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...Hodder Arnold 2007)
Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob. Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York: Hambledon and London 2004)
THE ONE THING THAT CAN BE SAID about London history is that it has staying power. There was a time in the 1970s when community studies were all the rage, when a concern for region, province, and even pays threatened to cast English, and perhaps even British history in a more Annalesiste mould, at the very least to highlight the divergent histories of the island. Within this prospectus London threatened to lose some of its supremacy as a premier site for historical investigation and as an exemplary site for historical trends. But times have changed. Although there continue to be some good micro-histories of communities, local history seemed to thrive best when social-science-inflected history was to the fore. With the shift to cultural history, to post-colonial history, to the histories of alternative sexualities or of consumerism, Cobbett's "Great Wen" has made a comeback.
In the latest clutter of metropolitan histories stand these three books. Two of them, those of Professors Hitchcock and Shoemaker, flow out of a larger project in which they have been engaged, the Old Bailey Proceedings online. This is a massive digitalization of the printed proceedings of London's central criminal court from 1674 to 1834, comprising over 100,000 trials. From any part of the internet, researchers can call up the names, places, crimes, canting discourses, and capers that came up in the Old Bailey archives; and in its associated records, such as the Ordinary of Newgate's Account, which provide fascinating biographical details about those who were hanged at Tyburn. For those with a quantitative bent, there are now online opportunities to create your own pie or bar chart of sex or occupational-based crimes, or the pattern of punishment decade by decade. It is a very impressive resource that was impressively funded as well, with grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Britain, the New Opportunities Fund, and EnrichUK, that is, a grant from the British lottery, not to mention the two editors' own universities. It is a research council's dream, training new scholars who did the dog work to get the project up to par, and accessible not simply to academics but the wider public. It won the 2003 Cybrarian Project Award for its "outstanding effort and contribution towards the accessibility and usability of online information." (1) When I first worked in what was the Middlesex Record Office, now the Metropolitan London archives, Australians used to drop in to see if they could trace their ancestors who were transported Down Under from the Old Bailey. Now it can be done within minutes from Sydney.
Hitchcock and Shoemaker are among the academic impresarios of Britain's new enterprise culture. They were both awarded personal chairs for their project. They are there to make history trendy and relevant, and to pump up the volume. (2) When the project was launched at a conference at the De Haviland campus of the University of Hertfordshire in July 2004, there was a lot of heady talk about a "New History from Below" as if the old "history from below" of Thompson, Rude and Hobsbawm was somehow passe. It was not at all clear to me what was exactly new about their project. If the essence of history from below was the positive re-evaluation of the agency of ordinary people in the making of their own history, beginning with a sensitive evaluation of their experience' and life chances, then much that flowed from the Old Bailey project fell within that framework. To be sure, the classic historians from below were primarily interested in popular political agency, in dramatic episodes of popular intervention in history that served as a counter-history to the reigning orthodoxies of fair-minded elites attending to and accommodating new social forces. Yet the aspiration to democratize history, to expand the range of conventional historical subjects, was extended into fields of less political agency, and consequently to the predicaments and institutional terrains that court records like the Old Bailey might address beyond their self-evident usefulness as a chronicle of crime: topics such as illicit economies, unconventional family formations, social deviance, violence and conflict resolution, or poverty and welfare. Moreover, there did not appear to be any significant methodological departures in the papers offered at the conference. Indeed, some of the papers showed a disturbing tendency to make the digital Delphic, to privilege online sources simply because they are accessible, without considering how they stand within the ensemble of texts available to historians and what their limitations might be.
It cannot be said that Hitchcock and Shoemaker fall prey to this tendency in the two books under review. Tim Hitchcock's book on down-and-out London in the eighteenth century flows out of his doctoral work on workhouses and his engagement with the Old Bailey project, as well as some youthful Jack Kerouac-like enthusiasms for living on the margins; hoping, he tells us, that by "living poor!' he "would purchase real freedom" and avoid "the ever slavering maw of work and responsibility." (xi) No doubt his early adventures on the road account in part for the up-beat temper of this book, which is less concerned with desolation, disease, and death than with the resourceful strategies of survival among the destitute and the role they played, or might have played within the casual labour economy of London. Whereas previous histories had tended to see the destitute and homeless as the victims of parish tyranny, or enduring the lash for vagrancy, Hitchcock argues that it was possible to eke a living on the streets of London, to avail oneself of the various welfare agencies on offer, and through threats, menaces, and pleadings, prey on the conscience of the middling sort for small change and victuals.
In the last chapter of the book Hitchcock lays out his strategy for making this case. He sees his work as a sort of literary venture, fictionalizing his varied texts into a complex multifaceted whole; in his own words, "to use each of these sources to form one lens in ah insect-like compound eye." (236) Hitchcock doffs his hat to Hayden White's belief in history as literary artifact and seems to take on board much of the relativity of the linguistic turn. But he also seems to fie himself in methodological knots. He talks of texts as offering no "clear and knowable truth" beyond the "self-referential" but he doesn't offer any guidelines as to how he moves from the self-referential to the contexts that historians find important: through proliferating forms of intertextuality? through distinguishing discursive from non-discursive sources in the manner of Roger Chartier? through the use of a dialogical analysis in the manner of Mikhail Bahktin, whereby the language of the text is unpacked to reveal its social dynamisms and antimonies, its implicit conversations? (3) There are gestures towards the latter in the statement that authors "deploy images and ideas in such a way as to preclude readings and rereadings that are at odds with an authorial intent" (237) but it is not developed any further. This is a pity, because a dialogic reading of many social pamphlets about the vagrant poor could reveal an increasing anxiety among reformers that the public still favoured personal over public or institutional charity in addressing the problem of indigence. This kind of evidence, which Hitchcock uses casually rather than systematically, (4) could have buttressed his argument about the persistence of public sympathy for the less fortunate, even in a town of strangers like London.
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