Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice 9780415576185, 9780415576192, 9780429487217

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
‘Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going
to happen’
Terminology
The turn to the personal
Archives
Structure of the book
Notes
2. Historians’ uses of letters
Reading letters for fact
Letter writing as a social and cultural practice: the case of war letters
Gender and the letter
Epistolary constructions of the self
Conclusion
Notes
3. Historians and the diary
The diarist as observer
The diary as a ‘technology of the self’
Gender and the diary: the making of masculinity
Contradictions and incoherence
The diary and the psyche
The diary and privacy
The public and the private
Conclusion
Notes
4. Autobiography, memoir and the historian
Reading memoir for fact
Reading for subjectivity
Gendered subjectivities and models of autobiography
The present meets the past
Audience
Rethinking the past for the present
Conclusion
Notes
5. Oral history and historical practice
Reliability and the cultural turn
Public discourse and personal recall
Personal memory and popular culture
Evasions and silences
Conclusion
Notes
6. Representativeness
Historians and the sample
Cultural criteria of selection
The luminosity of the single case
The ‘exceptional normal’
Conclusion
Notes
7. Conclusion
Authenticity
Multiple genres
Alternative genres and new directions
Notes
Index

Citation preview

HISTORIES OF THE SELF

Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice. Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians. Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of personal narrative, notably Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007).

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HISTORIES OF THE SELF Personal Narratives and Historical Practice

Penny Summerfield

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Penny Summerfield The right of Penny Summerfield to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-57618-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-57619-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-48721-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

For Oliver

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

viii

1

Introduction

2

Historians’ uses of letters

22

3

Historians and the diary

50

4

Autobiography, memoir and the historian

78

5

Oral history and historical practice

106

6

Representativeness

135

7

Conclusion

167

Index

1

187

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank the students who took my module on ‘Personal Testimony and Historical Research’ over the years, as well as my PhD students, for their engagement with the issues discussed in this book, and for their courage and creativity in using personal narratives in their projects and dissertations. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends at my own and other universities who have taken an interest in this project. Those at Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, where I was Visiting Professor in 2015, deserve a special mention. Discussions in the corridors, in seminars, and at conferences have been invaluable, and have opened up to me a wealth of research that uses personal narratives in fields far from my own. In particular, I owe a great debt to the following readers of chapters at various stages of development. I am immensely grateful for the time and trouble they took in commenting on my drafts, and I can only apologise if I didn’t manage to address all their suggestions. They are Lynn Abrams, Hannah Barker, Deborah Bernstein, Joy Damousi, Emma Griffin, Leif Jerram, Aaron Moore, Frank Mort and JulieMarie Strange. I also want to thank Laura Doan for some lively conversations and especially for help with the title, Sarah Patterson of the Imperial War Museum for tracking down the cover photograph, and Eve Setch at Routledge for her confidence in the project from the start. Above all, heartfelt thanks are due to my partner, Oliver Fulton, for his constructive criticisms, patience, companionship and inspiration. It is to Oliver that I dedicate this book.

1 INTRODUCTION

‘Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going to happen’1 Estelle Armitage was born into a business family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1921. In an oral history interview in 1994 she spoke of a relatively privileged upbringing, with servants in the house and a boarding school education. She also described the complications of colour in her mixed race family: both grandfathers were white, and her father, whom she depicted as ‘slightly coloured … lighter than I’ would not let her walk down the street with a ‘black’ school friend. Estelle’s ambition to become a nurse was put on hold in September 1939, when the British government declared war on Germany, and she trained as a shorthand typist and book-keeper instead. The arrival of a British Army unit at Up Park Camp in Kingston offered her the chance to become a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the British Army) with a job as a wages clerk, and then to go to Britain. Succeeding in the selection process, Estelle braved the enemy submarines in the Caribbean in August 1943 with a dual purpose in mind: ‘England was your mother country, that sort of feeling … Rule Britannia and all this business … and I could do my nursing after if I survived.’ This combination of patriotism and desire for self-improvement spurred Estelle on. In the ATS she trained first as a wireless operator and then learned to use a teleprinter, working in code. As the end of the war approached she was given a choice: to go home or to undertake training in the UK. Estelle seized the moment to embark on a three-year course in nursing, followed by midwifery: ‘it was wonderful, that was my goal’. Once she had qualified, with a job as a ‘staff midwife’ at Lewisham Hospital in London, she had, by law, to be repatriated, and spent eight months back in Jamaica, but she was determined to return, telling her family, ‘I haven’t got any friends here, they are all in London.’ In particular, Cyril

2 Introduction

from Guyana, who had been in the Royal Air Force during the war, was there. Estelle wangled a free passage back to England in 1952, married Cyril, and had her first child. The challenges, and Estelle’s determination, increased as the 1950s progressed. Her former employers at Lewisham Hospital wanted her to resume her job as a midwife, but her search for a child-minder was impeded by racism, which also worsened the desperate post-war housing situation. The family, now with a second baby, struggled to manage in one room in Blackheath. They improved their lot through co-operation with other black and mixed-race families: an Anglo-Indian woman minded the children; they found a house and shared the rent with a Guyanese man and his English wife, who also had two children. Cyril, working on the assembly line in a factory, then discovered that they could buy a new house through a tenant-purchase scheme. Cyril and Estelle ‘jumped at the idea’, even though the cost meant they could not afford any extras, forgoing for many years both a refrigerator and a washing machine, which added laborious domestic chores to the long hours of paid work and parenting that both were doing. They emphasised that, by sharing the tasks and responsibilities, they managed, and gradually became more prosperous. They were still living in the house they had acquired in the late-1950s when I interviewed them in 1994. Asked if the war changed her, Estelle said ‘of course it changed me’. Elaborating, she indicated that the main change was in her perception of her own social standing in relation to that of other people, rather than specifically to do with gender or race: ‘it made me sort of realise that I didn’t have to have servants to do, I had to do things for myself … I learned about life definitely … and learned to respect people that I thought were below me, nobody is below you, people are what they are.’2 I am quoting from Estelle’s story, elicited as part of an oral history project, not to advance an argument about women, race and colonialism, or social class and the Second World War, or to suggest that her experiences were ‘typical’, but to serve as an example of the fascination of life histories. Even the most ordinary life makes it possible for the reader to visit other worlds through the prism of another person’s memories, feelings and perceptions. David Vincent writes that early-nineteenthcentury working-class autobiographies, published in newspapers as well as in bound volumes, were favoured reading for the middle class because they enabled its members to enter the homes and workplaces of the poor without having to go there in person.3 We too might wish that we could travel through time as well as across space, to visit such a home, or an eighteenth-century penal colony, or a nineteenth-century migrant ship, or even a Nazi concentration camp, in order to experience what life was like there, albeit briefly. Personal narratives give us that imagined opportunity.4 Life histories have become ever more popular with historians. As Clare Anderson puts it, they are ‘a useful tool for attracting and holding interest in large, complex historical processes’. 5 They ground the general in the particular, and they juxtapose the public with the personal. Yet personal narratives have not been easy for historians to use. In the 1970s, as a postgraduate student, I was keen to embrace

Introduction 3

the new methodology of oral history. But when I tried to use the oral histories of ex-servicemen that I collected as part of a project on army education, based mainly on War Office papers, there was a confusing dissonance. The terms of discussion were different. The policy-focused official papers were about an intensely negotiated, though ultimately mild, political education for soldiers that some policymakers hoped would raise morale, and others feared would encourage a leftward political drift in the armed forces. The oral histories, which I thought would reveal servicemen’s responses to this educational experiment, were about personal political development, relationships with other servicemen and with women, post-war aspirations, and the everyday fabric of service life: cheeking superior officers, longing for mail from home, danger, boredom and booze. It was possible to pluck out the occasional quotation to vivify an aspect of the army’s education policy, but it was clear that this touched only the tip of an iceberg of memories. The larger history of what life was like in the armed forces in the 1940s pervaded the interviews: how it felt to be conscripted or to volunteer; how social and political tensions wove through the experience; and what being a soldier or a servicewoman in wartime meant within the longer life course. These issues were beyond the parameters of my project.6 But they made me conscious of the provocative capacity of individual life stories to draw attention to experiences that are ignored or marginalised in mainstream historiography, and to require us to reconsider what we mean by ‘history’. The idea for this book came in part from my attempts, since the 1970s, to write history using a variety of types of personal testimony.7 I hoped it would offer an opportunity to reflect critically, in relation to larger historiographies, on historical questions and methodologies focused on the personal in history. The idea was stimulated further by teaching and supervising students who were becoming increasingly keen to use personal narratives in their own historical work, but unsure as to the most effective ways of doing so. For about ten years I taught a course on ‘Personal Testimony and Historical Research’ first to undergraduates and then to masters students, which concentrated mainly on the theoretical and methodological aspects of different types of autobiographical narration. The course developed in the context of the ‘biographical turn’ affecting not only history but also many other disciplines, including literary studies, anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography and sociology.8 Over time students told me that what they wanted was not only theory but also more extensive discussion of the uses historians themselves have made of personal testimony. In particular, both they and I needed to consider in more depth the numerous challenges that historians have encountered when working with life stories. These concern, for example, the referentiality of personal narratives, that is the extent to which they refer to ‘real people’ and ‘what actually happened’, and their reliability as historical evidence, as well as issues of representativeness and generalization. Challenges also include the interplay of histories of the self with public discourses, their inflection by gender, race, sexuality and class, and their relationship to memory and subjectivity. It is through theoretical discussion that such issues have been named and insights

4 Introduction

generated, as the introductions to the chapters that follow indicate. But historians’ negotiation of these matters, in the histories they have written, are the main concerns of the rest of each chapter, and of the book as a whole.

Terminology The book’s title selects from a range of terminological possibilities. Life histories, life stories, life narratives, life writing, personal narratives, personal testimony, ‘testimonio’, ego documents, and histories of the self, are all terms that have been deployed to indicate the sources used by historians and members of other disciplines who seek to reconstruct the past through the words and perspectives of individuals who lived through it. These sources embrace a rich mix of personally composed items including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, medical interviews, police statements, court depositions, scrapbooks, photograph albums, songs, films, self-portraits, embroidery, patchwork and even graffiti. The appropriateness of the different terms that are applied to them collectively has, however, been contested. Critical anthropologists argued in the 1990s against the use of the term ‘life history’ on the grounds that it was conceptualised in their discipline in confining ways, as chronological, structured by life stages, and factual. Seeking a term that would, instead, acknowledge the creative and interpretative nature of autobiographical practices, they preferred ‘life story’ because ‘it does not connote that the narration is true, that the events narrated necessarily happened, or that it matters whether they did or did not’.9 Historians vary greatly in their views of how much these issues of referentiality, accuracy and reliability in personal narratives ‘matter’ for the histories that can be written from them, as we shall see in the chapters that follow. ‘Life writing’ is widely used to capture the creativity involved in the construction of narratives based on ‘real lives’. Users of the term emphasise the fictional techniques deployed to shape the story and make the life matter to others.10 However ‘life writing’ alludes to the written version of a life, whether the author’s own or the biography of another, and so does not describe oral history or other non-literate forms (although these might be sources on which the practitioner of life writing draws). Nonetheless, some historians have found the concept useful as a way of thinking about the process of composing biographies of people in the past.11 The term ‘personal testimony’ is widely used in the UK to describe autobiographical sources. However ‘testimony’ is associated, particularly in Germany and the USA, more specifically with eye-witness accounts of atrocities whose accuracy is under scrutiny because of its potential legal force in holding perpetrators to account. Such testimony was particularly important in the judicial processes of the 1960s and subsequently, in West Germany and Israel, relating to the mass murder of Jews and others in the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s, and to Truth and Reconciliation Commissions like that set up in South Africa after 1994 in an attempt to heal the wounds of Apartheid.12

Introduction 5

The terms ‘personal narrative’ and ‘life narrative’ are preferred by some historians and literary scholars to ‘personal testimony’ because they do not have connotations of legal witnessing, and so do not foreground the issue of the validity of the testimony as evidence. They capture the idea of telling a story about the self that interprets lived experience and endows it with meaning.13 The idea of narrative points to characteristics such as emplotment, description, reflection, and dialogue, signalling the interplay of imagination and invention with the process of creating a record of one’s life over time. The concept of ‘testimonio’ refers to first person narratives that connect the personal to broader social critiques as a step towards change. ‘Testimonio’ originated in Latin American in the 1960s in the context of movements for national liberation, and, writes John Beverley, its narratives are propelled by a sense of the urgency of communicating problems such as repression, poverty, imprisonment and subalternity.14 The narrator in ‘testimonio’ speaks in the name of a community or group, merging the story of the self and that of the collectivity. Although embracing a wide variety of genres, ‘testimonio’ thus has a specific signification as a popular-democratic form of protest narrative. ‘Ego document’ is used particularly in the Netherlands and Germany to describe a text that provides an account of the self, or ‘ego’, that produced it. This term has been criticised, however, on the grounds that it carries the baggage of the notion of the self-reliant, masculine ‘ego’ that was invented in the nineteenth century, in response to the rise of mass democracy, by scholars such as Jacob Burkhardt, whose ‘Renaissance Man’ confidently detached himself from others. Critics Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack urge that, on the contrary, subjectivity emerges from connection rather than detachment. The telling of stories about the self, they argue, is interactive. It is shaped by a combination of collective cultures, norms about what can be said and how it can be put, and the identities of others involved in the dialogue. They argue persuasively that personal narratives are, of necessity, less about the autonomous ego than about ‘relational personhood’.15 The anthropologist Stuart Blackburn and historian David Arnold suggest that although the distinctions between the various terms have provoked heated debate, they are largely a matter of disciplinary tradition and preference.16 In practice there is considerable slippage and overlap, and in much historical work they are used interchangeably: differences of terminology may not be very significant for current usage. All the same, the history of those differences points to some lasting variations in historical practice. For some historians, the accuracy and veracity of accounts of a life are vital, and they see inconsistency, contradiction and the possibility of fabrication as signs of unreliability that render those sources problematic. Others accept the idea that the sense of self, or subjectivity, constructed in the process of composing a personal account is not static and stable, but shifts according to context, reiteration and reflection.17 While some historians focus on the evidence to be found in personal narratives, others explore the interpretative and imaginative aspects of narratives for the meanings that a narrator gives to the personal past, and for clues about the culture, belief systems and social relationships of the time and place with which the historian is engaging.18

6 Introduction

In selecting ‘histories of the self’ and ‘personal narratives’ for the title of this book, I have chosen terms that are current among historians, and that avoid the baggage that comes with some of the other possibilities. ‘Histories of the self’, as a term, does not carry the connotations of chronology and accuracy attached to ‘life histories’, about which anthropologists have complained; it links the idea of the exploration of the past with accounts of the individual self; it embraces narratives that are both voluntary and involuntary, and that provide a snapshot of a life or that extend across the entire life-course; and it is flexible and inclusive, making space for any method of telling a story of the self.19 The term ‘personal narratives’, as we have seen, points to the creative and interpretative processes at work in the construction of a story about the self. ‘Historical practice’ refers, simply (although of course it is not a simple matter) to what historians do by way of research, analysis and writing.20

The turn to the personal Historians’ engagement with histories of the self has been part of a turn to the personal in history. This turn has taken place in the broader context of the advent of biographical methods across the social sciences generally, and many of the influences on history are shared by these other disciplines. It is nevertheless possible to trace the origins and direction of the personal turn as it affects history specifically. The study of well-known, prominent figures has long been at the centre of historical practice. In this sense the historical study of the individual is nothing new. The preoccupation with ‘great men’ gave history an elite bias, in response to which ‘history from below’ was assertively placed on the scholarly agenda in the 1960s and 1970s. But the ‘New Social History’ was conducted largely at the expense of ‘the personal’. Its practitioners foregrounded quantitative and statistical methodologies, aspiring to reliable generalisation about social trends based on representative samples of large groups. In subsequent decades, in contrast, numerous historians followed the example of Carlo Ginzburg and the Italian micro-historians in prioritising the study of the obscure and ordinary individual in society, politics and culture, as opposed either to eminent individuals or to the aggregated mass.21 One might speculate that the individualism and neo-liberalism which have soared to the ascendancy globally since the 1980s could be held responsible for this preoccupation with the individual, yet historians who have taken the turn to the personal justify what they do in very different language: that of humanising, democratising and diversifying history.22 Many scholars subscribe to the idea that since the late eighteenth century a new, modern self has been created, that looks inward to its self, rather than outward to family, faith and community to discover who it is and how to be in the world. Numerous cultural changes in the past four hundred years, including the emergence of individualist varieties of religious faith, the advent of ‘reason’ during the Enlightenment, developments in science and technology, new forms of social and

