Ordinary People’s History: On Laura Carter’s “Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979”

By Thomas J. SojkaApril 12, 2022

Ordinary People’s History: On Laura Carter’s “Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979”

Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 by Laura Carter

IN THEIR HISTORY of interwar Britain The Long Week-End (1941), Robert Graves and Alan Hodge surveyed everyday life in the 1920s and ’30s. While that book offered readers some insight into domestic politics and other major issues of the day, the authors’ focus was decidedly on the more mundane: they discuss, for instance, various crazes (pogo-sticking, Mahjong, crossword puzzles, nudism, Benzedrine), popular fashion (the shortening of hair and skirt lengths especially), and the widening definition of newsworthy as “crime, sex, and folly, but […] served with the potatoes and meat of respectability.” Laura Carter’s new history of this kind of popular social history serves as a reminder that the quotidian can be both exciting and also key to understanding the lived reality of the past. Such accounts not only allow readers to feel empathy for historical subjects but also provide a glimpse into the practice of history writing more generally.

Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 considers the production and consumption of the Graves/Hodge kind of history — especially the important and underexplored role played by women (some newly enfranchised) and the rise of mass education in Britain. Women produced and distributed histories of everyday life in classrooms, publications, and museums, and on radio; these histories amplified women’s stories while remaining committed to traditional gender politics. As Carter argues, they “permitted women, the most ordinary of people, a central place in the making of history without threatening a radical overhaul of mid-century masculinities and femininities.” Since women were largely excluded from the production of academic history, writing popular social history gave them an opportunity to engage with the past.

Carter’s book is an attempt to move beyond discussions of professional historians and their histories, especially the left-wing social histories of the 1960s (such as E. P. Thompson’s foundational 1963 study, The Making of the English Working Class). Carter uses the term “popular history” rather than “public history”: the latter she sees as too tied to the academy, while the former represents a new genre that emerged in the early 20th century. The book makes the important argument that popular history did not decline because of the development of new forms of academic historiography but rather “because bottom-up social change rendered the ‘history of everyday life’ untenable in the changing context of mass education.” In less than 300 pages, Carter leads the reader masterfully through the many settings in which the history of everyday life unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century, before it ultimately receded in the closing decades.

The history of everyday life was a more democratized turn away from Whiggish Victorian narratives of progress and histories-from-above as espoused by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Instead, accounts informed by the Arts and Crafts movement, local history, and lived experience emerged. For instance, Marjorie and Charles Quennell published the first of their series A History of Everyday Things in England in 1918. And this was popular history indeed: by 1961, over one million copies had been sold, and in the seven years that followed, another quarter of a million. Revising how history was presented was also bound up with the changing purpose of education: with the rise of mass literacy, schools were now “tasked with determining the nature of democratic culture.” Much of the history of everyday life was preoccupied with the working and domestic lives of ordinary people like wainwrights or blacksmiths. The ordinary, however, did not only focus on typical working- and middle-class subjects; just as Graves and Hodge were much concerned with where the Prince of Wales danced, other accounts discussed what the Queen ate for breakfast.

Carter begins with the publishing of popular history books and the teaching of social history to “ordinary” students. By 1935, publishers like the university presses at Cambridge and Oxford had to respond to the rising popularity of lighter fare offered by the likes of the newly established Penguin Books. Then, much as now, the audience for academic monographs was relatively limited, but the demand for richly illustrated, highly readable histories was evident. As Carter writes, “What began to emerge was a way of expressing and enjoying history unconcerned with universality and nationality.” The ordinary reading public was far more interested in the “small and seemingly inconsequential details of life in the past (such as how people cooked, how people decorated their homes, or how machines and mechanisms were assembled and functioned), which had hitherto been the reserve of eccentric antiquarian knowledge.” This publishing impulse carried over into the classroom, with a pedagogy informed by the local, the visual, and the emotional.

The teaching of the history of everyday life was well suited for “less able pupils, soon to-be-ordinary citizens (that (wo)man-in-the-street, the general reader, radio-listener, museum-goer).” The aftermath of World War I saw a rise in the promotion of global and international history, in an effort to prevent future conflict. Many teachers, however, bristled at history they deemed too political, choosing instead to focus on the hyper-local as a means of understanding the nation and the self. It is unsurprising that film, the medium of the masses, was used to teach history to the burgeoning citizens of a mass democracy and to debunk overly romantic notions of the past. Most interestingly, history was believed to be a kind of emotional training, with the study of the past engendering empathy among ordinary pupils.

The second part of Carter’s book turns to popular history transmitted by BBC Radio, local museums, and local governments. From its inception, the BBC had been aware that “light” entertainment outperformed more “factual” reporting: “History education on the radio was embroiled within this wider dilemma over how to ‘educate’ listeners, without dictating to them and boring them.” As in educational contexts, there was an attempt to avoid overly politicized history while keeping the past relevant, accessible, and interesting to a general audience. But by World War II, Carter argues, “[h]istory’s ‘relevance’ was here being recast as intellectual, philosophical, and masculine (rather than personal, practical, and feminine).” In addition to historical entertainments such as radio drama, the BBC was increasingly hosting talks by professional historians, a shift reflective of the movement of academic history into a broader public sphere.

