Everyday Life of the English Working Class - Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century

"This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley's voluminous diaries and Clifton's magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man's understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life"--

List of contents

Prologue: what are they like?; 1. An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is, what it is like, and what it is not like; 2. Books do furnish a mind; 3. Family and friends; 4. Fears as loyons: drinking and fighting; 5. Sex and the single man; 6. Talking law; 7. Earthly powers; 8. Getting and spending; 9. Knitting and frames; 10. The knocking at the gate: General Ludd; 11. Some conclusions about writing everyday.

About the author

Carolyn Steedman is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (2007) and Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (2009).

Product details

• Authors: Carolyn Steedman, Carolyn (University of Warwick) Steedman, Steedman Carolyn
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.12.2013
• EAN: 9781107046214
• ISBN: 978-1-107-04621-4
• No. of pages: 312
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; England, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, European History, Social & cultural history, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, c 1500 onwards to present day, British & Irish history, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General, Social and cultural history