Joseph Lee on Victorian social history
Social history has long been regarded as a hold-all for the bits and pieces left over by more institutionalised historians. Even now, when it is rapidly achieving positive rather than negative recognition, confusion con- cerning its scope continues to exist. Is it, as Professor Hobsbawm asserts in a general introduction to this new series, the history of society, or, as Professor Rowse thinks, the history of consumption, or as Professor Conze defines it, the history of social struc- tures and movements? It wouldn't perhaps matter what it is, so long as it is done well, but for the evidence contained in even as crisply written and sensitively illustrated a study as Professor Best's that, without some self-denying ordinance about its scope, social history simply slithers away from writers trying to get in a bit of everything.
Professor Best proves a most perceptive guide through Victorian slums and suburbs, sandwiching-in railway excursions to the sea- side between visits to city halls and music halls, schools and workhouses, pubs and Prisons, churches and chapels. But this bril- liantly versatile performance merely empha- sises the dilemma of finiteness. For, impres- sive though this list is, why stop there? Are barracks and boardrooms, for instance, beyond the bounds of social history? Why linger longer over factory children than over the numerically more important agricultural Labourers? Why take us into servants' quart- ers but not on to building sites, or down Mine shafts, or-on board ship? Why should age receive such short measure compared With youth? This uncertainty about the scope of social history prevents Professor Best from imposing consistent order on his mat- erial and from fusing a series of compelling vignettes into a coherent whole.
Social history is the history of status. In- stead of attempting a history of society, which, if successful, would 'be simply history, not social history, the social historian should Concentrate on the status aspects of all human relationships, and abandon the futile attempt to master every detail of the infinite range of subjects which social history now embraces—demography, urbanisation, health, housing, education, crime, war, bureaucracy etc—all with their own actual °r potential conceptual cores, all destined
ultimately for intellectual independence, and some already so specialised as to be beyond the comprehension of most social historians.
At the same time social history must sharpen as well as narrow its focus by draw- ing on the sociologists' analysis of stratifica- tion. As a beginning, one might apply some such simple but useful distinction as that drawn by T. H. Marshall between personal and positional status—between status within a group and the status of the group itself within society. Professor Best is almost ex- clusively concerned with the second type, although according to his own definition of social history (*what it would have felt like to be alive about 1850 and how differently it would have felt about 1875') he should have concentrated on the first type. The section on 'The making of livings', for in- stance, largely neglects the work situation, being primarily devoted to what work men were at rather than to them at it. Their status in the family was the single most important factor in most people's lives, and intensity of family feeling exceeded that experienced in any other group, much of the poor's legendary willingness to help the poor, for example, being in fact the willingness of relatives to help kinsfolk. Yet Professor Best's approach precludes sustained analysis of family life, the essence of any social his- tory that aspires to be more than a vicarious study of popular politics.
The history of status poses particularly prickly problems in the handling of evidence. Contemporaries are rarely reliable witnesses in other historical fields, but they are the only arbiters of status. However contradic- tory contemporaries' opinions concerning status may be. they can never be wrong, because what they thought it was, was what it was. But while all contemporaries were right, only some were relevant in any given context, and without a theoretical framework it becomes impossible to distinguish relevance with any consistency. More the pity, then, that Professor Best adopted an impossible concept of social history, for he presses Victorian literature into such frequent and felicitous service in capturing the nuances of contemporary perception that his use of it would have been even more effective if sub- ordinated to a disciplined sense of the scope of the subject.
The Victorians were obSessed with the problem of how to transmute class into status in the face of unprecedentedly rapid eco- nomic growth. Approaching social history as the history of status would have avoided the incongruous inclusion of public school education with music halls and excursions under 'leisure' and placed it in the context of a systematic survey of the entry fines extracted by rank from riches. Police and military could be treated as an integral part of society rather than as an external in- truding force. Ireland could be considered as a case study in status distinctions within a plural society instead of popping aimlessly in and out (some scattered, if illuminating, comments do not remotely convey a sense of 'what it would have felt like to be alive' in mid-Victorian Ireland).
Dr Levanthal's biography of a status- seeker seems a curious choice to initiate another series, for it neither uses the promised 'new methods' nor draws on the *research in allied disciplines' which A. F. Thompson, the general editor, considers the distinguishing feature of the series. It is nonetheless impressive—a modest, judicious, tautly-written, tightly-controlled life of the bricklayer who became secretary of the Lon- don Trades Council and the Reform League. Levanthal confirms the traditional interpre- tation of George Howell's career as a case- study in embourgeoisement, the working class answer to scientific socialism. A highly competent study might have been turned into a really exciting one had Dr Levanthal infused the later pages with some of the in- sights of the admirable introductory analysis of the making of an artisan By almost wholly ignoring Howell's later life-style, Levanthal neglects the opportunity to probe further into the ethos of respectability offered, for in- stance, by the death of this temperance reformer's wife from alcoholism.
The lesson of these two works is that, until social history acquires a conceptual core, not even naturally alert and sophisticated minds can hope to make their full contribution to it.
Joseph Lee is a Fellow and Tutor of Peter- house, Cambridge
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