Mark Hailwood

It’s been a lively old summer here on the ‘monster, and as the dust finally starts to settle on our ‘Voices of the People’ online symposium it’s probably time for a few conclusions. The vast range of thoughts provoked by our brilliant contributors are impossible to capture in a humble blog post, so there is no pretense here of providing a definitive summary of all the key points: for that, you’ll have to read the posts (and the #voxpop2015 hashtag on twitter). Instead, I’ll keep to highlighting a few of the themes that featured most prominently in your comments, both on the posts and on twitter; and that seem to me, therefore, to set the agenda for keeping the broader conversation about ‘history from below’ moving along.

History from below is… popular

Let’s start with the vital statistics: since the start of the symposium in July, the many-headed monster has received over 20,000 views. Add to that the 80 comments made on the blog posts, and the countless tweets about the symposium that have used the hashtag #voxpop2015, and I think it is fair to say that VoxPop2015 has been – appropriately enough – popular. One endorsement went so far as to say that ‘#voxpop2015 is the best thing on Twitter. If there was a Twitter fire, it’s the one thing I’d save; the rest could crackle away’ (@CBarnacles). Not an opinion of twitter we share, I hasten to add, but it’s a compliment we’ll take! A huge thanks to everyone who has participated in the event in some shape or form. Continue reading →

Our final post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by Jon Lawrence, Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge. Jon discusses his ongoing project to write a social and cultural history of post-war Britain in which ordinary people take centre stage as the experts on their own lives and experiences. In the process he revisits a number of the issues that have run through this symposium: how to relate the individual voice to the collective voice and its wider culture; how to account for the influence of the archive on the voices that are recorded; the extent to which we can or should be looking for ‘authentic’ voices; and perhaps above all  Jon reiterates the enormously rich and rewarding avenues of enquiry that are open to those engaged in the reflective pursuit of history from below.       

Jon Lawrence

I often wonder what life’s for. Greavsey lives for work, but I don’t. I’m happy to go on as we are or get a packet and be the idle rich. I’m not bothered about sweating for a £40 a week job. I’m happy now. I could do with £50,000 but I’m happy as I am. Are you? How can you be? You’re far from home. You can drink but that’s not real happiness. You’re going to lecture and do teaching, the same things one time after another. That’s just talk. We put up with bad conditions. But we’re more free than you. We do something different each day. We can move about. We know how to have fun, we don’t try to worry or try to keep up with the Joneses.

‘Ron Morris’, October 1968[1]

I am currently writing a social and cultural history of post-war England based largely on contemporary voices as they were recorded by social scientists between the 1940s and the late 2000s. This extract is from a study of Swan Hunter’s Wallsend shipyard on Tyneside. I will say more about this man and the context in which he came to say these things later. For now I simply wish to offer this as an example of how rich such testimony can be; and also to plant the question: how should we treat a plebeian voice which is so obviously not just exceptionally eloquent, but also knowingly engaged in a dialogue with academic knowledge? Continue reading →

Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by the many-headed monster’s very own Jonathan Willis, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham. Jonathan uses some rather intriguing letters found amongst the Elizabethan State Papers to raise some crucial questions about the relationship between eccentric individuals and the wider culture they belong to – what we might term the ‘Menocchio question’ .

Jonathan Willis

A few years ago, I stumbled across an interesting letter in the Elizabethan State Papers. I would say that it was ‘by accident’, but it wasn’t really, as I was actively looking for references to the Ten Commandments, as part of the monograph I’m currently writing on the reformation of the Decalogue. Still, I wasn’t exactly expecting to find what the calendar compliers described as ‘two letters to the Queen from Robert Banister, a great quoter of Scripture, yet mighty vehement against some Puritans who plagued him’, and which the caption on the letter itself (dated 1578) records as ‘two letters to Queen Elizabeth by Robert Banister a Religious mad-man, who seems to have concedid great indignation against the Puritans his prosecutors’.^[1] Banister’s letters were written in black ink, but otherwise seem to fit the modern definition of a letter written by a card-carrying member of the green-ink brigade, which one website defines as:

a particular kind of letter writer, who claims that he is the victim of some injustice, or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or an organisation, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on the name of the Prime Minister shows he’s an agent of the devil, or who is sure that invisible rays are being beamed into his house by his next-door neighbour to cause him injury, or who puts forward a thesis which, if adopted, will lead inevitably to world peace.^[2]

Banister’s letters contained a request for the queen to grant him permission to publish a treatise designed to clear his name from puritan accusations that he was a member of the secretive radical sect, the Family of Love. Banister may in fact have been a familist – his letters are ambiguous. He refers scathingly to ‘the phamily of lewde love’, and claims that never to have been ‘acoynted with any of that sect’, but he also described the puritans as a ‘vile, & most faulse family’, and spoke repeatedly of ‘gods love’. What is clear though is that, familist or no, Banister was a rare Elizabethan antinomian – that is, somebody who rejected the authority of the moral law, or Ten Commandments. His attack on his puritan persecutors was based on the fact that they were pharasaical legalists, ‘English Jues … that spie moses motes in every eye’. Attempts to trace Banister in all the usual locations – parish registers, ODNB, ESTC, CCED, lists of university alumni, etc. – have so far proved fruitless. (If any reader has come across him in another context, I’d be very happy to hear about it!). Still, in a way Banister’s anonymity opens up as many possibilities as it closes down. It seems to suggest that, other than his extraordinary views, expressed in these startling letters, he was an ‘ordinary’ person. Continue reading →

Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by David Hopkin, Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. David explores another life story, that of a nineteenth-century female Breton farm servant, through a combination of historical records and three remarkable novellas written by his subject. The result is not only a fascinating examination of an individual life, he argues, but an insight into a collective commentary on the first-hand experience of hardship in the past. David has also written a book entitled Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France, from which this symposium borrows its name.

David Hopkin

Virginie Desgranges, born 1868, lived a short, peripatetic life along the Normandy-Brittany border. Her frequent moves were the result of her family’s rapid social decline. Her grandfathers were customs officers but her own father, who died when she was ten, was a rag-and-bone man, while her mother was first a servant and then a day-labourer. For a while the couple ran a bar. Virginie had one older brother, who briefly followed his father’s profession before joining the Atlantic fishing fleet. In 1881 he and his mother spent a month in prison for robbing a neighbour of her bed-sheets. By that time Virginie had already left home and was working as a farm-servant. When she died, aged eighteen, she was employed as a servant by her uncle and aunt in the village of Pleine-Fougères, about ten miles from Mont Saint-Michel.

Poor, rural, young, female, mobile – by every measure Virginie’s is a voice from below. Given her social marginality it’s debateable whether she could make that voice heard in her lifetime, let alone in the historical record. Back in Pleine-Fougères her voice would have been in dialogue with others – her family, her neighbours, her employers, the marketplace singers and the various other people she encountered. Some of the parameters of that discussion were set by what we might call, for want of a better term, the oral tradition. It was because she was a participant in and recorder of that tradition that her voice has been preserved. Continue reading →

Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by Helen Rogers, a Faculty Member of the English and Cultural History Department at Liverpool John Moores University. Here Helen continues our current focus on how to put the fragments of ‘voices’ we can find in the archive into context to recover a fuller picture of the ordinary individuals behind such voices – drawing on her work on nineteenth century prison inmates, Helen advocates a combination of biographical reconstruction and prosopography that she terms ‘intimate reading’. 

Helen Rogers

History from below, writes Tim Hitchcock in this series, ‘is in essence, a politics of empathy and voice explored through a conversation with the dead.’ His proposition that we must read historical documents ‘against the grain’ if we are to recover experiences and voices from below from the records made by the powerful is one of the best descriptions of our practice. We need to listen out for the voices of the dead if we are to have a two-way conversation and allow them to challenge us about how we view the present and ourselves as well as our forebears and the past. But what if the dead ‘don’t want us to listen’, asks Julia Laite, and instead hoped to keep their secrets hidden? And what if it was not ‘voices’ they wanted, adds Will Pooley, but ‘bread, security, or just to be left alone.’

These questions resonate with me for I spend my days communing with the dead as I investigate how prisoners responded to punishment, Christian instruction and philanthropic intervention in the 1830s and 40s and whether these influenced desistance from crime or continued offending. When they left gaol, we can reasonably assume many strove to keep a low profile and some, though not all, will have remained indifferent to the moral education they had received inside. Since they left little or no first-person testimony I encounter their voices – and bodies – in the penal records that measured and described them, occasionally noting their words or abbreviations of them. Reduced to ‘offenders’ in the penal archive, I seek to recover their agency and humanity by examining their crimes and misdemeanours in the context of their ‘whole lives’ or what I can reconstruct of these from myriad sources. But can we derive historical meaning out of a single life plotted through the ten-yearly tabulations of the census returns or records of births, marriages and deaths? What interpretative weight can we place on incidental anecdotes and fragments of ‘voices’?

Great Yarmouth, Tolhouse (Gaol, House of Correction and Magistrate Court), photographed by Thomas Ayres, late 1800s, c. Norfolk County Council

The strategy I have developed is to weave biographical reconstruction with prosopography, or group biography. By viewing individual lives in the context of their social networks and the circumstances and characteristics they shared with others, we can speculate not only on the possible causes and outcomes of their actions, but also what was plausible and probable. I call this approach ‘intimate reading’: getting up close and personal with our subjects through immersive reading and extensive contextualisation.[1] Record linkage lets us explore the relationships binding individuals and groups, and their interactions – no matter how unequal – with officialdom. Intimate reading is smaller in scope than the ‘distant reading’ methods practiced in the digital humanities, and is concerned with excavating ‘deep’ data on specific individuals rather than ‘big’ data on large amorphous groups. But while the voices of the convicted were only rarely recorded, intimate reading may reveal how they made their mark in other ways, as we can see by following one boy in and out of the penal system.[2] Continue reading →