Introduction 7

economic competition, and the rise of psychoanalysis, have encouraged people in the West to work on themselves, consciously and reflexively. Interest in the self has been accompanied by a wide variety of methods of endorsing the personal and the autobiographical. Some are coercive, as Carolyn Steedman and Liz Stanley suggest, such as the ‘enforced narratives’ extracted from the poor by nineteenth-century magistrates administering poor relief, and the life histories required by employers, health practitioners, and immigration officials in the present day.23 But modern life is also full of invitations to produce autobiography voluntarily: numerous television and radio shows are devoted to it, while therapists encourage diary keeping, as well as the ‘talking cure’, to help resolve stress and anxiety. Anthony Giddens suggests that autobiography, as a way of thinking, has played a central part in this development: an ‘interpretive self-history’, usually unwritten, has become ‘the core of self-identity in modern life’. 24 Yet, as James Hinton argues, it may be less the case that people in earlier periods were unreflective, than that records of reflexivity were not solicited and kept. What is new is the archiving of sources that make the personal, the confessional and the reflexive accessible to the historian, as well as ways of reading ‘against the grain’ that enhance our view of interiority. Hinton challenges us to ask why we should assume that modern self-determining selves are either universal, or distinctively different from the selves of the past. 25 Four intellectual developments spanning the last forty years have stimulated historians’ uses of personal narratives to study the self and subjectivity in the past and their deployment of such testimony to illuminate the relationship between the individual and larger social processes. Post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism, and psychoanalysis have developed in dialogue, and they overlap and bleed into each other. It is possible, however, to isolate the contribution of each one to the ‘turn to the personal’ in historical practice.26 The cultural turn of the 1980s was of enormous importance in offering new ways of thinking about the past. Post-structuralist thinkers pivotal to the turn, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, emphasised the role of language and culture in constituting reality in ways that challenged current historical practice. Foucault, in particular, disputed ideas embedded in social and economic history about the structuring of society by social class; questioned whether the determinants of human history were, as widely assumed, economic forces and the state; and destabilised grand narratives of social, scientific and economic progress in the modern world. Post-structuralism did not lead directly to the rehabilitation of the individual and the personal in history. However, the idea that power circulates as linguistic discourses that constitute ‘regimes of truth’, rather than merely lodging within given social structures, themselves viewed by post-structuralists as culturally constructed categories, opened up numerous possibilities. It disaggregated groups formally conceptualised as more-or-less coherent entities (such as ‘the working class’). It suggested that the self is both the subject of, and subject to, power and regulation through discursive and institutional practices. It raised the possibility that subjectivity, emotion, and memory, all central to ‘the personal’, have a history. For many historians such insights led to a focus on institutions and

8 Introduction

discourses, rather than personal experience, which was seen as impossible to recover directly because of its mediation by cultural forces, not least by language.27 But the suggestions that the self has been constituted in different ways at different points in the past, as ideological practices and belief systems have changed over time, and that subjectivity can only be understood through texts that deploy language to construct the realities they delineate, have proved fertile ground for numerous historians. An example of a historian who has identified strongly with the cultural turn, who focuses on subjectivity, and who makes use of personal narratives, is Patrick Joyce. In his book Democratic Subjects Joyce draws on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, that is, the idea that institutions such as the law, medicine, religion, ideology, the family and education generalise processes of surveillance and discipline in such a way that not only people’s bodies, but also their uses of time and space, and their thinking, are affected. Thus individuals effectively control themselves from within. Joyce explores this idea through the journals of Edwin Waugh, a nineteenth-century printer and poet who kept a diary from 1847 to 1850. He writes of the diary not as a reflection of Waugh’s life, but as a technique for managing the self, that is, a ‘technology of self’, and sees diary writing as one of a number of methods of communication involved in ‘making the self visible to the self’.28 Joyce uses his study of Waugh’s inner world, through this text, to develop an argument against regarding social class as a structural reality, but rather as one of many competing identities available to and constructed by Victorian people. I discuss Joyce’s work on Edwin Waugh’s journal further in Chapter 3. A problem for historians at the heart of the post-structuralist approach to the self and subjectivity in the past, is whether they regard individual autobiographers solely as protagonists constructed in text, or as historical figures with flesh and blood reality outside the text. It would be inconsistent for a post-structuralist to suggest that any source provides a direct route to ‘the real’: all sources are texts that construct the subject, and only in the reading of text is meaning released. Thus, in his discussion of Soviet autobiographies, Igal Halfin writes that his focus is on ‘the subject as the text constitutes him’ and that ‘the autobiographer is not a real historical actor but the protagonist abstracted from an autobiography’. 29 Yet historians frequently want to recuperate a living, breathing individual about whose historical existence they can be confident. In the 1980s and 1990s this issue gave rise to some bitter debates, but the tensions have been productive. They have prompted historians to be careful about their truth claims, and to acknowledge that their access to ‘reality’ is, necessarily, via text, even though the texts at their disposal are greatly varied, and take not only written, but also oral, visual, and material forms. The debates about post-structuralism have also stimulated a keen interest in new understandings of agency, that is, in the capacity of people in the past to resist, manipulate or negotiate the powerful discourses that constitute their cultural and social worlds. Post-colonialist and feminist historians share with each other the need to find sources arising from the oppressed and marginalised, rather than depending on

Introduction 9

materials generated by the powerful and the dominant. Both groups demand a place for ‘experience’ as the source of new knowledge, hence their embrace of personal narratives. Following the cultural turn they also acknowledge the need to understand experience in terms of interaction within discourse. Post-colonial historians, who focus on the cultural and social legacies of colonialism and imperialism, have used the idea of ‘the other’, originating with Edward Said and developed by Homi Bhabha, to delineate the ways in which the colonised and the coloniser constitute each other.30 Antoinette Burton, for example, in At the Heart of the Empire (1998), investigates the ways in which colonial subjects experienced their construction as ‘other’, that is, as exotic, oriental and fundamentally different, through life writing that recorded their interactions with imperial ideologies and colonial stereotypes in late Victorian Britain. Committed to the idea of agency, and not simply to the discursive ‘interpellation’ of the subject, Burton explores the letters and memoirs of three Indians in Victorian Britain. Her objective is to discover ‘how subjects of history are simultaneously made and make themselves’ in the imperial context, and she argues that the processes of self and mutual cultural construction ‘established some South Asians as “Indian” and simultaneously worked to consolidate Britons as “British”’.31 Burton shows that the Indians whose texts she scrutinises were not passive recipients of colonial constructions, but talked back, asserting their superior knowledge and differentiating themselves from anyone, white or black, whom they regarded as morally or socially inferior. And yet, as she demonstrates through the correspondence of Cornelia Sorabji, they were caught within the contradictions of the colonial relationship. I explore Burton’s work in more detail in Chapter 2. Feminist history has also been concerned with the ways in which ‘othering’ and the relationship between the individual subject and public discourses work to constitute subjectivity. Feminist theory is central to the turn to the personal, for its insistence that ‘the personal is political’, that is, that inequalities and oppressions that figure within the everyday relational world of the home, the family and intimate life are integrally connected to those in the public domain. Feminism, in its many varieties, suggests that women and men are presented, in public discourses across cultures, with models of behaviour, thought and appearance that not only differentiate feminine from masculine identities, but are unattainable and contradictory. Within these complex cultural cross-currents, women and men have struggled historically to adopt and act upon discourses that constitute them as female and male, and have sought to devise masculine and feminine identities that they can live with. Such insights have been enormously important, opening up the history of masculinity as well as femininity, underpinning gender history, and becoming a now unavoidable component of social and cultural history. My own book, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, provides a case study of this kind of feminist history. Its subtitle is indicative: ‘Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War’. The enquiry was inspired by the question of how British women responded to the opportunities and constraints of the Second World War. Oral history interviews with women, undertaken in the 1990s,

10 Introduction

indicated that there was more than one story. The women framed their life narratives in relation, in the main, to one or the other of two powerful public narratives of femininity that circulated in Britain between 1939 and 1945. One of them constructed an active wartime woman who participated in war work in factories, offices, voluntary work and the military, and willingly sacrificed home life for war service, out of a patriotic desire to serve. The other narrative emphasised traditional femininity. It focused on maintaining homes in the straitened circumstances of war, and stoically coping with rationing, shortages, death and disaster for the benefit of children and the comfort of men, whose masculine wartime role was to serve in the military or undertake industrial war work. Individual women could never completely achieve the wartime feminine ideal, since it embraced both of these deeply contradictory models of what it meant to be a woman in wartime.32 The argument of Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives is that those who understood their wartime pasts in terms of the first narrative composed relatively ‘heroic’ histories of their wartime selves, focused on battling against the odds, as women, to contribute to the war effort, and, in many cases, regretfully giving up their roles at the end of the war. Other women spoke of their reluctance to leave the familiar world of conventional femininity for war work, but of understanding that they must nevertheless help the nation. They composed ‘stoic’ narratives, of putting up with something that had to be done, but which they were glad to relinquish when they could. Estelle Armitage, with whom this chapter opens, drew on the first of the two narratives: she eagerly overcame hurdles to reach her goals, which were framed as both public (contributing to the defence of the ‘Mother Land’) and private (qualifying as a nurse). In her case, however, the challenges of race and colonialism increased once the war was over, and she recalled her post-war years as a series of hard won triumphs over the ‘othering’ to which she was subjected. At the same time, her reflections on her life history went beyond the binaries of race, gender, and ‘heroic’ or ‘stoic’ understandings of the self: her wartime experiences, she said, made her more self-aware, less arrogant, more accepting of others. In short, she saw them as enhancing her humanity. Why a woman might couch her account in the language of one cultural imaginary rather than another is not easy for a historian to explain. Psychoanalysis, the fourth intellectual strand stimulating historical research on the self, is used by some scholars to probe the complexities of the composition of life histories. Psychoanalysis can usefully be seen as a heuristic device, that is a particular mode of enquiry, rather than a single set of theories. The psychoanalytic premise set out by thinkers and practitioners such as Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein is that accounts of the self are never completely final and stable. The version told is in part conscious strategy, and in part the result of unconscious, psychic needs which can be brought to the surface and, possibly, comprehended, by an enquiry informed by psychoanalytic concepts. Historians whose work is informed by psychoanalysis suggest that both the conscious and the unconscious processes by which subjectivity is constituted and reconstituted in personal narratives can be understood in their historical context.

Introduction 11

Michael Roper, who explicitly adopts a psychoanalytic approach, argues that historians whose analysis of personal narratives is informed by post-structuralist attention to language and the constructedness of the self have over-emphasised the power of public languages, and neglected the workings of the unconscious.33 According to him, they engage with the personal without paying due attention to the psychic processes at work. His discussion of the memoirs of Lyndall Urwick, a First World War soldier and later management guru, to which I return in Chapter 4, illustrates the potential of psychoanalytic concepts for historical analysis. The memoirs, written at various points between 1914 and the 1970s, obsessively revisit Urwick’s experiences as a junior officer in the trenches of the First World War, but each iteration offers a different account. Roper explains the various versions in part in relation to changing emphases within public narratives of military masculinity over that period, which he sees as the ‘enabling context of memory’.34 But he gives greater emphasis to psychodynamic processes, which he relates to Urwick’s position in the life course, drawing on the Freudian concepts of ‘splitting’ and ‘screen memory’ to elucidate inconsistencies between these renderings of Urwick’s story of military service. Relatively few historians who work with personal testimony make explicit use of psychoanalytical concepts to elucidate the meanings within their texts. In part the cautious uptake is the result of historians’ preference for more obviously empirically grounded methodologies. In part it arises from wariness of a theory that seems to claim to hold good for anyone, in any period and context: a post-structuralist approach would suggest that the theories of mental processes and the workings of the unconscious on which psychoanalysis is based are specific to twentieth-century Western concepts of human relationships and the self, and thus do not have universal validity. These reservations are not, however, the end of the story of the contribution of psychoanalysis to the turn to the personal in history. In an article exploring the uptake of psychoanalytic approaches by historians the historian T. G. Ashplant both explains the divergence of psychoanalytical methods from prevalent historical modes of thought, and emphasises the positive influence of psychoanalytic approaches on historiography.35 He recommends, in particular, the close attention that psychoanalysis pays to language and its multi-layered meanings, its commitment to the perspective of historical actors, and its prioritisation of the complex sets of mediation between unconscious and conscious, internal and external, processes in the individual psyche. Indeed, the turn to the personal owes much to psychoanalysis. The individual biographies that are central to it parallel psychoanalytic case histories. Psychoanalysis provides ways of talking about sexuality and the intimate, and about the interpretation of dreams and fantasies, and it confirms, in a different way, the post-structuralist idea that the single coherent and consistent ‘self’ does not exist. In any case, historians who work in the realm of the personal bring with them more or less theorised psychological perspectives, even if they do not adopt an explicitly psychoanalytic approach. Thus they make assumptions about the self and the psyche in their analyses and, in common with their narrators, draw on concepts that circulate in everyday discourse, such as repression, projection, transference and dependency, in constructing their accounts.

12 Introduction

Archives A prior condition of the use of any type of personal testimony is its survival. Archives provide the entry point to past societies: the materials on their shelves enable historians, amateur and professional, to discover and interpret specific parts of the social life enacted in earlier periods as well as to identify those that remain in darkness. Influenced by, and influencing, the turn to the personal, the material that archivists acquire has diversified since the 1970s. Academic and popular interest in history from below, in family history, and in the self and selfhood, means that County Record Offices, for example, collect not only official documents and the papers of well-known social and political figures, but material relating to ‘ordinary people’, including diaries, letters, memoirs, oral histories, photographs, films and videos. There has been a degree of randomness in the building of archives, which researchers regard with a mixture of frustration and gratitude. Everything is not always weeded or carefully catalogued; obscure manuscripts turn up in the dusty corners of familiar places; seemingly unpromising catalogue entries turn out to unlock treasures; variations in collecting policies over the years ensure the improbable preservation as well as the wanton destruction of papers from the past. Lisa Kaborycha writes of the chance survival of fifteenth-century Florentine popular texts known as ‘zibaldoni’. These anthologies of letters and other written materials were copied onto paper, carelessly bound, and lacked attractive illustrations, so that, although handed down within families, they lost sentimental or market value within a few generations. The survival of any of these ‘ugly-duckling manuscripts’ in the archives is a matter of good fortune.36 Yet the popular desire to preserve historical materials is strong. Ruth Watson describes ‘local do-it-yourself archiving’ in Nigeria, linked to what Karin Barber calls ‘tin trunk literacy’, that is, the production and hoarding of all sorts of texts, including diaries and private correspondence, written by non-elite Africans in the colonial period.37 Distressingly, though, in the UK as elsewhere, pressures on space and funding, as well as deliberate and accidental weeding, constrain collection.38 There are also marked gaps in archival practices. Feminist scholars bewail the archival absence of writing by women, particularly those of low social standing, until the twentieth century. Barbara Caine, for example, writes that letters between mothers and daughters that did not have a bearing on dynastic or political matters were rarely kept before the late modern period. The preservation of the letters of Mme de Sévigné to her daughter in late-eighteenth-century France, she argues, and the historical attention they have received, are both exceptional.39 In a parallel and linked critique, scholars of empire point out that colonial archives are highly selective. Antoinette Burton argues that the preservation of documents in public archives is ‘deeply … implicated in systems of socioeconomic power’, and that, in the context of Britain and its nineteenth-century empire, the questions of whose personal papers are archived, and where they are housed, underpin the ‘colonial knowledge systems’ that shape history-writing.40 Gajendra Singh’s research

Introduction 13

underlines the power relations that structure the colonial archive: the letters of Indian soldiers of the First World War that have survived are those that were translated into English for the benefit of the military censor. These testimonies are thus intertwined with the colonial discourses that conditioned them.41 Clare Anderson documents the fragmentation, dispersal and destruction of colonial records that have eclipsed marginal and seemingly unimportant people from the history of Empire even more thoroughly than in the cases that Burton and Singh write about. She demonstrates, however, that it is possible to recover the life stories of individual colonial subjects in spite of a dearth of autobiographical materials. Information about nineteenth-century Indian convicts transported to penal colonies, for example, was aggregated by the colonial authorities, reducing each person to a number on a record set. However, crises, such as an individual’s conviction for a further crime, or involvement in a riot, caused them to appear, briefly, as themselves rather than as a number in the records.42 When the crisis was over they were reabsorbed into the depersonalised lists, yet, as Anderson shows, a researcher can reconstruct life histories from these tiny fragments, and even, very occasionally, hear the voices of the convicts themselves.43 On-line methods of collection have enlarged the availability of sources of personal testimony. This is linked to recognition of the importance of the interpretative and subjective qualities of narratives, as opposed to factual, ‘eye witness’, reporting alone. When the BBC People’s War website, an on-line archive of Second World War memories and photographs, was created in 2003, for example, the BBC announced that it sought a wide range of ‘subjective interpretations that described “what it was like”, not what happened’, differentiating the endeavour from its own reputation for ‘objective’ reporting. The public responded enthusiastically and the BBC amassed a large on-line collection of first-person memoirs and photographs of wartime experience.44 Internet searches can lead to valuable discoveries. Hannah Barker, for example, researching family businesses in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Manchester, sought out personal narratives such as letters and diaries in order to understand the ways in which power was divided, and the tensions that existed, within business families. In particular she wanted more information about the Fildes family who were mentioned in some papers deposited at the Manchester Local Studies Library. Through a family history website she located a descendant online whom she contacted, leading to the discovery of the love letters of an early-nineteenth-century grocer in a policeman’s garage in Huddersfield.45 Some historians state that they prefer sparsity to an abundance of sources. Carolyn Steedman writes of the pleasures of ‘finding a world in a grain of sand, and conjuring a social system from the purchase of a nutmeg grater recorded in a household account book.’46 An over-abundance of archival material can indeed be daunting. Scholars who have sought to edit diaries for publication acknowledge the dispiriting character of the ‘arcane and tedious detail’ and ‘lack of topical organization and redundancy’ with which they are faced.47 In contrast, limited source material can seem attractive. The contextualised interpretation of fragments, as well

14 Introduction

as the imaginative reconstruction of lacunae, are real scholarly possibilities, as much historical work demonstrates, including that of Steedman, Anderson and many medievalists. Yet most historical researchers desire a bit more than a grain of sand or a few tattered manuscript pages on which to base their analyses. The voice of the subject whom a historian is seeking may, however, be silenced or muted even when there is plentiful documentation about him or her as an individual. Carlo Ginzburg’s reconstruction of the world view of Menocchio, an obscure sixteenth-century miller from the Friuli region of Italy who was charged with heresy, is based on a huge collection of inquisitorial papers compiled as part of sixteenth-century witch trials. The challenge for Ginzburg was to interpret them for the access they give to Menocchio’s beliefs, thoughts, fears and feelings, rather than to the ‘inquisitorial concepts of witchcraft derived from sources of learned origin’ in which they are saturated.48 Ginzburg found Menocchio’s own voice by attending to the discrepancies between the questions of the judges and Menocchio’s replies. He argues that these incongruities point to the orally transmitted popular religious beliefs that furnished Menocchio’s perceptions, as well as to ideas that the miller had absorbed from the new print culture of the sixteenth century. Ginzburg’s analysis enables him to elaborate the relationship between the particular and the general, showing that the microhistory of this lowly individual illuminates nothing less than the workings of peasant culture in pre-industrial Europe, its interactions with elite culture, and its relationship to the printed word, the spread of literacy, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Ginzburg’s demonstration that reconstructing the world from the point of view of a single individual can have wide implications inspires many of those who seek histories of the self in the archives, whether the documentation they find there is abundant or sparse. As the sociologist Michael Rustin puts it, in defence of the ‘biographical turn’ in the social sciences, understanding the social world is not achieved by ‘abstract general propositions’ and quantitative methods alone, but also ‘through the luminosity of single cases’.49 Powerful and poetic though Rustin’s statement is, however, many historians who draw on personal testimony are doubtful about the validity of the ‘single case’ and its authority in shedding light on social life in the past, and seek to identify a larger population with which the individuals whose lives they are scrutinising connect. The questions of how many ‘cases’ it is necessary to use in order to generalise, in what ways they can be matched to the larger population, and how the concept of ‘typicality’ may be handled, have not gone away. Chapter 6 explores the many ways in which historians who work with personal narratives have negotiated these issues.

