and Karen Harvey. This situates Ferguson's book in the midst of important scholarly debate, and, although Ferguson focuses on one individual, he manages to connect that individual to broader themes in effective and interesting ways.

The subject, James Carter, endured huge and irreversible changes in his daily existence. He did not understand them all, but he knew them, he lived them, and he wrote about them. Overlooked by all but a few historians, and unappreciated even by them, Carter's self-chronicling is taken seriously by Ferguson, somewhat in the manner of David Vincent and Jonathan Rose in their approach to working-class autobiography. To Ferguson, Carter is a valid observer of his surroundings, whether or not he conforms to particular historians' ideas of what is representative. Carter's story is an encapsulation of modern urban life in the time it was being created, with "heightened conditions of anonymity, autonomy, and antagonism promoted by rapid urbanization, economic upheaval, intensified migration, rising literacy, and expanding print media" (3). There may have been calm and continuity on the surface of British society, but revolution was underway beneath.

A tailor in Colchester and then London, Carter contended with new methods in an increasingly competitive trade. He had to adjust, and took up writing in part to earn more money. Still, Ferguson eschews a wholly pessimistic version of the Industrial Revolution and points to an awareness of its mixed results. There were winners alongside losers. There was also intellectual change, linked with the availability of print and the movement toward mass reading. Carter was one of those humble readers who became humble writers. Literacy meant self-discovery, and the body could journey as well as the mind, for this was an age of mobility. With migration and urban growth, people learned to live in the city. Carter's time in London brought "personal transformation in the crucible of British modernity," and Ferguson dwells on the combination of freedom and isolation (2). In the city, one could feel lost, and while this was not a new feeling, now it was experienced on an unprecedented scale. By the 1850s, as Ferguson claims, "crowded loneliness was steadily becoming the default backdrop to everyday existence for the majority of Britons" (180).

Carter's was a life of hard work, illness, and struggle. In 1845, when in his fifties, he anonymously published Memoirs of a Working Man, and a second autobiographical volume in 1850. In other works, he discussed religion, nature, literature, and civilization. He had several motives: the pursuit of knowledge (against the odds); distraction from personal circumstances (health and money worries and exacting physical labor); a wish to be useful to others; and the determination not just to seek knowledge, but also to produce it: "The working man was no longer content to read and be educated. He...