Naturally, local museums prioritized local, rather than national, histories and focused on the role of labor — particularly women’s domestic work — in history. Interestingly, attempts to create national folk museums in Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland were ultimately successful, but similar attempts failed in England, revealing complicated questions surrounding the issue of nationalism in Britain. More practically, museums in the 1930s and ’40s collected “bygones,” previously forgotten in attics and cellars or salvaged from demolitions, for their collections, which were “not precious, ancient, or even beautiful. And they were functionally useless. But they affirmed the place of individual people — laboring, loving, and living — in the historical progression.”

By the 1950s, however, museums were beginning to professionalize, shifting both the collecting practices and the educational objectives of heritage institutions. As with the BBC, social history in museums began to take on a more masculine appearance. Beyond broadcasting and museums, the history of everyday life was also found in cultural policy. Carter uses the example of the London County Council (LCC) — and the Geffrye Museum in Hoxton (now the Museum of the Home), “a site of LCC cultural policy in practice” — as representative of “the mid-century shift from elite to democratic culture, seen through the lens of popular social history.” The museum took the model of the Quennells’ A History of Everyday Things in England in its approach to the past (to be expected given Marjorie Quennell’s role in its administration).

Histories of Everyday Life ends with a return to the educational context, tracing the ultimate decline of popular social history as a genre. By the 1970s, more students than ever before learned history as a school subject. And it is at this time that reactions against the history of everyday life reach their height, in the form of a right-wing “backlash against ‘permissive’ social education” and a left-wing critique of the inability of such history to “accommodate an analysis of power dynamics, especially in relation to racial difference and the history of the British Empire.” And so, by the mid-1980s, divorced from its educational context, the history of everyday life “had become a nostalgic, English conservative safe haven, a prime target for the left-wing critics of kitsch and cosy popular histories.” Critics of such histories attacked the nostalgia found therein, ignoring its educational impact earlier in the 20th century. While popular social history was indeed too “parochial and nostalgic,” especially as compared to progressive “new social history,” Carter does not attribute the rise of the latter to the decline of the former. Instead, the book points to the “bottom-up social and pedagogical forces” at work in the 1970s: the rise of comprehensive schools, the standardization of curricula in response to examinations, and society’s inability to accommodate multiculturalism.

Carter’s account pays close attention to the importance of regionalism: the history of everyday life, with its frequent focus on the local, varied considerably across English, Welsh, and Scottish contexts. What’s lacking, though, is more attention to the overarching imperial context. To be fair, this is less a deliberate omission by the author — indeed, Carter discusses this lack in some detail — than a reflection of how the empire “was either ignored or surreptitiously weaved into local history.” Nevertheless, a more careful discussion of how the academic social history that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s was better suited to deal with the history of British imperialism would have certainly been a welcome inclusion. Significant work by Jordanna Bailkin, Kathleen Paul, and Wendy Webster has shown just how fraught the dissolution of empire was in domestic Britain, particularly in the emergence of new understandings of Englishness and Britishness. Could students of the Windrush generation relate to the (ostensibly white) history of everyday life that had been so popular at midcentury? Carter begins to answer this important question in the book’s final chapter: “Attempts to stretch the boundaries of mid-century popular social history to fashion an inclusive, ‘multicultural’ education were often problematic, deeply racist, and a weak tonic for the reality of growing, racialized ‘attainment’ gaps in the 1970s education system.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that these inadequacies — the way histories of everyday life were unable to adapt to the emergence of new identities and subjectivities — ultimately led to its downfall.

“A central contention of this book,” Carter writes, “is that there was an idiosyncratic synergy between progressive educational techniques for ordinary consumers of history and conservative impulses focused on emotional and individualistic responses to history.” Histories that challenge dominant paradigms or nationalistic myths are often attacked as “revisionist” today. But all history is, of course, a process of revision and reevaluation. What do we do with history that makes us uncomfortable, particularly when it is our own? Today, the Museum of the Home is indeed reflective of a modern, multicultural Britain, correcting the 1970s omissions of the Geffrye Museum — a reminder that inclusive, factual representations of the past (including everyday life) are indeed possible, but they require careful cultural policy-making, political will, and a valuation of expertise and community engagement. Furthermore, Carter’s book is an important corrective; the lengthy absence of women (especially women of color) from academic history-writing does not diminish the important role they played in the production of popular social history in Britain. As Carter says:

The intellectual innovations of a small coterie of male class warriors did not stimulate popular tastes for social history from the 1970s onwards. A democratic yet deferential mid-century culture, geared towards mass education, women, and community life, had already primed a new generation of consumers to use and think about everyday life in the past in their own everyday lives in the present.


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Thomas J. Sojka (@tomsojka) is a PhD candidate in history at Boston University, where he researches elite sociability, party going, and gossip in 1920s and 1930s Britain.

LARB Contributor

Thomas J. Sojka (@tomsojka) is a PhD candidate in history at Boston University, where he researches elite sociability, party going, and gossip in 1920s and 1930s Britain.

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