Structure of the book The intellectual currents and archival practices sketched above have formed the context in which the personal turn in history has taken place, and through which subjectivity has become a legitimate matter for historical enquiry and a route to understanding the past. This does not mean that there has been consensus among

Introduction 15

historians about how to use personal narratives. Although historians in recent years have taken the turn to the personal in large numbers, they have done so in a variety of ways, and not all have embraced subjectivity with equal enthusiasm. The challenges they identify include the question of the veracity and accuracy of personal narratives, the idea of their interpretative and imaginative nature, and the tension between the possibilities that lie in the ‘luminosity’ of the single case and the demands of ‘representativeness’. Historical practice is constrained and enhanced by the limitations and possibilities of archives, including the internet, and the creative readings that may be applied to their contents. The intellectual strands that have stimulated and accompanied the personal turn have enriched the possibilities of analysis with ideas concerning, for example, subjectivity, narrative, technologies of self, agency, the other, public discourse, and the unconscious. The take-up of such ideas has, however, been uneven within historical practice. This book explores the many ways in which historians have engaged with histories of the self in their research, analysis and writing. It discusses their deployment of and contributions to the ideas central to the turn to the personal, and identifies the developments in historical practice that arise from their work. In the chapters that follow, I discuss, through historiographical case studies, the uses historians have made of each of four genres of personal testimony: letters; diaries; memoirs; and oral history. Chapter 2 explores historians’ uses of the letter. I investigate approaches to letters as sources of facts concerning the writers’ economic and social situations, the problem of accommodating individuality, and anxieties concerning ‘bias’. I trace the cultural shift in historians’ attention towards the mediation of letter writing and the changing use of language in letters. Wartime letters have been extensively analysed by historians, to ask how both the formal censorship of letters and self-censorship can be read and understood, as well as to examine the social, political and emotional relationships between home- and battle-fronts. I explore the value that historians attribute to letters as evidence of literacy, particularly women’s literacy, and ask whether they see letter writing as a source of agency for men and women both in and out of colonial situations. I also discuss historical practice that focuses on letters as narratives that deploy experience, emotion, fantasy and imagination in the construction of the self in relation to an addressee. Chapter 3 focuses on the diary and historical practice. Historians have valued diaries as windows on the past through which it is possible to see the social, political, cultural and economic worlds that diarists inhabited, as they experienced them day-by-day. I discuss the kinds of history that have been written from such a perspective as well as exploring historical practice that uses diaries in different ways. Historians who engage with the subjectivity of the diarist focus on the self-fashioning that takes place within the pages of the diary, as well as the practice of diary writing itself. Some use the idea that diary writing is a method of self-regulation, a ‘technology of the self’. I investigate historical work on the inflection of class, colonialism and gender in such self-regulation and also explore historical practice geared to interpreting the unconscious content of diaries, in language, dreams and

16 Introduction

fantasies. A popular assumption is that diaries are secret, interior documents, but some historical work questions the idea that they always lie on the private side of the imagined boundary between public and private. Chapter 4 considers how historians have used memoir and autobiography. I highlight the differences between extracting historical evidence from autobiography, and reading for subjectivity, and look at historians’ treatment of the relationship between gender and memoir. The chapter explores historians’ various understandings of departures from factual accuracy in autobiography, and their responses to the idea that the present moment in which, and the audiences for whom, the memoirist is writing, shape what is written. Some autobiographies rewrite the past for the present: the chapter concludes with an investigation of historians’ analyses and usages of such revisionist texts. Chapter 5 concerns oral history. It discusses the various approaches that historians have taken to the issue of the reliability of oral narratives: some see inconsistencies and contradictions as undermining the validity of oral evidence, while others see them as providing access to the meaning of the past for the teller. The way in which a life story is composed through oral history practice is, for some, largely irrelevant to their objective of collecting evidence of past experience, while for others it is a matter vital for the historical account they are writing. The chapter explores historians’ engagement with the relationship of public discourse and popular culture to oral narratives, and it discusses the different ways in which historians regard silences and evasions in oral testimony. Throughout, it is alert to oral historians’ engagement with gender, to their uses of alternative historical sources alongside oral testimony, and to their varying attention to the processes of composure and inter-subjectivity within oral histories. In Chapter 6 I explore the issue of representativeness and the legitimacy of generalisation. It may seem obvious that scholars need to identify the social location of narrators and decide in what senses they might be representative of a larger population, but historians have viewed these issues in a range of different ways over the past thirty or forty years. At one pole is the idea that representativeness can only be achieved by statistical sampling of large populations, or by matching the sample available to the historian to what is known about the larger population. At the other extreme, as in the case of microhistory, historians have built interpretations of entire societies and cultures on single cases. Chapter 6 considers the responses of historians of the personal to such possibilities. In the concluding chapter I discuss rivalries between practitioners who use different types of personal narrative and interrogate the concept of authenticity that underlies claims that one genre is superior to another. Chapter 7 also explores historical practice that uses a combination of types of personal narrative, and seeks to clarify the commonalities and divergences between the various genres in such usages. A growing body of historical work makes use of personal materials that cannot be subsumed under the four genres discussed in the book but that also constitute histories of the self. The last part of the chapter explores work that analyses embroidery, graffiti and photograph albums as personal narratives, and asks where the ‘turn to the personal’ is taking history.

Introduction 17

The focus of this book is on the uses that historians have made of personal narratives – their methodologies – rather than on the historiography of the specific issues that they address. The intention is not to enter into the, often noisy, debates to which the historical work under scrutiny contributes, be they about society in the Industrial Revolution, war consciousness, Soviet subjectivity or the many other topics that historians seek to illuminate by deploying personal narratives. The case studies of particular types of approach discussed here are drawn from a pool that is intended to be wide and deep. Although my own familiarity with the field of modern British history has inevitably influenced my choices, I have tried to be global in scope and to reach back in time from the recent past to the late medieval period. It has, of course, not been possible to cover every example of the use of personal testimonies by historians, and I can only regret glaring oversights and omissions. On the other hand, the selectivity in the pages that follow is respectful. The book does not set out to lay down the law about how historians should use personal narratives, but to trace how they have used them, and with what results. Criticism is tempered by admiration for the endeavour, imagination and adventurousness of the many varieties of historical practice discussed here.

Notes 1 Estelle Armitage (pseudonym), born 1921, interviewed by the author, 14 January 1994 as part of a research project, ‘Gender, Training and Employment 1939–1950’, Economic and Social Research Council Grant Number R000 23 2048. See Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), especially Chapter 5. 2 All quotations are from the interview cited in note 1. 3 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 36. 4 James Olney argues that autobiography is the most appealing form of literature, followed by biography, to readers, ‘because it brings increased awareness, through understanding of another life in another time and place, of the nature of our selves and our share in the human condition’. J. Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. vii. 5 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 13. 6 See Penny Summerfield, ‘Education and Politics in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War’, International Review of Social History, XXVI, Pt.2, 1981, pp. 133– 158. There have been a number of studies of the social and cultural history of British servicemen in the Second World War since the early 1980s, most of which use at least some personal narratives, such as David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: the British Army and the War Against Germany 1919–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and particularly his article ‘“You cannot hate the bastard who is trying to kill you …”: Combat and Ideology in the British Army in the War against Germany 1939–45’, Twentieth Century British History 11:1, 2000, pp. 1–22; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999); Lucy Noakes, Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006); Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Richard Vinen, National Service: A Generation in Uniform 1945–1963 (London: Allen Lane, 2014) uses oral history, memoirs and letters to capture the social dynamics of military service in the post-war period.

18 Introduction

7 See, among others, the following publications. The first listed uses Mass Observation Project directive replies, the others mainly oral history. P. Summerfield, ‘The Generation of Memory: Gender and the Popular Memory of the Second World War in Britain’ in L. Noakes and J. Pattinson (eds.), The Second World War in British Cultural Memory (London: Continuum, 2014), pp. 25–45; P. Summerfield (with C. Peniston-Bird), Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. xviii, 307; P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) pp. xiii, 338; P. Summerfield (with G. Braybon) Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora/ RKP, 1987), p. 330; P. Summerfield, ‘An Oral History of Schooling in Lancashire 1900– 1950: Gender, Class and Education’, Oral History Journal, 15:2, 1987, pp. 19–31; P. Summerfield, ‘Cultural Reproduction in the Education of Girls: A Study of Girls’ Secondary Schooling in Two Lancashire Towns 1900–1950', in F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: Women and Education 1850–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 149–170. 8 For an introduction to this interdisciplinary development, see I. Goodson, Developing Narrative Theory: Life Histories and Personal Representation (London: Taylor and Francis, 2012). 9 James L. Peacock and Dorothy C. Holland, ‘The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process’ Ethos, 21:4 (1993), pp. 367–383, here p. 368. Lynn Abrams, drawing on socio-linguistic theory, makes a similar distinction between life history as a ‘chronologically told narrative of an individual’s past’ and the ‘creative and fluid’ life story that communicates how the narrator wants to be seen through the style of narration rather than the facts they include. See Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 40–41. 10 Philip Neilsen, ‘Life Writing’ in David Morley and Philip Neilsen (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 133–150. 11 Clare Anderson uses the term ‘life writing’ in describing her methodology in Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), even though relatively few of her subjects actually put pen to paper themselves. 12 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp (New York, London, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, this edition 2011), pp. 1–3; Devin O. Pendas, ‘Testimony’ in Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 226–242. 13 Personal Narratives Group (eds.), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 4. 14 John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (testimonial narrative)’, Modern Fiction Studies, 35:1, 1989, pp. 11–28, here p. 14. 15 Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack, ‘In Relation: The “Social Self” and Ego-Documents’, German History, 28:3, pp. 263–272, here p. 271. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the term ‘documents of relational personhood’ has not caught on. Claudia Ulbrich, another historian of Germany, however, defends the concept of the ego-document on the grounds that it captures sources in which people give evidence about themselves, sometimes unwittingly. Ego-documents include, she argues, legal documents such as marriage contracts, wills, and court depositions, which may not ‘identify the self’ or construct subjectivity, but may provide a route to understanding the context within which the subject lived. Claudia Ulbrich, ‘Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin’, German History, 28:3, pp. 296–309. 16 Stuart Blackburn and David Arnold (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 9. 17 Social psychologists have insisted that the ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story’. See Jerome Bruner, ‘The “Remembered” Self’, in U. Neisser and R. Fivush (eds.), The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 41–54, here p. 53.

Introduction 19

18 See Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 29–30. 19 For use of this term, see Anna Clark, Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets, 1762–1917 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Clark’s book explores ways in which five extraordinary individuals manipulated current models of selfhood in the process of their own self-fashioning in the long nineteenth century. 20 For a discussion of ‘historical practice’ see Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 21 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 22 David Gerber, for example, states that the reasons for using personal narratives in the US have included the urge to create a more inclusive and democratic American history instead of the prevalent Anglo-Saxon, male, political master narrative. Gerber, ‘The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: American Historians’ Uses of Personal Correspondence’ in R. Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-writers 1600– 1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 37–55, here p. 39. Mary-Jo Maynes challenged labour history in the 1990s with the argument that the ‘personal matters’ inscribed in autobiography ‘were important dimensions of the history of class relations and class identities’. M-J. Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 2. Marjorie Shostak writes that ‘the spectrum of voices from otherwise obscure individuals helps us learn tolerance for differences as well as similarities’. M. Shostak, ‘“What the Wind Won’t Take Away”: The Genesis of Nisa – the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman’ in Personal Narratives Group (eds.), Interpreting Women’s Lives, pp. 228–240, here p. 239. Lynn Bloom states simply that diaries by women ‘humanize history’. L. Z. Bloom, ‘Escaping Voices: Women’s South Pacific Internment Diaries and Memoirs’, Mosaic, 23:3, 1990, pp. 101–112, here p. 110. 23 See for example Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives. Stories of Another Self’ and Liz Stanley, ‘From “Self-made Women” to “Women’s Made-selves”? Audit Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Woman’ in T. Cosslett, A. Easton and P. Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 25–39 and 40–60. 24 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 52–54. 25 James Hinton, Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 23. 26 For a fuller treatment see P. Summerfield, ‘Subjectivity: The Self and Historical Practice’ in Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliams and Lucy Noakes (eds.), New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 21–44. 27 For a now classic statement of this position, see Joan W. Scott, ‘Experience’, in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–40. 28 Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 19. 29 Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 44. In contrast, Meritxell Simon-Martin insists that the real individual existed, but is unknowable: the narrating subject does not exist prior to the narrating; her ‘epistolary voice’ is a ‘narrative construction that coexisted alongside’ her lived identity. Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters: Performative Identity-formation in Epistolary Narratives’, Women’s History Review, 22:2, 2013, pp. 225–238, here p. 234. 30 Eduard Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’ in R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha and C.

20 Introduction

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

West (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 71–87. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in LateVictorian Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 10. Sonya Rose writes about the discursive contradictions of wartime notions of femininity, in Which People’s War? National identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), pp. 181–204, here p.184. This useful concept comes from Donald Spence, ‘Passive Remembering’ in U. Neisser and E. Winograd (eds.), Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 321. T. G. Ashplant, ‘Psychoanalysis in Historical Writing’, History Workshop Journal, 26, 1988, pp. 102–119. Lisa Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti and Her Two Epistles in Quattrocento Florentine Manuscripts’, Speculum, 87:3, 2012, pp. 793–826. Ruth Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence, Our School Going and Our Reading of Books without Getting Money?” Akinpelu Obisesan and His Diary’, in K. Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 52–77, here p. 53, and see Barber’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–5. There is, to date, no single archive or library in the UK that is devoted to the collection of personal papers. Many local libraries and county record offices accept donations, space permitting, and regional libraries, such as Chethams in Manchester, collect papers relevant to their areas and advise on others. Themed collections take relevant materials. Thus the Imperial War Museum accepts personal material relating to twentieth-century wars. The Modern Record Centre, Warwick University, and the Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, take personal material relating to trade union and popular political activity. Brunel University Library houses the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies. Women’s Libraries in Glasgow, London, Sydney and Vancouver collect women’s papers. Some archives have developed as a result of individual enterprise, such as the collection of diaries at Bishopsgate Institute. See http://www.thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk/ (accessed 10 November 2016). Researchers are often able to consult documents held in private collections, from the carefully preserved letters and diaries of well-known figures, to caches of ‘ordinary people’s’ papers discovered in humble attics. Barbara Caine, ‘Letters between Mothers and Daughters’, Women’s History Review, 24:4, 2015, pp. 483–489. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, p. 12. Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 9. Anderson, Subaltern Lives, p. 10. She explains that only two convict memoirs and one collection of poetry have come to light, written by elite men, but very occasionally a statement by a convict is quoted, for example in a court record. Quoted and discussed by L. Noakes, ‘War on the Web: The BBC’s “People’s War” Website and Memories of Fear in Wartime in 21st-century Britain’, in L. Noakes and J. Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London: Continuum 2014), pp. 47–65, here p. 51. Hannah Barker, Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 147–53. The letters are now stored at Huddersfield University Library. Clare Anderson also found valuable sources through the internet. She writes of conducting a basic Google search from the UK for papers relating to penal colonies in the Indian Ocean. It brought up a reference in an online catalogue to the diaries and letters of an obscure American sailor, Edwin Forbes, who worked at a British

Introduction 21

46 47

48 49

penal colony on the Andaman Islands from 1861 to 1864. From this she was able to track the manuscript down to Duke University Library and obtain copies to work on in the UK. The internet also enabled her to contact relatives of Forbes working on their family history, and so to fill gaps in his biography. See Anderson, Subaltern Lives, p. 59. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 8. See also Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Jill Liddington, Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority. The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833–36 (London: Rivers Oram, 1998), pp. 77–80; Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, Journal of Popular Culture, 9:4 (Spring, 1976), pp. 794– 807, here p. 806. Bloom writes of the difficulty of editing 5,000 pages of Natalie Crouter’s diaries of internment from 1941 to 1945, which include full details of the 3,785 meals that Crouter ate in captivity. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xix. Michael Rustin, ‘Reflections on the Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences’ in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengraf (eds.), The Turn to Biographical Methods in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 33–52, here p. 49.

