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

Beverly Lemire. _The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and
Social Politics in England, c. 1600-1900_. Gender in History Series.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. xii + 257 pp. $80.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-7222-2.

Reviewed for H-Albion by John Smail, Department of History, University of North 
Carolina at Charlotte

Household and Credit in England: 1670-1900

In a 1994 article in the _Journal of Economic History_, Jan de Vries
argued that the debate between demand-side and supply-side explanations
for the causes of the Industrial Revolution was unlikely to resolve
itself unless historians acknowledged a parallel "industrious
revolution" that was taking place within the household during the same
period.[1] His point, obvious when one thinks about it, is that
production and consumption are intimately connected inside the "black
box" of the household in the decisions about how much its members would
work and how much they would spend. In _The Business of Everyday Life_,
Beverly Lemire occupies this same analytic terrain, looking in detail at
English households in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries. Lemire's book is more than just an application of Vries's
insight to this particular time and place, for she significantly extends
and enriches the paradigm in two ways. First, Lemire draws attention to
the central role that women played in household members' everyday
practices in the market. Second, she shifts focus from the
production/consumption nexus _per se_ to the credit relationships on
which both depended and through which they were connected. The result is
an interesting and important book that should shape the way in which
historians consider this period.

The book's organization mirrors the complexity and richness of the
interlocking topics Lemire studies. A narrative is embedded in this
analysis, for it is clear that ordinary householders in the seventeenth
century negotiated credit, earnings, and consumption quite differently
than their descendants two centuries later. However, an analysis of the
developmental arc that takes us from early modern to modern is secondary
to the book's argument. Its chapters, instead, are structured by topic:
the first three cover different aspects of credit, while the remaining
three are discussions, respectively, of fashion, savings banks, and
plebian numeracy and accounting. By framing her argument in this manner,
Lemire focuses on three interrelated themes that shaped the context
within which the processes of social and economic change of these
centuries took place.

The first of these themes centers on an analysis of the importance of
women as active agents in the world of plebian credit. In the early
modern period, for example, women, as Lemire shows in her analysis of
the surviving papers of several pawnbrokers, predominated as borrowers
and also as key individuals in the networks of social capital in the
community. As alternative means of saving emerged, particularly the
savings bank from around 1800, women continued to play a crucial role,
again making up a significant number of the depositors in such
institutions and a significant share of the total amounts deposited.
Crucially, Lemire shows that plebian women, as well as men, adopted the
providential ethos and the numeracy and accounting skills that gave a
savings account meaning. To be sure, the fact of women's active
involvement in the economic sphere is not in itself surprising; however,
Lemire's focus on credit shows that plebian women's role as economic
agents within the household needs to be understood as a type of
entrepreneurship with all the implications that it has for understanding
the pace and nature of economic and social change during these
centuries.

Second, Lemire shows that plebian households were very much
invested--both tangibly and emotionally--in the developing world of
consumption and fashion. They did so in a way that used household goods
as, what was in effect, an alternative currency. In good times, families
accumulated possessions, enjoying them for both their use and status
value, but always with the knowledge that they could be converted into
cash should the need arise. These patterns created a huge secondhand
market for everything from clothes to furnishings. This aspect of
Lemire's work makes two important contributions. It shows that fashion
played a role in shaping consumption patterns across a broad social
spectrum, extending down into plebian households rather than being
confined, as has often been assumed, to the middling ranks and above.
And, her analysis confirms the trend in recent work in the field arguing
that fashion trends originated from different social loci rather than
always being the result of social emulation.

Third, Lemire explores the developing class dynamics of this era, best
understood as the tension between policies that middling reformers
sought to impose and the practices of plebian households. Her
fascinating account of one early effort, the short-lived Charitable
Corporation of the early eighteenth century, describes the attempt to
provide small-scale loans for the deserving poor that would avoid the
perceived immorality, and usurious interest rates, of loans from
pawnbrokers. The very concept of the corporation recognized that the
poor had legitimate needs for small-scale credit, and its structure (a
joint stock company like the Bank of England) signaled that the poor
were part of the growing commercial economy. The corporation, however,
fell victim to a South Sea-like fever of speculation and mismanagement,
and its collapse had the effect of cementing the public perception that
plebian borrowing was caused by improvidence.

If the Charitable Corporation represented a failed attempt to bring
middling respectability to plebian credit practices, the emergence,
almost one century later, of small-scale savings banks was more
successful. Established in both urban and rural settings, these banks
provided a safe place for the laboring poor to accumulate savings,
ideally by means of regular deposits that would build over time. While
the middle-class reformers who championed these institutions believed
that they were bringing providential values to the poor, Lemire suggests
that the clear success of these banks may have had more to do with
underlying changes in the economy and society rather than reformers'
efforts. In this instance, Lemire's analysis of social politics suggests
that historians need to pay attention to the roles that credit and
consumption played in the emerging political and social differences of
this era.

As the book's title suggests, Lemire sets out to reexamine plebian
households as if they were, in effect, businesses. Doing so allows her
to include ordinary women and men as actors in the long process of
social and economic change that created a "monetized, industrial, and
numerate society," while at the same time forcing us to take a broader
and more inclusive view of what those processes of change involved (p.
227). The result is a complex and satisfying argument that should be
incorporated into the way that historians interested in the intersection
of cultural and social history think about this period.

Note

[1]. Jan de Vries, "The Industrious Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution," _Journal of Economic History_ 54 (1994): 249-270.


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