H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (April, 2008)

Andrew August. _The British Working Class, 1832-1940_. Harlow: Pearson
Longman, 2007. ix + 286 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $33.40 (paper),
ISBN 978-0-582-38130-8.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Dennis Dworkin, Department of History, University of 
Nevada

In the 1960s and 1970s, the working class--and particularly the British
working class--had a special place in historical writing. It was at the
center of the new social history and history from below, in large part
because of E. P. Thompson's enormously influential _The Making of the
English Working Class_ (1963). Yet, Thompson's book built on a tradition
of radical historiography in which the British working class was
important to the historical process broadly conceived. It was the
world's first industrial proletariat and central to Karl Marx's
understanding of the historical dynamic of capitalism and the transition
to socialism. The British working class's experience had universal
implications.

Certainly, much has changed since the heyday of the new social and labor
history. The end of communism, the rise of identity politics, the
decline of the labor movement, the advent of post-Fordism, and a host of
other changes have contributed to a declining interest in the working
class within historiography. As a result of the impact of the linguistic
turn, the new cultural history, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies,
the fields of labor and social history are less central than they once
were. Yet, at the same time, there has been an outpouring of theoretical
discussion that has revised our understanding of class, and historians
have produced a more complex and nuanced picture of British
working-class life. The theoretical transformations have been analyzed
at length, including by me in _Class Struggles_ (2007). Andrew August's
_The British Working Class: 1832-1940_ is a highly readable overview of
British working-class history that builds on the achievement of numerous
social, cultural, and feminist historians, while deploying numerous
primary sources to make its principal points.

Theoretically, the book reflects the debates of the 1980s and 1990s,
which pit advocates of cultural and linguistic approaches against those
who supported social and materialist interpretations. August's book
offers a middle ground, building on both positions. It opposes the
automatic assumption, typical of the new social history, which causally
links social being and consciousness, and it draws on cultural
approaches that privilege language and discourse. Yet, August insists
that working people embraced the language of class, because it resonated
with their experience: the environment of home, work, and neighborhood.
Such a perspective is firmly rooted in the materialist tradition of
social and labor history. For August, the primary affiliation of British
workers was in terms of class, but they had multiple identities--most
important, those connected to gender, ethnicity, and region. Where
writers often evoke "British" yet mean "English," August includes in his
narrative not only English but Scottish and Welsh workers as well. Irish
workers are given less space and Jewish immigrant workers virtually none
at all. Their relationship to his narrative raises interesting questions
about the ethnic composition of the British working class and the
criteria for inclusion and exclusion. These questions are by no means
easy to answer.

One of the radical moves made by Thompson was to begin his account of
the early working class by establishing the libertarian and radical
tradition of the free-born Englishman, which shaped the working class's
understanding and response to the early Industrial Revolution. It
demonstrated his rejection of the base/ superstructure model and
stressed his belief that ideology and culture played a constitutive role
in the working-class formation. While August might differentiate himself
from traditional Marxists, his account is structured along
base/superstructure lines. The book is divided chronologically into
three parts, each introduced by shifts in material relationships that
shaped and reshaped working-class culture. Yet, August fully realizes
that such changes can be overemphasized, and he stresses the
continuities that exist in working-class life from one phase to the
next. The first part of August's book covers the early Industrial
Revolution and the years of the long Victorian boom. Here, he stresses
the importance of population movements and growth, which produced
intensive urban expansion. Workers faced overcrowding, poor sanitary
conditions, and high mortality. In this context, family was the dominant
relationship, and people often lived at home for extended periods.
Although a minority of workers was unionized, and unions had to struggle
to be tolerated, there was a continual struggle over wages and workplace
control. Workers fought within the capitalist system rather than against
it. They spent their limited leisure time at feasts and wakes, and they
played street football. These forms of entertainment offended
middle-class notions of respectability, and middle-class and some
working-class reformers wanted to put a stop to them. Working-class
people created their own institutions--cooperatives and friendly
societies--and political movements, notably Chartism, but they were also
hostile to the Poor Laws and the increasing presence of the police. The
book's second part covers the period between the Depression of the 1870s
and World War I. Following the Victorian boom, British capitalists
experienced intensified competition and shrinking profits. They
responded by using more productive technologies, stricter work
discipline, greater reliance on piece rates, and higher levels of the
labor of women and youth. The working class accordingly joined unions at
an unprecedented rate, and the "new unions" of unskilled workers engaged
in increasing levels of strike action. The period following the 1870s
solidified the traditional working-class way of life, founded on dense
and crowded conditions, the doctrine of separate spheres in the
household, and mutuality and solidarity. In contrast to the privatized
world of the middle class, the leisure of working people was public,
involving street life, fairs, gambling, pubs (although reduced amount of
time were spent there), music halls, and football matches. Workers were
becoming more "respectable," increasingly drawn to self-help
organizations emphasizing education and religion. Perhaps the most
important aspect of the first two parts of the book is the way in which
August integrates recent feminist historiography on the working class
into his account. He captures the tension in working-class life between
its embrace of the middle-class ideology of separate spheres and the
fact that many working-class families depended on the wages of husband
and wife to make ends meet. Industrial capitalists, who increasingly
found women's labor appealing because it led to a reduction of wages,
were confronted by skilled male workers who insisted that they alone
were responsible for producing the family wage. As August points out,
unions, which privileged gender conflict over class solidarity, often
shunned women. However, he might have also have given some space to
instances of cooperation between male and female workers. The third part
of the book is largely concerned with the period of World War I and the
interwar years that followed. Following the war, old patterns of
working-class life persisted in the midst of important changes. Despite
high levels of unemployment, many workers had smaller families and more
disposable income, developed better nutritional habits, and lived in
better housing on new housing estates. With the shift in economic life
from textiles and coal to cars and electrical engineering, population
movements took place as well. Workers confronted the intensified
exploitation of labor and acceleration in deskilling. The shift from the
old industries of the Industrial Revolution to such industries as
automobiles was detrimental to unions, and high levels of unemployment
contributed to a reduction in wages. While union membership ebbed and
flowed in the interwar years, the British government supported the
process of collective bargaining but was often hostile to working-class
militancy. August's book includes a thought-provoking discussion of
working-class political affiliations. Working-class people could be
militant, but their class affiliations did not lend themselves to
embracing radical political ideologies. Indeed, as August points out, a
segment of working-class people were not only steadfastly Tories, but
they also could be deeply patriotic, turning out in large numbers for
Empire Day and the Coronation of 1937. Ultimately, for August, "the
informal, everyday politics of households, neighbourhoods and workplaces
pervaded working-class life far more than party politics or militant
activism. Hierarchies of reputation and respect distinguished households
and whole streets in working-class districts from one another" (p. 236).
Such a perspective provides justification for giving short shrift to
workers' involvement in socialist politics, which, as August rightly
points out, was a minority trend. But, if traditional accounts of the
British working class have exaggerated its connection to socialism, he
has perhaps bent the stick too far in the other direction. Socialism
might be a minority current in working-class life, but its relationship
to the majority culture was by no means insignificant. In short,
August's _The British Working Class, 1832-1940_ is a readable synthesis
of recent scholarship that skillfully deploys the voices of
working-class people to make its principle points. While scholars in the
field will be mostly familiar with his primary and secondary sources,
the book is an excellent introduction for those less knowledgeable and
is ideally suited for the classroom. In provincializing the British
working class, August has performed an important scholarly task.



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