2 HISTORIANS’ USES OF LETTERS

Letter writing has a long history that has involved many people. It is more common to write letters, or in the present day emails or texts, than to keep a diary, write a memoir or record an oral history interview.1 Work by scholars such as Janet Gurkin Altman, Rebecca Earle and Liz Stanley emphasises the social, cultural and material character of epistolarity.2 In contrast to a diary, a letter explicitly presupposes a reader, or readers, with whom the letter writer is in dialogue. Letters bridge separations and build relationships through not only the literacy of the writer, but also the style of the composition, whether formal or casual, florid or matter of fact, as well as the letter’s own physical aspects. In deploying language and the technologies of pen and paper, keyboard and computer, letter writers capture the moment and communicate the self to the recipient. Beyond the written word, methods of inscription and decoration, choice of paper and envelope, inclusions and insertions, and even the surface on which the composition takes place, can be seen as part of the communication, and, since letters depend on delivery as well as composition, so too can postal systems and their regulation. Theorists and historians, notably Jürgen Habermas, have argued that the written word, in print culture and in the practice of letter writing, was the means by which individuals came to know themselves and develop human relations with one another in eighteenth-century Europe. Epistolary exchanges thus contributed to the creation of an imagined ‘public sphere’ of politics, work, leisure and consumption, outside the control of the state.3 It is possible to see this process at work beyond Europe, too, for example in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African societies. The historian Vukile Khumalo writes about the creation of an African political sphere in the Natal colonial state in Southern Africa by literate members of the Zulu–Natal population through a letter-writing network, between 1860 and 1910.4 Centred on a mission station, which was a focus for education and publishing, and spreading to villages, towns and cities throughout southern Africa and

Historians’ uses of letters 23

beyond, the exchanges of letters by African men and women stimulated a critique of colonialism. Khumalo argues that the imaginary world created by this letterwriting network constituted a public sphere that was not under the control of the colonial state. The feminist historians Carolyn Steedman and Dena Goodman have pointed out that the process of creating a politically engaged civil society through letter writing was permeated by gender. They argue that the exclusion of literate, letter-writing women from the male-dominated public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain and France worked to reinforce the idea of a feminine private sphere.5 The different registers of letter writing associated with the two imagined spheres contributed to the ideology of a division between public and private, male and female. Intimate, familial and domestic letter writing was constitutive of the concept of the ‘private person’ and helped to bind the supposedly private space together. Even so, as we shall see, many historians insist that the reception and reading of personal letters was often a communal and social rather than a private and individual practice. Significant prompts to intimate letter writing over the centuries have been the physical, emotional, enforced and strategic separations of courtship and conjugality, migration and war. Much historical work using letters has focused on these themes, but letters have arisen from all sorts of separations, and historians’ work on epistolarity is by no means limited to these topics. Large collections of letters survive in archives and in private collections.6 While these appear to be treasure troves of material about the past, some historians have been wary of them. Although letter writing is dialogic, the other voice is often absent from collections of letters: communications to a roving correspondent rarely survive, whereas letters home have more often been saved.7 In many cases the dialogue that is a key feature of letter writing has to be inferred from one side of the correspondence. Moreover, historians who have approached letters for information about the past have worried about what to do with the multitude of slightly different accounts of the same events recorded in some collections, the overspill of the minutiae of everyday life, the eruption, or absence, of emotion in letters, or their seemingly formulaic contents. Alternatively, historians who choose to use letters less as sources of empirical evidence than as clues to the history of emotion and subjectivity, face questions of how to read them. This chapter considers historians’ varied approaches to letters. The first section explores the practice of historians committed to ‘history from below’, who read letters for the access they give to ‘the real’ and seek to elicit from them factual details about social life in the past. It discusses the possibilities for reconstructing social history from letters, and also the anxieties that epistolary methodology provokes. These include whether we can trust letter writers to give accurate accounts, how we can generalise from a single, very particular, narrative and what to make of formulaic expression and the use of epistolary models. The following sections explore the work of historians from the 1990s to the 2010s who have focused on letter writing as a social and cultural practice rather than on letters as a seam to be mined for facts. Such historians ask different types of

24 Historians’ uses of letters

questions, concerning, for example, composition and cultural influences, subjectivity, and the history of letter writing. These questions stimulate historical analysis of matters identified as problems by historians who seek empirical data from letters. They orient historians towards the implications of at least five issues. First, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, letter writing was guided by models taught at school or found in manuals and published collections of letters.8 Second, in some social and political circumstances, such as war, imprisonment and oppression, letter writing was externally constrained by official censorship.9 Third, selfcensorship, symbolised by deletions, screwed up sheets in the waste paper basket and unsent letters, has also accompanied letter writing.10 Fourth, much correspondence, although personal, was not private. In societies as far apart as eighteenth-century Scotland and twentieth-century Nigeria, reading a letter was often a collective not a solitary experience, and writers expected their letters to be shared rather than be private communications.11 Fifth, the letter is not only a container for written content, but also an object, produced in a material context of letter writing equipment and postal systems that may themselves assume symbolic meanings.12 The second section of the chapter explores historians’ engagement with these issues through a focus on the wealth of work on personal correspondence in the two world wars of the twentieth century. I review a number of social and cultural analyses of war letters, as well as discussing the work of historians who draw explicitly on psychoanalytic and post-colonial theory. In contrast to the historians discussed in the first section, those selected for scrutiny here regard models of letter writing and other external influences, such as censorship and the communal consumption of letters, as well as the material context in which they were written, as grist to the mill of the historical enquiry, rather than as sources of ‘bias’ that might invalidate the evidence in the letter. Such historical practice was encouraged by the cultural turn of the 1980s. It moved historians towards regarding letters as cultural products that deploy language and cultural idioms, and as sites in which ideology, discourse and popular culture are deployed in the fashioning of the self. Valuing letters for the light they throw on the consciousness, emotions and subjectivity of the author raises questions about the gendered nature of these processes. The third section of the chapter discusses the ways in which letter writing as a social and cultural practice features in the work of historians of women and gender relations. I investigate historical studies that use letters to explore female literacy; to chart the history of patriarchy; and to examine the making of a feminine epistolary self. Letters have been prized for their intimacy, immediacy, and privacy, characteristics increasingly constructed as ‘feminine’ in later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and France. In these historical contexts women were seen as ‘natural’ letter writers, an association reinforced in the eighteenth century by fictional female correspondence in the work of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson.13 As Rebecca Earle puts it, ‘The easy natural style that the eighteenth century so admired in familiar letters was felt to accord particularly with women’s untutored and spontaneous expressiveness.’14 However, feminist scholars, including Earle, question this stereotype, suggesting that ‘spontaneity’ was in fact carefully cultivated.

Historians’ uses of letters 25

The fourth section of the chapter investigates historical work that develops the idea of the letter as a site of the construction of the self and the other. The literary scholar Elizabeth MacArthur argues that in personal correspondence individuals construct personae not only for themselves but also for their correspondents as they write, as well as ‘plots for the story of their relationship’. 15 Letter writers present themselves in different ways to different readerships. Thus letters, she argues, are neither entirely faithful to experience and feeling, nor are they complete fictions, but constitute ‘linguistic organisations and transformations of that experience’. 16 In this section I discuss studies that explore the interactions of letter writers with available cultural identities; that embrace the possibility that multiple epistolary selves are presented in correspondence; and that suggest ways in which letter writers construct the subjectivity of their addressees in the pages of their letters.

Reading letters for fact In the 1960s and 1970s many historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw correspondence as a product of the mass communication of the modern age, premised on rising literacy rates and the development of national and international postal systems. It was attractive for enabling the study of an inclusive and democratic history ‘from the bottom up’. The reaction against top-down history, however, was accompanied by a preference for history that was ‘objective’, that kept its distance from its subjects and their subject matter, and that used a ‘fundamental frame of reference … political, economic or social’. 17 Such historical approaches found the individual hard to accommodate. In a discussion about the uses that twentieth-century American sociologists and historians tried to make of the huge collection of immigrant letters that became available for research in the 1950s, David Gerber argues that social historians at this time preferred dealing with ‘large categorical social groups’ such as ‘the Polish peasantry’ or ‘the urban poor’ rather than with the individuals who composed them.18 Individuality introduced ‘perplexing variations on the general themes present in culture and society’.19 If it were not for the individuals there would of course be no groups, but even so, historians then and now have found it impossible to write the history of the group as the aggregation of the personal records of all its members. From the 1950s to the 1970s, writes Gerber, they responded by oscillating between claiming that any particular letter is a ‘specific instance of general emotions and a common psychology’, and, on the other hand, using the letter to defend the individual from massification, that is indiscriminate incorporation within mass society, and cultural stereotyping.20 The first strategy imposes the daunting task of defining ‘general emotions’ and ‘common psychology’, in other words identifying the feelings, attitudes and behaviours that could be considered normal or typical in the group under study. The alternative to such difficult generalisations, offered by the second strategy, seemed to be the acceptance of infinite individual variations. In the 1970s historians reconciled such individuation with the need to generalise by compiling edited collections of letters, introduced by interpretive essays.

26 Historians’ uses of letters

Charlotte Erickson’s Invisible Immigrants published in 1972, for example, presented twenty-five series of letters home from nineteenth-century English and Scottish emigrants to the USA, interspersed by explanatory essays by the author.21 The essays draw on the letters in each section to address the themes of the emigrants’ motives for emigration, where they came from and went to, the networks through which they found jobs and established themselves in their new country, and the economic and social adjustments that they made as they settled. These questions are oriented to work, or more specifically to the work of male breadwinners, and the letters are organised by occupational group: agricultural workers, industrial artisans, and those in professional, commercial and clerical jobs. Letters written by women are included only to supplement the accounts given by men.22 Erickson refers to the groups of letters as ‘case studies’ and seeks to ‘reach judgements about the entire population’ from which they were drawn.23 She quotes statistics drawn from sources such as passenger lists and the Census, and uses the language of ‘usually’, ‘often’ and ‘many’, but she does not seek to quantify the evidence drawn from the letters. Erickson’s methodology led to at least three major insights about emigration to the USA from the 1810s to the 1860s. First, she found that, even though Scottish and English emigrants who chose to enter agriculture in America did not come from disintegrating peasant communities, some of them sought to become peasants in America, adhering to values which other social scientists identify with a traditional peasant model, such as regarding land as worth having for its own sake, and seeing work as necessary for subsistence rather than as a means to a higher standard of living.24 Second, common motivations included escaping taxation and seeking independence, but did not usually arise from dire poverty and destitution: emigrants (or at least those whose letters have survived) took some financial resources with them. The desire to emigrate was often based on the view that ‘the government of England was tyrannical and that America was the land of liberty’. 25 Third, family networks were important in respect to distribution, settlement and adjustment, and the circulation of letters home was, in consequence, often restricted. Contrary to the widely held assumption that emigrants’ letters were passed round whole villages, letters suggesting that others should join recent settlers were often ‘private’ in the sense that they were addressed to family members rather than communities as a whole. Erickson explains this in material terms: migrants believed that ‘if they gave an invitation to immigrants to come to them, they would be obliged to be their hosts when they arrived’ and they preferred to target particular family members who might make a useful contribution, than to offer general encouragement.26 Erickson’s concern was with ‘the experience of the migrant’, and attitudes and expectations figure in her study, but, in keeping with the emphasis within social and economic history at the time, she prized objectivity. She identified ‘bias’ as a problem that needed to be addressed: the letters introduce ‘particular types of bias’ that must be considered. Thus, as she put it, ‘while one emigrant might write a letter for the press calculated to assist his own economic interests, another might

Historians’ uses of letters 27

justify his emigration to an unsympathetic family with similarly selected and garnished facts’.27 For the historian seeking the ‘facts of emigration’ from letters, such strategic portrayals are a problem. The solution was, for Erickson, to identify the correspondents and compare their statements with independently obtained facts, from, for example, the Census, about their background and situation. It was also to classify and so generalise about the main purposes of letter writers, which, she argued, were to obtain financial help from home, to arrange the migration of other family members, to report on the migration experience, and to keep in touch with those left behind. She did not explore the clues to subjective feelings within the letters; nor did she discuss the gendered power dynamics within emigrant families, but viewed women through a male perspective, discussing, for example, their reluctance to emigrate, the usefulness of their earnings to supplement those of husbands and fathers, and the calculations that men of different occupations made about marriage.28 These missing perspectives – subjectivity, women’s history and gender relations – did not feature strongly on the agenda of social and economic historians in the 1960s and 1970s when she was researching and writing. Erickson’s selection and editing of the letters included in her collection are indicative of her focus on migration as, primarily, an economic experience. She wrote that she edited out of the collections of migrants’ letters descriptions of ocean voyages, references to health, and lists of American prices, because of the endless repetition of these themes and despite their evident importance to the emigrants themselves.29 David Gerber, writing in the 1990s, commented that historians found it problematic that migrants’ letters are full of mundane details concerning health, deaths, births, prices, and wages, that many letter writers were plagued by difficulties of literacy and self-expression, and that they used formulaic expressions of endearment, blessing, congratulation and sympathy.30 Erickson was dismissive of the models that letter writers may have followed in composing their own letters.31 She did not discuss their uses of contemporary collections of emigrants’ letters because she saw such volumes as introducing ‘bias’ since they were published by organisations devoted to promoting or restraining emigration.32 As I discuss in the next section, from the 1990s onwards historians were increasingly willing to treat the cliché and the formulaic expression as bearers of meaning, and to regard the models provided by contemporary letter collections as offering letter writers ways of understanding and describing the complex social processes in which they were caught up. Historians who seek data about the past from letters have seen them as both a blessing and a curse. Correspondence offers detail and complexity on experiences that touched multitudes, yet each letter is highly individual. The ‘facts’ are present, but they are embedded within distinctive portrayals, composed for particular purposes in specific ways, understood by such historians as introducing damaging ‘bias’. The work of Erickson and others on the letters of emigrants to the USA is important for marking a break with other types of research, which focused, for example, on emigration projects such as government-assisted schemes, and on the economic impact of emigration on the receiving society. Erickson’s approach

28 Historians’ uses of letters

enabled her to offer an interpretation of a social phenomenon affecting millions, from evidence about some of the ‘ordinary working people’ who migrated.33 It did not, however, engage with aspects of the past that later historians have regarded as not only vital to historical understanding, but also particularly accessible through letters, notably gender, subjectivity, and emotion. 34

Letter writing as a social and cultural practice: the case of war letters As periods of enforced separation for millions of people, at a time when letter writing was the principal genre of popular communication, the two world wars of the twentieth century generated huge amounts of correspondence. Christa Hämmerle writes that during the First World War, letter writing became a ‘mass cultural phenomenon’. 35 In addition, the importance attached to both wars as occasions demanding commemoration, as well as sites of social change, has meant that numerous collections of war letters have been saved, in archives as well as in private hands. Social and cultural historians of war value such correspondence for the opportunities it provides to pursue questions framed in terms of consciousness and emotion. They have explored the subjectivities of those involved in order to find out how soldiers and civilians understood the nature of warfare, to assess soldiers’ motivations for fighting, and to gauge their acceptance of the conduct of war. The questions that have interested them include how far soldiers subscribed to the ideological justifications of war to which they were exposed, and to the constructions of heroic and self-sacrificing masculinity with which these were linked, and whether they rebelled against the wars they were required to fight. Historians of the two world wars are also interested in the idea, urged by scholars such as Eric Leed, that a gulf of incomprehension yawned between the front line and the home front.36 They have used correspondence to explore the emotional ties and mutual dependencies that, despite the contrasting experiences of the two ‘fronts’, may have bound them together. Some of the historians engaged in this historiography have sought out the epistolary models that letter writers were encouraged to use, subjecting the cultural codes within them to historical analysis. Martha Hanna, for example, in a study of the letters of French rank and file soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War, relates the modes of expression used by the soldiers to the epistolary content of the curriculum of late-nineteenth-century French elementary and secondary schools. She argues that schoolchildren were trained to regard the letter as a ‘written conversation’ in which truth telling was highly valued, in accordance with the seventeenth-century advice of Madame de Sévigné.37 Hanna concludes that classroom practice in writing letters of condolence and confession, which combined the virtues of honesty, compassion and stoicism, is evident in the letters from the front not only of officers but also of the rank and file, the ‘poilus’. 38 Using Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘bricolage’, that is the adaptation of dominant cultural practices to personal ends, Hanna states that, ‘having learned that letters

Historians’ uses of letters 29

were to be instruments of frank communication and familial affection, French troops and their civilian correspondents took these lessons to heart and adjusted them to their own needs’.39 This included truth-telling about the horrors of war, including descriptions of trenches ‘filled with mud and poisoned by the stench of rotting corpses’, as well as accounts of the effects of relentless bombardment and of witnessing the death of comrades and innocent animals.40 Some soldiers wondered, in their letters, whether their honesty overstated the dangers to which they were exposed during the offensives of the First World War.41 Hanna argues, nevertheless, that French schooling gave young men at the Front positive models of letter writing that enabled them to be more open about their experiences than historians had previously imagined, without, it seems, leading to rebellion in the ranks. John Horne’s study of the letters of soldiers serving in French infantry divisions in 1917 that were copied into the mail reports compiled for the benefit of the censor, likewise suggests that French soldiers followed generic models of letter writing. He argues, however, that the classroom training about which Hanna writes was not the only influence on French letter-writing habits, and that there were telling variations over time in soldiers’ compliance with these prototypes. 42 Guidance was provided by collections of other soldiers’ letters, specifically those of junior officers, published between 1914 and 1918, which, Horne tells us, emphasised the themes of heroism and sacrifice while not sparing addressees the grisly details of the battlefield.43 The tone of personal correspondence varied according to the current level of military activity. In quiet periods, such as the lull before the spring offensive of 1917, Horne argues, rank and file soldiers mostly ignored military matters altogether, and in so far as they referred to the war, they promised their families that victory was bound to come.44 During the 1917 offensive itself, however, they did not hesitate to tell their families about the murderous enemy assault, the scandalous deaths caused by friendly fire and by the military ineptitude of their own side, and their personal depression and war weariness. Horne writes that the vocabulary in the letters of the rank and file at this time departed from that of the models of sacrifice in the published collections: ‘It was the language not of “sacrifice” but of the “sacrificed”’, and it was accompanied by veiled references to mutinous behaviour and political protest.45 Things did not remain this way, however. Shifts in military leadership and strategy after June 1917, particularly the avoidance of another big offensive, led to a return to constructions of sacrifice, albeit infused by resignation and fatalism, in the personal correspondence of the ‘poilus’. 46 Neither Hanna nor Horne regards the letter-writing models on which soldiers drew as ‘introducing bias’ to personal accounts of their trench experiences. On the contrary, they see them as offering language, literary forms and concepts that men adopted selectively in shaping the narratives in their letters, and they argue that these models enabled French soldiers to inform family on the home front of the horrors they were experiencing. In the hands of these historians, shifts in the language of the letters reveal variations in the use of ideological constructs, such as

