British social history, for so long in protracted adolescence, seems finally to have come of age. The work of two generations of researchers, led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The modish topics of birth and death, the family, sex, marriage, leisure, crime, ceremony and ritual have begun to supplant the time-tested topics of the more traditional curriculum. What began as periphery is now core. This development is much more of a mixed blessing than its chief proponents admit it to be. At its worst, social history degenerates into the antiquarian elevation of the picayune, and even at its best it raises intractable problems of historical explanation that are very rarely tackled head-on. It is significant that the sum of the parts of the most successful books on British social history is nearly always greater than their whole.

LRB 5 August 1982 | PDF Download