30 Historians’ uses of letters

patriotic sacrifice, that are indicative of the ups and downs of soldiers’ responses to the intensity of warfare and their changing attitudes to the war. Historians are well aware that letters from the front were subject to censorship by the military authorities. Some of those sceptical about the usefulness of war letters have suggested that this means that few correspondents communicated the ‘reality’ of the frontline.47 Cultural historians of war, however, including Martha Hanna, Christa Hämmerle, Michael Roper, and Hester Vaizey, have engaged more critically with the effects of censorship on what was written.48 While acknowledging that it left its mark on letters and letter writers, these historians find that correspondents commonly evaded censorship, for example by giving friends going home on leave letters to deliver, and by smuggling messages to and fro in packages containing other things, from tooth powder to dirty washing.49 In addition, Hanna, Roper and Vaizey present evidence suggesting the permissiveness, or inefficiency, of censorship. Roper, for example, argues that the sheer bulk of correspondence that British platoon commanders were responsible for censoring made the standard of inspection uneven.50 Hanna and Horne argue that in spite of the censors, the letters of the French ‘poilus’ in the First World War were open about both conditions at the battlefront and their war weariness and pessimism. Vaizey argues that, even more surprisingly given the nature of the Nazi regime, German soldiers in the Second World War defied censorship to write frankly about events and feelings.51 Another problem raised by sceptics of the value of war letters is that, even if they were not eviscerated by military censorship, letters from the front followed clichéd formulae rendering the content so stylised as to conceal rather than reveal the individuals who were purportedly speaking for themselves. There are numerous examples, such as the salutations with which working-class soldiers’ letters commonly opened and which Roper says were ‘mocked by many a middle-class officer’, such as ‘just a line to let you know that I am still in the pink’.52 The Field Service Post Card, about which Paul Fussell writes scathingly, discouraged, indeed forbade, introspection and creativity. It consisted of a set of pre-printed optional phrases, such as ‘I am quite well’, and ‘I have been admitted to hospital sick/ wounded’, with stern instructions to cross out those that did not apply and to add nothing apart from date and signature.53 Hämmerle describes such post cards, also used by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, as providing recipients with little more than ‘a sign of life’.54 Vaizey, however, defends the cliché-ridden and formulaic letter as a historical source. She argues that even when written in ‘repeated commonplaces’, letters tell historians what people felt, thought they felt, remembered feeling or thought they ought to feel, such that letters enable the historian to probe ‘individual subjectivity’. 55 Roper takes this further. ‘Many of the images and expressions used by rank and file soldiers in their letters are formulaic, even commercial,’ he writes. 56 However, he argues that it is possible to ‘use such letters as historical sources’ if we ‘analyse their cultural codes so as to bring out the powerful emotions that are often implicitly expressed, or that lie within what appears to be mere cliché’. 57 He

Historians’ uses of letters 31

quotes lines from a 1914 Christmas card saved by a soldier named A. G. Baker, that was returned to his parents with his effects after his death on the Somme in September 1916, by way of illustration: ‘A link to bind where duty bids us part/A chain of thought stretches forth from heart to heart’.58 In spite of his robust defence of the cliché, however, Roper does not explicitly unpack ‘the powerful emotions’ that lie within this and other such formulations, but the point remains: clichés provided writers and readers with easily recognisable forms of expression that could stand in for more complicated constructions; cultural historians need not dismiss them as meaningless. The argument of Roper’s book, focusing on the emotional and psychological significance of wartime correspondence, and informed by psychoanalytic theory, is that the letters of front line soldiers tell a story of dependence on maternal care. This is not only the care of their own absent mothers, provided by proxy through letters and parcels, but also the care of ‘mothering men’ at the battlefront who endeavoured to look after other soldiers by keeping them warm, dry, clean and fed, and who sometimes sought the advice of their own mothers about how best to do so.59 Roper argues that soldiers’ letters tell us that, even though home and battlefronts were divided, they were also ‘structurally connected and inter-dependent’ and that survival depended on the emotional sustenance of home.60 Letters were cherished by soldiers who wrote that they felt they were hearing the writer’s voice as they read them, and were lovingly saved by mothers for whom, argues Roper, the flimsy paper on which they were written, stained by the elements, ‘suggested how fragile a son’s existence was’.61 Official censorship may have had a relatively minor impact on letter writing, but Roper argues that self-censorship shaped the content of letters. As he puts it, ‘the relational character of emotions means that who a son was writing his letter to had a direct bearing on the kinds of experiences he related’. 62 Other cultural historians of war note the same thing, without framing it in psychoanalytic terms. Hanna finds that descriptions of the horrors of war in the letters of French soldiers, as well as confessions concerning pessimism and depression, sometimes led the letter writer to place conditions on who might see a letter, as in the instructions of a French private to his wife to show his letter ‘to your parents if you like and to my father, but not to my mother’.63 Christa Hämmerle, writing about the correspondence of a German soldier and his fiancé in 1917, describes a similar pattern. The couple usually encouraged the participation of their respective families in the reception of letters, but there was an occasional hiatus caused by feelings of despair about the war, or a crisis of confidence in their relationship. At such points one would implore the other, ‘I beg you, Darling, this letter is only for you to read, and then burn it. It is for you alone, promise me that?’.64 The pleas for privacy underline the expectation that letters would normally be more publicly available. Roper reads into such restraint some of the emotional and psychic meanings of war for soldiers. There was a relative absence of explicit descriptions of the horror of the trenches in British soldiers’ letters. He argues that this was not due entirely either to military censorship or to the low impact of shelling, noise, dead bodies

32 Historians’ uses of letters

and injuries, as some recent historians’ minimisation of the horrors of the First World War would suggest. Self-censorship was as important. He suggests that anxiety made a serviceman want his mother, but the prevailing culture told him that, as a soldier and a man, it was inappropriate for him to say so. Thus soldiers who had horrific experiences felt conflicting pressures to confide in their mothers and to restrain the impulse to do so. Letters hint at the mental struggles to which this tension gave rise through, for example, oblique styles of communication, including abrupt changes of topic, omissions, opaque allusions, and contradictions.65 Such shifts and confusions can, argues Roper, mean that soldiers’ letters are hard for historians to understand: letters and diaries, he insists, rarely give ‘transparent’ access to the sentiments of those who wrote them.66 Approaching this impenetrability through the lens of psychoanalysis, he suggests that it arises from the impossibility of thinking about disturbing experiences in the immediate aftermath of battle because of the need to protect oneself from reliving trauma. One of Roper’s strategies is to seek out evidence of the psychic disturbances caused by trench warfare in, for example, slips of the pen, the protestation of good spirits, reports of unwellness and of insatiable appetites, and accounts of dreams. ‘If letters,’ he writes, ‘being close to the moment of experience, conveyed something of “how people really felt”, it was often more than the writers themselves intended, and sometimes in spite of their efforts at concealment.’67 Errors could be revealing, as in a letter from a seventeen-year-old soldier in which the words ‘first’ and ‘sights’ are repeatedly misplaced. In crossing them through, argues Roper, the young soldier inadvertently revealed ‘how much this violent introduction to modern warfare had upset him’, particularly the appalling ‘sights’ he had to witness during his ‘first’ experience of battle.68 Soldiers’ self-censorship was, in any case, double-edged: ‘Mindful of the need to protect mothers from worry, they also experienced a powerful unconscious need to get rid of disturbing feelings and even to punish mothers because they were remote and could not help. Reassurance could tip over into descriptions that were unwittingly aimed to make loved ones feel worried and guilty.’69 Few cultural historians of war draw on psychoanalytic concepts in their discussion of soldiers’ letters as explicitly as Roper, whose deployment of them demonstrates their potential for understanding the unconscious effects of extreme emotional experience. His argument for the use of psychoanalysis is that a focus entirely on language, that is on the discourses and linguistic codes in which feeling is constructed and expressed, misses the relatively independent existence of emotion. He agrees that public discourse, such as the emotional restraint urged by the culture of the stiff upper lip in twentieth-century Britain, shapes and even ‘manages’ feeling; emotional states are mediated through culture.70 He insists, however, on an ‘analytical distinction between emotional experience and its representation’, and claims that psychoanalytic theory can access such experience.71 A post-colonial approach, while sensitive to social, cultural and psychic dynamics, takes a different perspective. Gajendra Singh, like Roper, engages with the difficulties of deciphering the meanings in soldiers’ letters in the First World War.

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Those which Singh discusses, however, were written by Indian soldiers (‘sipahi’, Anglicised as ‘sepoy’) recruited to fight for Britain on the Western Front. Sipahis wrote letters home in an indirect and inexplicit way, using elaborate metaphors followed by phrases such as ‘think this over till you understand it’.72 Singh does not dwell on the psychological meanings of this opaqueness, but argues that it was a deliberate tactic, designed to frustrate the British censors, who did not know whether the letters translated for them were seditious. While the contents of correspondence were, as a result, ‘only partially decipherable by the censor’, they are also no more than ‘partly understandable to the historian’.73 Singh nevertheless finds ways to make sense of the letters. He sees the use of metaphor, allusion, abbreviation, and the reproduction of rumour, as central to sipahis’ negotiation of the colonial power that required them to fight for low pay, a long way from home, over many years. He finds numerous dualities and ambiguities in the letters: that loyal service was a matter of military honour, and that it depended on the amount the soldier was paid; that British officers were trusted parental figures, and that they behaved in the opposite way; that sipahis were obedient soldiers, while they were in practice flouting military prohibitions, such as the ban on racial mixing with women in military hospitals; that sipahis accepted the legitimacy of the military authorities, and that they were prepared to invent family crises and commit acts of self-harm in desperate bids to get home.74 Singh’s commitment to reading the letters as polysemic, that is, as communicating numerous meanings, enables him to find moments when sipahis ‘pushed the boundaries of the permissible’ and contested colonial power.75 Historians who have offered interpretations of the social, cultural and psychic dimensions of letter writing in wartime have also seen it as a material practice that itself communicates meaning. Roper reads the shape and size of handwriting, the impress of the pen or the type-writer keys on the page, the presence of extraneous marks and stains such as tears, sweat, blood – or jam – as physical signs of the state of mind and inner feelings of the writer.76 Other historians also attest to the psychological importance of the materiality of letters: the sensory experience of the feel of the envelope and the smell of the paper, which brought the sender close to the recipient at the same time as frustratingly emphasising their absence; and the habit of keeping letters physically next to the heart. Hanna brings out the significance, to recipients of wartime letters, of the sight of handwriting, the aural experience of hearing a letter read aloud, and tactile qualities of enclosures such as pressed flowers or scribbles from children. These things, she argues, constituted ‘simple tokens of remembrance’ that co-existed with accounts of the horrors of war and the hardships of the home front.77 Hanna and Hämmerle find that an interruption in the flow of letters was productive of anxiety because of its suggestion of the illness, death or indifference of the other correspondent.78 Such worries were prevalent at all times, but were acute in wartime, and were predicated on expectations of a postal service that would be at least reasonably reliable. The historians Litoff and Smith, in a study of mail and morale in the Second World War, emphasise the intermeshing of officially

34 Historians’ uses of letters

provided postal services with popular conceptions of the morale-raising effects of regular mail in wartime. The postman acquired ‘extraordinary significance in the lives of those at home’; he or she became an iconic figure with whom special relationships developed and about whom songs were composed.79 Numerous historians indicate that interruptions to mail deliveries in wartime were highly provocative for both soldiers and civilians.80 Vaizey writes that the breakdown of the postal service in Germany at the end of the Second World War was symptomatic of the collapse of the German economy and society.81 These cultural historians of war, released from the bind of detecting ‘bias’, explore influences upon letter writing as the infrastructure of epistolary meanings. Approaching correspondence as a social, cultural and psychic practice, they suggest that the cultural forms taught at school and via published models of letter writing were conduits of expression that could open out, or restrict, the accounts of experience and emotion communicated in letters. Attention to epistolary language leads to the discovery of changes in consciousness over time. Information that letter writers thought it important for their correspondents to know evaded the imposition of official censorship. Strong feeling can be discerned even in cliché, as well as in the practice of self-censorship, and sensitivity to psychic processes enables some historians to find more about the emotional state of correspondents in their letters than letter writers were aware of themselves. In their hands the materiality of letter writing as well as the use of language, contributes to the meanings of epistolary exchanges in situations of extreme emotion. This review of social and cultural historians’ uses of war letters also raises questions, informed by their different theoretical approaches, that could be posed one to another. For example, would a psychoanalytic approach enable Singh to explore the ways in which trauma affected colonial soldiers’ epistolary practices? Would a post-colonial approach help Roper to ask whether power relations analogous to those of the colonial experience affected letter writing by the soldiers who belonged, by nationality, to the imperial power?

Gender and the letter The concern of cultural historians of war with the relationship between men at the front and mothers and wives at home brings gender, particularly the construction of masculinity, into focus. A gender analysis centred on women and femininity, and informed by ideas about subjectivity and cultural construction, has been the explicit objective of numerous feminist historians who engage with epistolarity, writing between the 1990s and the 2010s. Working largely on the history of gender relations and the family, rather than war, the problems they address include the characteristics of women’s literacy in the past; the history of gender relations; the shaping of the female self through correspondence; and, in relation to all these topics, the issue of women’s agency. Lisa Kaborycha uses the letters of the widow of a minor Florentine nobleman to challenge the idea that it was exceptional for women to be literate in

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fifteenth-century Florence.82 She finds that both nuns and ‘patrician women’ not only taught children, but also copied, and contributed to, anthologies of letters and other writings, secular and sacred, known as ‘zibaldoni’, that were produced for sale and circulation.83 Kaborycha focuses on two letters written by a noblewoman, Brigida Baldinotti, that were included in at least thirty ‘zibaldoni’, indicating a wide contemporary circulation. She regards the letters as evidence not only of fifteenthcentury Florentine women’s literacy but also of their literary proficiency and their influence. One of Baldinotti’s letters is an ‘encomium’, a text expressing high praise, addressed to the nuns and lay sisters of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Kaborycha explains that it uses the principles of rhetoric and good epistolary style current at the time to combine praise of the nuns with professions of humility on the part of the author, and to compliment the sisters for their commitment to an active life of service rather than a purely contemplative role. The other letter ‘is a model for how to write a gracious letter of advice and praise’ addressed to a young noblewoman about to be married.84 It is cast as a gift to the bride, and advises her on ‘how to lead a worldly married life with dignity and in accordance with Christian teachings’.85 It advises the bride to follow the models of saints of noble extraction whose spiritual growth was not impeded by the luxury and temptations to vanity in which they lived. Baldinotti also cautions the young bride against ‘indecent passion within marriage’. To avoid explicit reference to sexual excess, she cloaks the message in the biblical story of Tobias, the eighth man to wed Sarah, whose previous seven husbands had all perished on their wedding nights due to lack of restraint. Kaborycha’s argument is that these highly literate letters were popular and widely read by both women and men in fifteenth-century Florence. They successfully combined ‘an uplifting content with a good literary form that could be admired and imitated’. 86 The letters, and with them women’s literacy and agency, have, she suggests, been ‘hidden in plain sight’ from the historian’s gaze, and may represent the tip of an historical iceberg of women’s literary practice.87 The discovery and discussion of female agency represented by literacy is a vital focus of feminist work on epistolarity. Another is the exploration of gender relations through letters between women and men. Such correspondence is central to Katie Barclay’s study of the history of marriage within the patriarchal culture of Scotland in the period 1650 to 1850.88 The collections of letters that Barclay uses arose from separations between married couples of the landed class. Husbands endeavoured to boost family incomes by involvement in trade, banking, the law, the military and industrialisation, which took them away from home, while wives remained on the family estates. Thousands of letters were exchanged by members of this diverse elite. Barclay draws on them to argue that, in the two hundred–year period she covers, Scottish patriarchy did not necessarily involve oppression, conflict, or violence in marriage (although on occasion it did). She sees it as an ‘evolving system of power’, reinforced through daily interactions between men and women that were given meaning by ‘patriarchal discourses’.89 As such it was

36 Historians’ uses of letters

subject to negotiation, albeit within the framework of a power imbalance that favoured men. Barclay’s attention to the form and language of letters, as well as their content, enables her to trace the ways in which the lives of the Scottish letter-writing elite both shaped, and were shaped by, the changing system of gender relations from 1650 to 1850. She argues that these letters show that understandings of conjugal love shifted over time. In the seventeenth century, the idea of conjugality was based on the mutual duty of husbands to provide and wives to obey, but before that century ended it was developing into a culture of sensibility that, in the eighteenth century, became coupled with an emphasis on friendship in marriage. Barclay argues that, whereas seventeenth-century wives commonly addressed husbands formally, for example as ‘My Lord’, and signed off ‘I rest your loving obedient wife’, from around the 1690s the word ‘obedient’ disappeared.90 She suggests that, in the eighteenth century, couples increasingly drew on the language of romantic love to express themselves with greater empathy and feeling. Modes of address became more informal, and included the use of terms of affection and personalised nicknames such as ‘thou dear bewitching creature’ and ‘my dearest puddles’.91 Nineteenth-century letters tell us that the construction of marriage as friendship gave way to the overriding importance of domesticity as the site of intimacy.92 ‘Couples produced images of domestic happiness to establish intimacy over distance.’93 Wives filled their letters with children’s prattle and family gossip, and used the language of domesticity and submission to negotiate the balance of power within marriage. While arguing for cultural change, however, Barclay’s interpretation of the mutation of epistolary language is that it does not indicate growing equality between husband and wife. Rather, she claims, it was constitutive of the evolution of patriarchy, which she understands as a ‘lived system’ but not a fixed one. Patriarchy involved the subordination of wives by husbands, but was adaptable in the face of change, and was tempered by the shifting meanings of love, as well as by legal and social restrictions.94 Barclay teases out of the correspondence of the Scottish landowning class not only the domination of men, but also women’s ingenuity in discovering ways to negotiate ‘a space for the female self within marriage’ that did not upset patriarchy, but complicated it.95 Dena Goodman, in Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, uses correspondence to explore both women’s literacy and the changing shape of gender relations and identities. She pursues the history of, specifically, women’s epistolary practice in eighteenth-century France. Her objective is to discover the implications of the increase in feminine letter writing for individual women and for ‘the concept and practice of womanhood’.96 She explains that, from the late seventeenth century, men of the French cultural elite associated epistolarity with elite women. From then on, facility in letter writing was a necessary accomplishment for any woman with aspirations to join, rise within, or remain part of, the social elite. Goodman shows how a ‘natural’ feminine writing style was carefully cultivated through a lady’s education in Enlightenment France. Penmanship, orthography, handwriting and spelling had to be mastered, and the right reading undertaken to

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develop both style and suitable content. Letter writing manuals offered instruction on the composition of formal and informal missives. In his treatises and fiction Rousseau praised a fluent, feminine, natural epistolary style. Above all, the wellknown published letters of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter were models for familiar letters, combining advice with a rich vein of gossip and observation. Letter writing became ‘part of the equipment of a modern woman and a primary means of social mobility’.97 It was bolstered by a vigorous consumer culture. Stationers’ shops sold paper, pens, and ink. Desk manufacturers made pretty writing tables suitable for ladies’ drawing rooms. Being a consumer of such new material objects, fashionably centred on Paris, and engaging in the activity of letter writing, ‘shaped the modern woman’, argues Goodman.98 Goodman’s strategy, informed by the theories of Michel de Certeau and Jürgen Habermas, is to approach correspondence as a means by which to reconstruct the ways in which letter writers produced themselves as subjects, in relation to other subjects, in and of their times.99 As she puts it with reference to the four eighteenth-century Frenchwomen in her study, ‘Their letters suggest how engaging in correspondence helped them to arrive at an understanding of what it meant to be a woman, to confront and work through the choices that womanhood entailed, and to arrive at some degree of autonomy as women.’100 According to Goodman, it was not only through correspondence with close women friends that ‘each woman came to be her own modern self’, although this was important, but also through correspondence within marriage.101 Conjugal separations, not dissimilar to those which stimulated the correspondence between members of the Scottish landed elite studied by Barclay, affected one of the four women whom Goodman studies in depth. She draws on the correspondence between Sophie Silvestre and Bernard de Bonnard in the 1780s to bring out the dialectic at work between male attempts to cultivate a particular feminine identity, and female resistance. Bernard, older as well as male, sought to instruct his young wife on how best to write letters in order to fulfil her social duties and maintain the couple’s respectability. Sophie, for her part, defended her slips increasingly vigorously over time, by underlining what was, to her, more important, notably the couple’s infant son, and her longing for the return of her husband. Goodman argues that, without directly challenging Bernard’s Rousseau-inspired narratives of femininity and conjugality, ‘in which he used the power of language to shape and mould Sophie’, she ‘countered them with her stories of everyday life, grounded in her own experience’.102 Each of the historians discussed here considers letter writing to have been an important part of women’s assertion of themselves and their influence in the past. For Kaborycha, women’s literacy was the gateway to a particular type of female power. Barclay sees letter writing as both shaped by and shaping changing concepts of gender relations, and hence central to women’s negotiation of patriarchy. Goodman writes of letters as a medium through which women produced and consumed stories about themselves in the past, and letter writing as a process of self-discovery that facilitated the development of a ‘culture of the self’.103

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Epistolary constructions of the self Goodman’s work takes up and develops the idea that letter writing, as a social and cultural practice, has been influential, historically, in the formation of gendered subjectivities. She describes the way that people in the past acquired knowledge of themselves by writing letters to other people, as the ‘paradox of correspondence’: ‘by addressing oneself to another one gains access to oneself’.104 This section explores the work of historians who explore the complexities of self-fashioning through letter writing, in a variety of historical contexts. Post-colonial historians have found letters a useful medium for exploring the complexities of the processes of constructing the self in the colonial context. Antoinette Burton, in At the Heart of the Empire, explores the personal narratives of three Indian travellers to Britain between 1880 and 1900, illustrating from their letters and a memoir how they experienced their construction as ‘other’ through their interactions with imperial ideologies.105 Cornelia Sorabji, one of the three, travelled from Poona in India to England in 1889, to study at Oxford University. She had chosen to read medicine, was pressed to switch to education by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) who wanted teachers, and resisted this pressure ultimately studying for a degree in Civil Law. Her letters home were, argues Burton, a stage on which she ‘performed’ for her parents, explaining her choices, describing her social interactions, and testing her own respectability and moral worth against their values.106 Burton also describes Sorabji’s letters as an ‘ethnography’ of late Victorian Britain, in which she recorded her observations of, and her emotional responses to, her new surroundings, those who peopled them, and the colonial stereotypes that informed their attitudes to her. Sorabji described her awareness that she was constructed as ‘the Indian woman’ of colonial fantasy, whom the CMS both needed and feared, writing, ‘they are under obligation to me, for the happy fact that I am Indian is an advertisement in itself’.107 She also recorded being told that she ‘looked so very heathen’ by a ‘proselytizing old lady’; that all Indian women were ‘impure’ by another; and that she had chosen to study a subject that would not help Indian women by a third.108 Sorabji’s resentment at such patronising and racist ‘othering’ is inscribed in the letters. So, too, is her own contradictory engagement in such processes. Sorabji differentiated herself in her letters not only from ‘Hottentots’, a term used to describe Africans that strangers sometimes applied to her, but also from other Indian women in Britain, and from white women whom she regarded as her moral or social inferiors.109 Burton’s interpretation is that such reproductions of ‘othering’ by one who herself suffered from it, are indicative of the ways ‘colonials in Britain understood and made use of taxonomies of colonial-racial difference’ in constructing themselves in their personal narratives.110 Sorabji even applied the language of the stereotyped Hindu woman, which she normally rejected, to herself, when describing the demanding environment of Oxford University which accepted women to study and examined them in the 1890s but refused to confer degrees upon

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them.111 She also expressed jealousy of, and rivalry with, other Indian women in Britain, as well as hostility to the causes of women’s suffrage and Indian nationalism. Burton explains these complexities in relation to Sorabji’s precarious position as a colonial ‘other’. For Sorabji, personal success and commitment to the maintenance of social order underpinned the viability of her visit to Britain and her (albeit racist) treatment there as a celebrity. Burton uses the letters, which survive in the archives because of Sorabji’s connections with the British colonial elite, to analyse the processes of colonial subjection, resistance and accommodation.112 In Burton’s hands, their reflexive content reveals the way that colonial subjects themselves absorbed and reproduced oppressive ideologies in the process of achieving a sense of self in an alien environment. Some cultural historians have argued that the epistolary selves delineated in letters were not necessarily unitary and consistent. Meritxell Simon-Martin draws on a collection of letters written by one person to a number of different correspondents to argue that constructions of the self, shaped in relation to the recipient, varied widely. Simon-Martin explores the numerous different identities that the nineteenth-century feminist reformer, painter and traveller, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘performed’ in her letters, depending on her addressee.113 Thus Bodichon presented herself as a contented wife enjoying marital harmony to her family of origin, who had discouraged her marriage in 1857 to Eugène Bodichon, a French physician. In contrast, she confided to her friend Mary Anne Evans (the novelist George Eliot) her anxieties about her marriage and the difficulties she was experiencing with Eugène.114 In letters to her sisters and some of her friends, she traded gossip, and composed herself as a traveller delighting in exotic sights and experiences.115 To fellow reformers, she constructed herself as a serious philanthropist and political activist.116 The handwriting, embellishment and layout of the letters contributed to these different types of self-presentation. Simon-Martin is, in effect, recording examples of what David Gerber calls the ‘epistolary masquerade’ in which letter writers adopt strategies of communication designed to maintain and develop key relationships while placing limits on self-revelation.117 The emphases, part-truths and concealments, tailored to each recipient, did not amount to deceptions, and yet were partial constructions of the self that were constitutive of the relationship at stake, as the writer conceptualised it. Simon-Martin argues that Bodichon’s practice of ‘staging nuanced self-projections in accordance with each correspondent’ was a ‘fertile source of female agency’ that enabled her to defy convention in many registers.118 She shows that the effects of the shaping of the epistolary self in imagined dialogue with the addressee are indeed powerful. Her research raises further complexities, however. What of letters to multiple addressees? A single letter could presumably present more than one identity, especially if letters were written for more than one audience in the expectation that they would be passed around. Further, if the identity of the addressee simultaneously takes shape on the page, what kinds of subjectivities have letter writers constructed for their readers?

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The idea that letter writing is at root about creating a sense of self in part through the construction of another is extended and elaborated in Matt Houlbrook’s study of Edith Thompson’s letters to her lover, Freddy Bywaters, in Britain in the early 1920s.119 Houlbrook sees letter writing as a psychological activity that ‘opened up an imaginative space in which to explore new possibilities for seeing and being in the world’, that was at the same time a material practice, dependent on time, space and privacy.120 In a claustrophobic and violent marriage, and with a demanding job, Edith Thompson had little of any of these, with the result that her writing and reading had, of necessity, to take place in short bursts, in the office, on the bus or in the train. Houlbrook found that the extent to which it was possible to reconstruct the materiality of Edith’s correspondence was limited by the nature of the archive. He regrets that, because only the typed court transcripts survive, and not the original letters, the researcher is not able to consider ‘the use of space, erasures, stumbles and handwriting that hint at a writer’s emotional state’ in the way that Roper does when analysing soldiers’ letters.121 Instead, Houlbrook uses Edith’s correspondence to explore letter writing as a complex cultural practice, involving imagination and fantasy. He discovers within it a wealth of material through which to investigate not only patterns of reading and the consumption of popular culture but also their interactions with self-fashioning and the construction of an addressee. Edith wrote numerous letters to Freddy, a merchant seaman, while he was at sea. She told him about the romantic fiction that she was reading, discussed details that related to their relationship, recommended and sent him books, demanded his responses to them, and suggested strategies to make reading pleasurable to him, including inventing his own endings if those offered in the novel did not suit.122 Immersed in ‘the pleasures of the imagination’ she also, argues Houlbrook, fashioned an epistolary self from her reading and cinema-going that involved emotional enactment, rather than ‘escapism’, and which merged the everyday and the fictional.123 This had tragic consequences. Edith fantasised in her letters to Freddy about the death of her abusive husband, Percy, and her future with Freddy, who subsequently stabbed Percy Thompson to death.124 Edith’s letters to her lover were used in court as evidence that convicted her, jointly with Freddy, of Percy’s murder and sent them both to the gallows. Houlbrook sees Thompson’s reading and letter-writing practices, in the context of her marital problems and the instabilities of Britain in the early 1920s, as indicative of ‘the messy work of negotiating emotional and psychological conflict, composing an acceptable sense of self and forging a better life’.125 He argues that they give access to the broader socio-cultural theme of the interaction of ‘modern Britons’ with contemporary popular fiction and mass entertainment, and the social anxieties this provoked, at a particular historical moment.126 Frank Mort’s work with letters about Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 both complicates the idea that the epistolary self is, at least in part, shaped by the recipient, and speaks to the issue of the imagined inter-subjectivity of a letter.127 The abdication crisis arose when Edward VIII, shortly after acceding to the British

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throne, gave up his kingship in order to marry his mistress, Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. It stimulated a burst of letter writing by members of the public. They sent letters to the King himself, mostly supporting him, although a few correspondents vehemently disapproved; to the Prime Minister’s wife, Lucy Baldwin, who, like her husband, embodied a conservative morality that frowned on the liaison; and to Winston Churchill, at the time a Member of Parliament known to advocate a more tolerant attitude to Edward’s dilemma. Mort argues that the letters should not be read as offering unmediated evidence of ‘public opinion’, despite the fact that they were preserved because archivists saw them in this way.128 He regards them (as Hanna and Horne, discussed earlier, view French soldiers’ letters, and as Houlbrook sees Thompson’s letters) as cultural products shaped by writing, reading and listening practices taught in school and encouraged in the media. Mort suggests that such influences favoured letter writing that accessed a ‘sense of the self within’, adopted a ‘direct and natural’ address, and was ‘emotionally expressive’.129 Mort suggests that the letters show that the abdication crisis brought into the open a conflict between emotion and politics. Their authors expressed proclivity or antipathy towards a particular style of marriage alongside bifurcated conceptualisations of modern monarchy. The crown was both the formal guarantor of democracy and ‘the focal point of a system of media-orchestrated populism’ based on the identification of ‘ordinary subjects’ with the monarch.130 Women, in particular, who sent letters to the King expressed such identification, writing about their own experiences of love and marriage, addressing Edward intimately, telling him that they understood his suffering, and expressing an imagined emotional bond with him. They contained statements such as Sylvia McElligot’s, supported by references to personal experience: ‘how ever much you suffer, you will be given something inside you to help you bear it’.131 Women’s letters to Lucy Baldwin struck a different note, expressing anxiety and fear about the crisis, and evoking the sacrifices of the First World War which some of them had experienced personally in the loss of husbands and sons, and which their writers wanted Edward to mirror by giving up Mrs Simpson. Drawing on a ‘rhetoric of restraint and understatement’ these letters stressed the power of spiritual as opposed to physical love.132 Men’s letters, argues Mort, were different again. Writing in a register located in an appeal to solidarity rather than in an exploration of the self, men put politics above emotion. They expressed support on the one hand and disgust on the other, while advocating that Edward should re-orient himself as a man, to nation, empire and duty. The letter writers did not expect, and in most cases did not receive, any sort of reply. Thus these letters were not dialogic. They addressed the issue of the King’s love affair and possible abdication in terms of personal feelings which the writers explored and developed on the page, and that they thought important to communicate to him, whether or not he responded. Mort applies psychoanalytic concepts to the writing, arguing that the empathy in the letters can be understood in Freudian terms as the practice whereby the self stands for the other, or the other stands in for the self, producing, particularly in the case of women letter writers, ‘forms of fantasy which ran freely from the King’s ego to their own’.133 He does

42 Historians’ uses of letters

not use Goodman’s concept of the ‘paradox of correspondence’, that is, that by corresponding with someone else one comes to know oneself, but his analysis of the letters suggests that the authors were, indeed, exploring themselves through their engagement with the King’s dilemma.

Conclusion Historians have used letters to uncover all sorts of histories. Whether they approach them as offering access to data or to the making of the self, they have valued the personal in the letter and the possibilities it opens up to write history from below and to gauge popular feeling. Ideas about how best to go about such historical writing, and the kinds of analysis that are most effective, vary according to the questions that historians ask about the past, but the shifts that I have considered did not follow each other in a linear fashion. Older methodologies and preoccupations coexist with newer ones. The problem that Charlotte Erickson wrestled with, concerning generalisation from large numbers of diverse texts, is still of concern to many historians. Recent studies of letter writing in the American Civil War, for example, continue to use quantitative methods of content analysis, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s, to provide generalised answers to questions about soldiers’ motivations and conduct. Michael Barton, author of several studies of Civil War soldiers, argues that ‘Deploying the General Inquirer program to crunch personal texts does not yield the same results as a humanist’s close reading, but there are problems with summarizing masses of documents that are best solved by the computer. If we are going to generalize about the mentality of large, literate, historical populations, this is one way it will have to be done.’134 There continues to be a wealth of work that seeks empirical evidence from letters and wants to find quantitative answers to questions about why people did things. Nevertheless, Barton’s comment acknowledges the trend in historical practice since the 1970s and 1980s traced in this chapter. It has led to a rejection of the violence implied by ‘crunching’ personal narratives, and an emphasis on the insights into past cultures and societies that can be gained from the ‘close reading’ of texts. Post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and psychoanalysis, discussed in Chapter 1, have encouraged historians to experiment with a wide variety of methods of analysis that enable them to use letters to enhance understanding of historical subjectivities in all their complexities free from the pressure of ‘generalizing about mentalities’.135 In the 1970s social and economic historians working in the paradigm of the ‘new social history’ wanted letters to tell them about the reasons people did things, how they went about them, and the configurations of social relations. They expected, and found, answers relating to people’s economic situations and social networks, but they also found other things that seemed problematic. Letter writers offered versions of their experiences that were oriented to the outcomes they hoped to obtain from writing, they borrowed from epistolary models, they used formulaic methods of expression, and they included in their letters a lot of trivia. The attention to language and subjectivity prompted by the cultural turn of the

Historians’ uses of letters 43

1980s transformed such ‘problems’ into productive possibilities for analysis. Consciousness and emotion could not be inscribed directly onto the page without cultural and psychological mediation. The identification of the influences on letter writers of school training, letter writing manuals and published collections of letters helped to explain what they wrote about and how they expressed themselves. The adaptation of cultural models to personal needs evoked changes in the use of language that were indicative of shifts in individual and collective emotion. To cultural historians from the 1990s to the 2010s, epistolary models and even clichés were not worrying sources of ‘bias’ that invalidated the letter as a ‘true’ expression of the writer’s experience. They were understood as providing letter writers with paths into which to steer their literacy, and as offering language, literary forms, and concepts with which to shape their narratives. Censorship, whether official or self-imposed, is a reminder that letters, though seemingly private, have been of public interest, whether that public is the state, the community or the family. Responses to censorship, as well as the practice of self-censorship, however, can make letters difficult to decipher. Historians confronting the opacity of letters have nevertheless found ways of letting light into them. The insights of post-colonial theory enable vocabulary and style, metaphor and evasion, to be read as forms of resistance to colonial oppression. Psychoanalytically informed readings bring underlying, unconscious processes into focus: the conflict arising from the desire to express emotion that prevailing cultural norms tell the author to repress; the leakage, nevertheless, of emotion into a letter through omission, allusion, contradiction, juxtaposition; its evidence in the marks on the page, communicating more about the emotion of the writer than they themselves intended. Feminist scholarship has drawn attention to letters written by women as evidence of female literacy and literary proficiency, in periods when historians have doubted the existence of either. It has also debunked the idea that epistolarity has been a particularly feminine form of communication, demonstrating the careful cultivation of this cultural phenomenon as a necessary part of femininity, through patriarchal influences. Historians of women have, in both cases, seen women’s letter writing as a source of agency through which women negotiated spaces for the female self, tempered male power, and demanded emotional as well as practical support. If letters were, as Habermas suggests, a way to produce the writer as a subject in relation to other subjects, women no less than men acquired knowledge of themselves through writing. In a colonial context this involved coming to understand oneself not only as a woman but also as a racialised other. Letters, seen by some historians as a stage on which their authors performed, recorded both resistance to the operation of colonial ideologies in everyday life, and the reproduction of such dynamics as part of the author’s accommodation of them. The fashioning of an epistolary self from culture and experience thus provides clues, in the hands of some historians, to wider social, psychological and material processes. Deploying an imagination fed by popular culture in the composition of a conflicted self could distil the anxieties of the age.

44 Historians’ uses of letters

Most historians use correspondence between just two people, and are fortunate if both sides of it have been preserved. But where letters from one person to a range of correspondents have been archived, historians have found it possible to trace the multiple identities that a single correspondent inscribes, their performances tailored to their different addressees. Things are yet more complicated when the correspondence is not, and is understood by the letter writer not to be, dialogic. The ‘paradox of correspondence’ is perhaps most visibly at work in such contexts. Writing to a public figure, not known to the author personally, facilitates the author’s exploration of his or her own feelings on the page. Authors are effectively writing to themselves, but are only able to do it because the addressee, inscribed in the letter, takes the place of the self. An analysis sensitive to the confluence of emotion, fantasy and self-discovery in such letters enables the historian to reconceptualise seemingly objective and quantifiable categories, such as that of ‘public opinion’, as multi-faceted processes of subjective engagement between the personal and the public. Historians attached to the facts of experience continue to seek them in letter collections, and, it should be added, historians who use letters to access subjectivity continue to ground their work in the factual context in which letters were produced. In a great deal of historical work using letters, however, the individual is no longer seen as a problem. On the contrary, the epistolary self is regarded as both an agent of change and a prism through which the social, cultural and psychic dynamics of history may be understood.

Notes 1 Carolyn Steedman, ‘A Woman Writing a Letter’ in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 119, remarks that letter writing was more widespread than keeping a journal or writing an autobiography in the period 1600–1800. The same was true in the late modern period, according to Thomas Mallon, Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (New York: Pantheon, 2009), p. 10. 2 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1982); Rebecca Earle, ‘Introduction’, in Earle, Epistolary Selves, pp. 1–12; Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences’, Auto/biography, 12, 2004, pp. 201–235. 3 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 4 Vukile Khumalo, ‘Ekukhanyeni Letter-writers: An Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, in Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 113–142, here p. 136. 5 Steedman, ‘A Woman Writing a Letter’, in Earle, Epistolary Selves, p. 116; Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 3–4. 6 David Gerber states that the creation of collections of letters of migrants is ‘unmatched in the case of any other primary source’. David Gerber, ‘The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: American Historians’ Uses of Personal Correspondence’ in Earle, Epistolary Selves, pp. 37–55, here p. 38.

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7 Mallon, Yours Ever, p. 101. Alistair Thomson, Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 235–236. 8 Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, The American Historical Review, 108:5, 2003, pp. 1338–1361. 9 Miriam Dobson, ‘Letters’, in Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 57–73. 10 Michael Roper, ‘Splitting in Unsent Letters: Writing as a Social Practice and a Psychological Activity’, Social History, 26:3, 2001, pp. 318–339. 11 Katie Barclay argues that, in Scotland between 1650 and 1850, the family letter was ‘a public form of communication, and not usually a window to the private, free expression of the soul’. Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 28. She explains that messages for family members were often marked for reading out loud while the opposite indication was given to unflattering remarks about other relatives. The use of cipher for intimate or politically sensitive content underlined awareness that epistolary privacy could not be guaranteed. With reference to twentieth-century African societies, Karin Barber writes, ‘letters and diaries were often composed in the style of a speaking voice, to be read aloud to family or confidants’. Barber, ‘Introduction’, in Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories, p. 18. Martha Hanna, historian of modern France, argues that ‘until the end of the nineteenth century … less educated men and women conceived of letter writing – and letter reading – as essentially public acts’, and thus letters were ‘read and re-read for the edification and enjoyment of many’. Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, The American Historical Review, 108:5, 2003, pp. 1338–1361, here p. 1343. 12 Martyn Lyons, ‘Love Letters and Writing Practices: On Écritures Intimes in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 24:2, 1999, pp. 232–239; Ronald Blythe, Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (London: Viking Penguin, 1991); Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters; J. Barrett Litoff and D. C. Smith, ‘“Will He Get My Letter?” Popular Portrayals of Mail and Morale during World War Two’, Journal of Popular Culture, 23:4, 1990, pp. 21–44. 13 See, for example, Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748); The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), all of which are composed of fictional letters. 14 Rebecca Earle, ‘Introduction’ in Earle, Epistolary Selves, p. 6. 15 Elizabeth MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 119. 16 MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives, p. 171. 17 Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, here p. 46. 18 Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, p. 38. (These are my examples.) 19 Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, p. 38. 20 Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, p. 45. 21 Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). 22 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 19–20 23 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 8. 24 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 8. 25 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 233. 26 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 36. 27 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 4. 28 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 65, 41, 406 29 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 9. 30 Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, p. 47. 31 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 1. She also asserts that most of the letters have no literary merit.

46 Historians’ uses of letters

32 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 4. 33 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 1. 34 Since the 1970s, studies of emigration based on letters have moved away from seeing them as repositories of fact towards reading them for the subjective meanings of migration and scrutinising the epistolary forms that conveyed such meanings. See, for example, David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); David Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence’, Journal of Social History, 39:2, 2005, pp. 315– 330; Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke (eds.), Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practice of International Migrants (London: Palgrave, 2006); Angela McCarthy, Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration 1921–65: For Spirit and Adventure (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 35 Christa Hämmerle (trans. Amy Krois-Lindner), ‘“You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?” Private Correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany’ in Earle, Epistolary Selves, pp. 152–182, here p. 153. 36 See Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 37 Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1344. We shall meet de Sévigné again in the next section. In contrast, Michael Roper, drawing on David Vincent’s Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), argues that in Britain before World War One ‘Elementary school students were given little in the way of instruction in composition … they had been neither taught nor encouraged to communicate their own thoughts and experiences in writing.’ Michael Roper, The Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 55. Roper finds, however, that motivation and practice led to rapid improvements in the letter writing techniques of the rank and file and their families, although, in the absence of school-taught models, ‘many struggled with the difference between conversation and the formality that a letter seemed to require’ (p. 56). 38 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1348. 39 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1360. She is drawing on Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. xii. 40 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1350. 41 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1350. ‘I wonder if out of a desire to be accurate, I do not give you a false impression of the whole; if, not wanting to hide from you the danger, I do not in fact insist upon it more than in truth is appropriate,’ wrote a young officer, Maurice Masson, early in 1916. 42 John Horne, ‘Soldiers, Civilians and the Warfare of Attrition: Representations of Combat in France, 1914–1918’, in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), pp. 223–249 43 Horne, ‘Soldiers, Civilians and the Warfare of Attrition’, pp. 233–234. 44 Horne, ‘Soldiers, Civilians and the Warfare of Attrition’, p. 237. 45 Horne, ‘Soldiers, Civilians and the Warfare of Attrition’, p. 240. 46 Horne, ‘Soldiers, Civilians and the Warfare of Attrition’, p. 242. 47 See Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1340. She cites, as a sceptic, Jean Norton Cru, Témoins: essai d’analyse et de critique des souvenirs de combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928 (first published 1929). Other historians who have expressed doubts about the usefulness of war letters, for the same reasons, include Ilana Bet-El, Conscripts. Forgotten Men of the Great War (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), pp. 135, 137; John Ellis, Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War One (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 139; J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 2–3. Cited by Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 63.

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48 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’; Hämmerle, ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’; Roper, The Secret Battle; Hester Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in Germany, 1939–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 49 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, pp. 1355–1356; Hämmerle, ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’ p. 164; Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, p. 54. In acknowledgement of the effects of censorship in Nazi Germany, Vaizey states that one-tenth of the thirty to forty thousand people prosecuted by the Nazi authorities for spreading rumours or criticising the Army or the German government during the Second World War were identified through the government’s censorship of mail (p. 43). 50 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 50. See also pp. 57–58 for class differences in the British context (officers censored their own as well as their men’s mail and were franker than they allowed the troops to be). 51 Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, pp. 54–56. 52 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 55. See p. 213 for an example of the unfortunate juxtaposition of such a salutation with the announcement of a comrade’s death, in a letter to his mother. 53 Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 184: ‘If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.’ 54 Hämmerle, ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’, p. 154. 55 Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, p.10. 56 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 22. 57 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 23. 58 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 50. 59 Roper, The Secret Battle, pp. 10–11. 60 Roper, The Secret Battle, pp. 6–7, 9. 61 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 49. 62 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 25. 63 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1350. See also Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 64 Hämmerle, ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’ pp. 163–164, emphasis in original. 65 Roper, The Secret Battle, pp. 20, 64. 66 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 20. 67 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 21. 68 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 66. 69 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 68. Jenny Hartley, like Roper, sees letters between home and front as a form a long-distance mothering, in her case in the British context in the Second World War. See Jenny Hartley, ‘“Letters Are Everything These Days”: Mothers and Letters in the Second World War’, in Earle, Epistolary Selves, pp. 183– 195 70 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 26. 71 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 27. 72 Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 66 73 Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, p. 67 74 Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, pp. 68, 77, 82, 97. 75 Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, pp. 8, 97. 76 Roper, ‘Splitting in Unsent Letters’, p. 333. 77 Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1349. Litoff and Smith discuss the promotion in mass circulation magazines and newspapers of the Second World War, of the idea that such enclosures were an essential part of the maintenance of soldiers’ morale. They give the example of the cover picture of the Saturday Evening Post in June 1944, which featured a US soldier (who had presumably survived D-Day) reading a letter containing the bootees of his newborn son, which contrast with his military uniform and steel

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78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103

104 105 106 107 108 109 110

helmet. See Litoff and Smith, ‘“Will He Get My Letter?”’, p. 24. Thomas Mallon states that the writer and journalist Jessica Mitford said that she missed letters from deceased friends more than the friends themselves, writing longingly ‘Oh for the writing on the envelope!’ Mallon, Yours Ever, p. 34. Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, p. 1353; Hämmerle, ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’, pp. 157–159. Litoff and Smith, ‘“Will He Get My Letter?”’, p. 28. Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’, pp. 1354–1355; Litoff and Smith, ‘“Will He Get My letter?”’, p. 23; Hämmerle, ‘“You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?”’, pp. 157–159. This was why means of communication (albeit restrictive ones) such as the Field Service Post Card were introduced in the First World War as well as V-Mail and Aerograms in the Second World War. Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, pp. 46, 50. Lisa Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti and Her Two Epistles in Quattrocento Florentine Manuscripts’, Speculum 87:3, 2012, pp. 793–826. Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti’, p. 794. Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti’, p. 812. Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti’, p. 812. Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti’, p. 811. Kaborycha, ‘Brigida Baldinotti’, p. 817. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, pp. 8–9. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, p. 105. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, p. 111. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, pp. 32, 136, 142. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, p. 142. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, p. 204. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, pp. 32, 144. Barclay does not subscribe to the idea, common among other historians of the period, that patriarchy was superseded by paternalism in the late eighteenth century. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 1. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 2. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 2. On these ideas, see de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 134, where he develops the theory that society seeks to constitute itself through writing, and Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 5. David Gerber puts the same thing another way. He writes that letters need to be analysed ‘for what they might reveal about the individual letter-writers’ consciousness and self-awareness and all the societal and cultural influences upon which both are contingent’. Gerber, ‘Immigrant Letter’, p. 38. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 14. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 322. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, pp. 3, 323. For ideas about the relationship between the dependency of the modern self on stories produced and consumed by that self, Goodman cites Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 2. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in LateVictorian Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, p. 3. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, p. 126. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, pp. 136, 138, 141. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, pp. 133–134, 117–118, 136. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, p. 134.

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111 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, pp. 147–148. 112 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, p. 12. Sorabji returned to Britain frequently after her initial visit. Her friendship with Lady Elena Richmond led to the archiving of her letters in the India Office Library in London. 113 Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters: Performative Identity-formation in Epistolary Narratives’, Women’s History Review, 22:2 2013, pp. 225–238. 114 Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, pp. 229–230. 115 Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, p. 229. 116 Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, pp. 230–231. 117 David Gerber, ‘Epistolary Masquerades: Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters’, in Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke (eds.), Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practice of International Migrants (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 141–157. 118 Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, pp. 231–232. 119 Matt Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”, Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in Edith Thompson’s Letters, 1921–1922’, Past and Present, 207, 2010, pp. 215–249. The letters were transcribed and used as evidence in the lovers’ subsequent trial for murder. 120 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 222, referencing Roper, ‘Splitting in Unsent Letters’, p. 226. 121 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 226. 122 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, pp. 216, 245–6. 123 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 221. 124 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 240. 125 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 249. 126 Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 216. For an example of a twentiethcentury Scot’s imaginative efforts, drawing on literature, to create in his letters the conjugality he was missing as a result of wartime separation, and thereby to compose a ‘modern masculine self’, see Lynn Abrams, ‘A Wartime Family Romance: Narratives of Masculinity and Intimacy during World War Two’, in Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan (eds.), Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 160–179, here p. 177. 127 Frank Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate: Letters, Public Opinion and Monarchy in the 1936 Abdication Crisis’, Twentieth Century British History, 25:1, 2014, pp. 30–62. 128 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 36. 129 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, pp. 37, 40. For the idea that, by the early twentieth century, a ‘sense of the self within’ had become widely accessible through writing practices taught at British schools, Mort cites Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago, 1995). Twentieth-century epistolary education in British schools thus contrasts with the nineteenthcentury educational practices to which Roper refers, citing Vincent (see note 37). 130 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 39. 131 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 41. 132 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 48. 133 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 43. 134 Michael Barton, ‘Studying Civil War Soldiers: The State of the Art and Science’ http://www.soldierstudies.org/index.php?action=barton (accessed 23 August 2017). See Michael Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), a quantitative study using sociolinguistic methods of analysing the values expressed in diaries and letters. For other studies of the American Civil War that apply quantitative methods to personal narratives, see James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007). 135 I return to the issue of generalisability in Chapter 6.

3 HISTORIANS AND THE DIARY

Diaries and journals capture the rough texture of the everyday, unsmoothed by retrospective insights and reorganisation.1 They record a life as it was lived more continuously than most collections of letters. Yet diaries take a great variety of forms. The genre includes the Protestant spiritual account of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the ‘commonplace book’ full of scraps of knowledge; the personal progress report of the early nineteenth century; and the journal intime recording the inner emotional life of the author.2 While some journals are detailed and reflective, others are simple appointment diaries noting no more than the times and places of meetings and other commitments, or logbooks that record specific events as they occurred, such as car journeys, mountains climbed, or a baby’s weight as it grew. They are written regularly or irregularly, as a life-long habit or intermittently, in response to crisis and change or simply to stave off forgetfulness. Early debate among scholars focused on whether diaries were as spontaneous, immediate, and sincere as they seemed. Robert Fothergill, writing in 1974, suggests that the diary is not an artless form, but that diaries are literary productions crafted to give the impression of spontaneity and sincerity. He argues that diaries are essentially similar to autobiographies, the main difference being that they are written over time, recording events as they happen, rather than looking back over a long period of experience. He offers the term ‘serial autobiography’ to describe them.3 A difference from autobiography and memoir, however, is the diary’s uneven, bumpy quality. Diaries are usually composed of a series of snapshots, albeit with the occasional longer review; they rarely articulate a perspective on a life as a whole. Yet some of the issues for historians seeking to use diaries are similar to those generated by other genres of personal testimony. They embrace the question of whether to regard a diary as a source of empirical data and to see the author as an observer of the social life of which they are a part, or to read it primarily for the access it gives to the subjectivity of the author.

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The first section of this chapter explores historical studies that use diaries as sources of social observation, in circumstances that were novel for the diarists, in these cases of incarceration and of factory work. I discuss the historical insights that such personal records can yield, as well as the ways in which subjectivity erupts from even the most observational diaries into the historian’s line of vision. As with letters, so with diaries, if they are not understood as giving transparent access to the past, historians need to find ways of addressing not only the record of events but also the process of composition, and the sense of self, inscribed on the page. Some theorists see this in terms of empowerment. Feminist scholars, such as Harriet Blodgett and Dorothy Sheridan, argue that diaries have been particularly important to women, and other oppressed or marginalised groups, because they enable them to discover and declare their own worth.4 Diary writing offers opportunities for personal reflection, so the argument goes, whether that leads to rebellion or to adjustment to circumstances. The point applies to men as well as women: diaries are not inherently feminine and women have by no means monopolised diary writing historically. Empowerment, it is suggested, derives from the daily, or at least periodic, review of the self in a diary, which contributes to a therapeutic process of psychic integration or ‘composure’. Diarists in difficult circumstances, such as imprisonment or an unhappy marriage, often use phrases such as ‘my diary helps me keep a grip on myself’, implying that diary writing is important for their mental stability. Other commonly declared reasons for diary writing include recording exceptional times, and safeguarding against an unreliable memory. These are everyday understandings of the idea of life writing as a ‘technology of the self’ that we encountered in Chapter 1. Thus in the second section I discuss historical work that deploys the idea of the diary as a technology of self, whether explicitly or implicitly. Viewed as such a technology, writing a diary is a way of managing the self and subjectivity on a continuous basis. It implies not only that the world view and moral outlook of the diarist are discoverable in the diary, but also that the historian will find there the diarist’s efforts to regulate his or her psychic and emotional ups and downs, and shape his or her social and cultural identity. This section focuses on historians’ work with diarists who were preoccupied with their own moral, social and economic self-improvement, in the different circumstances of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century Nigeria. The third section of the chapter investigates the central place of gender in the process of managing the self, specifically the shaping of masculinity and femininity, within the pages of a diary. In this section I discuss historical studies informed by feminism that treat diaries of the early nineteenth century and the 1930s as crucibles of masculinity. The fourth section explores historians’ engagement with the opposite phenomenon to psychic integration within the diary: contradiction and incoherence. The critical theorist Steven Rendall challenges the idea that diary writing promotes an integrated identity. He argues that, broken up by division into days, months, and years, diaries are profoundly discontinuous documents and, since a different self is

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expressed in each account, they contribute to psychic disintegration rather than to the achievement of coherence.5 Quoting the French scholar, Béatrice Didier, he states, ‘the journal, which arises from a malaise concerning identity, ultimately only multiplies and reflects it infinitely’. 6 The conceptualisation of the diary as fragmented and fragmenting is taken up by historians who focus on the contradictions between one view or state of mind and another in successive diary entries. Their engagement with the apparent incoherence of diaries is similar to historians’ efforts to make seemingly unfathomable elements of letters an intelligible part of history. In this section, I discuss historians’ explorations of such contradictions through case studies of work on the diaries of individuals whose national identity was jeopardised by circumstances of oppression and war. The fifth section of the chapter interrogates historical work that takes a more explicitly psychoanalytical approach. Diary writing, whether coherent or bristling with inconsistencies, is seen by some scholars as a process by which unconscious material is assimilated into consciousness to a greater extent than in other types of personal narration. The historians whose work is scrutinised here read diaries for the light they throw on the psychic processes at work in their composition. They suggest that it is possible to use diaries to explore aspects of the writers’ subjectivity that the diarists themselves were unaware of as they wrote. The sixth section addresses the question of the diary and privacy. Diaries have been seen as the most personal and intimate of documents, as the title of Robert Fothergill’s 1974 study, Private Chronicles, suggests.7 This, however, raises the question of readership. Harriet Blodgett takes the view that the more explicitly a diarist writes ‘for’ someone, the less frank, honest and self-revealing is the diary.8 Blodgett’s case is that the more unspecific and generalised the imagined readership, and the stronger the sense of present privacy, the more explicit the self-analysis and selfportrayal will be. Recent scholarship, however, questions the conceptualisation of the diary as a private and intimate document, on the grounds that such a view invokes a public/private boundary in ways that may not be appropriate. There are diaries, notably those of European and American politicians and literary figures, that have been written deliberately as public (or semi-public) accounts. They have often been edited and published, or rewritten as memoirs.9 Numerous more modest diaries began as letters intended for families and friends, but for reasons such as the difficulty or impossibility of mailing them, were extended into journals that were circulated among many recipients: they were certainly not written as ‘private’ documents.10 There are also examples of diaries that, like letters, were part of a dialogue with at least one other person, again raising the issue of the influence of the audience on the composition of the diary.11 In addition, there are journals that were elicited by others who wanted to use the testimony inscribed within them for their own purposes. In this section, I discuss historians’ uses of diaries that explicitly cross the line between private and public in this way, through cases of diarists writing for others in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries respectively. The final section explores historians’ engagement with other dimensions of the public/private ambiguity, notably the relationship of diary writing to public

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discourses. How far can diarists write outside, or against the grain of, dominant narratives? Can a diary be a meaningful site of contention between the writer and the beliefs and ideologies in circulation in his or her society? In some societies, such as Soviet Russia and twentieth-century China and Japan, as well as in contemporary British primary schools, diary writing has been publicly encouraged, as a form of self-education and self-discipline, and diaries have been expected to be available for scrutiny by those in positions of authority. In this section of the chapter, I investigate historians’ handling of such porous public–private boundaries in work on Soviet diaries and on the diaries of twentieth-century Japanese soldiers.

The diarist as observer Two historians of the Second World War, Sue Bruley and Lynn Bloom, use diaries to enlarge understanding of the social disruptions and reconfigurations of wartime.12 Both Bruley and Bloom emphasise that the diaries they use were written in circumstances that were exceptional for their authors, and that their diarists were outsiders in the milieus in which, due to the upheavals of the Second World War, they found themselves. They argue that, in spite of this, these women’s powers of observation, and ability to record their experiences, mean that their diaries make valuable contributions to ‘popular history’.13 The primary concern of both historians is not with the subjectivity of the diarists themselves, but with their observations of the life going on around them of which they were part. Both authors aim to find in the diaries information concerning social life in the Second World War that is not otherwise available. Sue Bruley uses the jointly written diary of two middle-aged, middle-class women who worked in an aircraft factory in Croydon from 1942 to 1945, Kathleen Church-Bliss and Elsie Whiteman, to provide ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers in the Second World War’.14 She is concerned that the differences between these two women and the majority of women war workers might cast doubt on the reliability of their perceptions.15 Their diary, she writes, is ‘coloured by the class perspective and cultural milieu of the writers’ who were ‘upper middle class women with a solid conservative outlook’.16 Their comments on their fellow workers are indicative. According to Church-Bliss and Whiteman, the female workforce was divided between ‘a bunch of nice middle aged grannies – with kindly worn faces and amiable manners’ who were good workers, and ‘a horde of ghastly looking wantons with long golden locks – and buffon [sic] erections on top – and enamelled faces’ who spent a lot of time in the cloakrooms.17 Bruley argues that in spite of such evident ways in which social differences coloured the diarists’ observations, the two women’s account is valuable because they shared the experiences of the majority, and so were observing themselves as well as others. During the war they lived as workers in respect of both their rented accommodation, close to the factory, and their shop-floor work. The diary, she argues, elaborates many aspects of the experiences of women workers in the

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Second World War that have been documented elsewhere, including both subjection to gendered pay and status inequalities, and the agency exercised by women workers.18 The ‘new perspective’ that Bruley claims the Church-Bliss/Whiteman diary offers is an ‘insight into the experience of older women war workers’ who have been neglected by other historians because few such workers had the time or level of literacy needed for diary writing, and because of the focus of oral history studies undertaken since the 1970s on younger women workers.19 The main ‘insight’ concerns the ‘bleaker side’ of war work, notably the ‘discomfort, fear and exhaustion’ of bombing and shelter life, the severe toll of long hours of factory work on women’s health over the years, and discrimination against older single women.20 Bruley’s aim is to expand the social history of wartime work through this diary by using it as a set of observations, yet the diary is also a record of the personal trials and tribulations of two women who would not have been factory workers but for the war. The two aspects are inevitably intertwined. It is of the nature of personal narratives that this should be the case, and Bruley acknowledges the emotional content of the diary. She comments, for example, on the impact of compulsory war work on the two women. Having been enthusiasts at the outset, by ‘the summer of 1944 Elsie and Kathleen felt trapped and demoralized, tired and unwell’, but under wartime labour regulations they were refused release from the factory, ‘so they just had to carry on’.21 Bruley does not, however, explore these subjective dimensions in depth. At the same time that she is drawn into the couple’s personal and intimate life inscribed in the pages of the diary, she pulls away from it. She provides factual details about the two women’s linked life histories, and states that their relationship was ‘in the tradition of a “romantic friendship”’, but offers no further comment beyond the enigmatic suggestion that the diary ‘acts as a reminder that not all women war workers were heterosexual’.22 She does not explore the interpersonal dynamics of keeping a joint diary. In contrast, James Hinton, in a study of the journal of a married couple, Matthew and Bertha Walton, shows that it is possible and worthwhile to read within a jointly kept diary the history of both the relationship that produced it and the diary that sustained it for a period of time.23 Lynn Bloom, in ‘The Diary as Popular History’, uses the diary of Natalie Crouter to reconstruct the social experience of the internment of civilians by the Japanese from 1941 to 1945. She explains that Crouter was an East Coast American married to a British lawyer who worked for the Shell Oil franchise in the Philippine Islands. Following the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the bombing of the Philippines, Natalie and her husband were interned by the Japanese as members of the expatriate elite, alongside a large and diverse community of other non-Filipino civilians. Crouter began a letter to her mother (in Boston) at the start of these events, but was unable to send it because of her incarceration, and continued it in captivity as a diary. Bloom describes the diary, which Crouter kept clandestinely in defiance of Japanese regulations, as ‘an anatomy of the lives and social organization of some five hundred [internees] and their captors’. 24

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Like Bruley, Bloom is concerned about the effects on the value of the diary of the differences between her diarist and the larger population in which she found herself. She sees Crouter’s upper class status as having an impact on the accuracy and completeness of the diary’s portrayal, which she says is ‘necessarily partisan’ and not ‘the whole truth’.25 She illustrates its ‘bias’ (as she sees it) with examples of Crouter’s Bostonian snobbishness and moral judgements (not dissimilar to the outlook of Church-Bliss and Whiteman): ‘One of the waitresses can be seen curling her eyelashes at 4 a.m. … vapid sophistication in a concentration camp.’26 Bloom regards Crouter, nevertheless, as ‘a reliable and perceptive observer’.27 Bloom’s first article on Crouter’s diary was published in 1976, and in it she stakes out its contribution to the concerns of social history and women’s history in the 1970s.28 She describes the form of self-government achieved by the internees as ‘roughly democratic, though sexist’ and comments that there was ‘no hint of women’s liberation’ in the camp.29 She argues that, even if there were no attempts to achieve gender equality, Crouter’s diary indicates a process of social levelling and status reversal. Natalie worked as a charwoman; her husband (an upper-class lawyer) became a wood-cutter wearing only a g-string; cooks and waitresses constituted the new elite thanks to their proximity to food in the context of worsening privation. Internal organisation was geared towards the best interests of all the internees but extensive bickering is recorded in the diary.30 Bloom’s focus is on the diary as ‘social anatomy’, but she is intrigued in passing by the influence of public discourse (without naming it as such). For example, she expresses surprise at the seeming disjunction of Crouter’s account from American public discourse concerning the Japanese enemy, commenting that the diary depicts the Japanese guards as human beings subject to deprivations, like the prisoners, ‘rather than as the propaganda stereotypes of evilly-grinning midget savages in glasses’. 31 In 1990, Bloom published a further article drawing on Crouter’s diary, which displays shifts of approach that are indicative of changes in historical practice since the 1970s. The 1976 article treats the diary as a social document. Although it brings out the humanity of the diary, it does not engage in depth with the emotional or the psychic life that might be discoverable within its pages.32 In contrast, in the later publication, ‘Escaping Voices’, Bloom lets go of her earlier concerns with the ‘completeness’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘bias’ of the portrayal of internment as a social phenomenon, and focuses on Crouter and two other women diarists as individuals.33 She asks questions about the subjective process of life-writing informed by the growing body of work on autobiography during the 1980s. She argues that, by placing herself centre stage, the diarist as autobiographer ‘becomes the principal actor in the drama of her own story, irrespective of her actual role in real life’.34 She suggests that life-writing gives the autobiographer control over her story, if not over the events she was living through, and that it confers the benefits of the detachment achieved through reflection. Bloom insists that these ideas are important for the interpretation of life-writing by prisoners of all sorts. Illustrating her point from internees’ diaries, she suggests that diary writing contributed to their ‘potential for self-sustaining defiance’ as well as fostering mental independence and personal

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privacy in the crowded conditions of the camps.35 Such considerations of the psychological significance of diary-keeping help to explain a phenomenon noted, but not explained, in the earlier article. This is the extreme importance of the internment diaries to their writers, who risked the death penalty in keeping them, went to great lengths to conceal them, and did their best to take them with them when forced to move, sometimes in preference to more obvious ‘valuables’.36 This discussion is not intended to suggest that the kind of history that Bruley, in 2003, and Bloom, in 1976, wrote, using diarists primarily as social observers, is wrong or mistaken. On the contrary, both authors demonstrate the special contribution of the diary as a source that reveals social processes unfolding at the gritty, uneven, level of the day to day, and both use material from the diaries to make important contributions to our historical understanding. Bloom’s intellectual movement towards reading diaries less for factual observation and more for subjectivity demonstrates that equally important historical insights are generated when concern with the ‘bias’ of an observer is dropped in favour of attention to that individual’s sense of self. The changes in her approach between 1976 and 1990 are indicative of the flow of one current of the historiographical tide, while Bruley’s approach in 2003 shows that not all historians were swept in that direction.

The diary as a ‘technology of the self’ We met, in Chapter 1, work on a diary by a historian who explicitly took the cultural turn around 1990. In Democratic Subjects, published in 1994, Patrick Joyce uses personal narratives from a post-structuralist perspective to challenge the dominance of social class within the historiography of nineteenth-century social and political change. Arguing that the structuralist concept of class has no reality outside its imagined existence, he suggests that class was but one way of thinking about the self and the social in the Victorian period. It belonged within a ‘social imaginary’ furnished with numerous narratives from popular culture and religion that constituted subjectivity and provided the means by which people understood themselves and lived the social relations of their day. The diary of Edwin Waugh, written between 1847 and 1850, is one of the lenses through which Joyce studies this process. He tells us that Waugh’s father was a shoemaker who died early in his son’s life, and that his widowed mother, though in straitened circumstances, fostered the young Waugh’s education, auto-didacticism, aspirations to independence and adherence to the Methodist religion.37 Joyce rejects the idea that the diary is a reflection of Waugh’s social background and class position, or that it provides a window through which to observe the society in which he lived. He sees it, rather, as a means by which Waugh actively shaped his subjectivity. In presenting the diary as a ‘technology of the self’, he draws on Michel Foucault’s idea that, in working on themselves in the context of generalised social processes of surveillance and discipline, people effectively control themselves from within.38 The diary, he argues, was a technique for managing subjectivity, capable of ‘making the self visible to the self’.39

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In Joyce’s hands the diary as a technology has intellectual, emotional and material components. Joyce shows how Edwin Waugh draws on contemporary thinkers to construct himself as an ‘Enlightenment Man’ who believes in education and discipline in pursuit of God and the moral life. This is not a calm, reflective process but one fraught with torment and contradiction. Waugh agonises in the pages of the diary about his own sin and the difficulties of his struggles to secure dignity, as well as freedom from the degrading needs of the flesh. Although a radical critic of bourgeois life, he simultaneously longs for it and idealises an imagined non-bourgeois rural world of hard work and self-sufficient labour.40 Joyce argues that in writing about himself in relation to society, Waugh imagines himself not as ‘working-class’ but as a ‘democratic subject’. This diary, according to Joyce, was a material as well as a psychic laboratory. Waugh conceptualises himself in his entries in relation to the diary-as-object, writing that he wishes he were as spotless as its blank pages. He pastes into it newspaper cuttings providing guidance about how to use a diary, and about the life that his diary might help him build, making visible the process by which he draws on public discourse in shaping himself as a subject. Diary writing enabled Waugh to play out, release, spectate and savour his self-criticisms and self-doubt: these ‘sorrows’ constituted the medium of Waugh’s emerging selfhood.41 Joyce’s work with Waugh’s diary underlines the value, for historical understanding, of studying the interaction of public and personal narratives in the creation of subjectivities, as well as scrutinising the practical process of producing personal narratives. Above all, it shows how the concept of the diary as a ‘technology’ may be used in the writing of history.42 It is possible to reconsider the diaries discussed in the previous section as such. Bloom does not use the concept, but her 1990 analysis of the psychological importance of the diary to those in captivity suggests that, in adverse circumstances, a diary offers the possibility not only of reflection and self-construction but also of self-regulation. A scholar who does not refer to ‘technology of self’ directly, but works with the same idea, is Ruth Watson. She discusses the diary of Akinpelu Obisesan, a Yoruban clerk, trader and intellectual who lived in the city of Ibadan, now in south-western Nigeria, in the early twentieth century.43 Watson defends a post-structuralist approach against the criticisms of another historian of colonial Nigeria, J. D. Y. Peel, who argues that such an approach suggests that ‘nothing exists beyond the text, of which an infinite number of “readings” is possible’. 44 In contrast, according to Peel, what is important for the historian using a diary is the relationship between writing and living. Watson accepts the usefulness of personal narratives such as Obisesan’s diary for exploration of the lived experience of the world the text represents, as Peel recommends, in this case the political, social and economic history of colonial Ibadan. But she argues that post-structuralist insights enable the historian to go further, and to investigate ‘the way the diary entries also serve to create a social world that Obisesan inhabits’.45 To this end she asks why a colonial subject kept a diary in English, and pays attention to the emotions depicted there. Her discussion centres on the roles of education, literacy, religion and employment in Obisesan’s life, and their relationship to colonialism.

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Watson explains that Obisesan acquired literacy in English at two Christian Missionary Society (CMS) schools. His family required him to act as family secretary in support of their land claims, crucial for the future of their cocoa plantations. Obisesan’s English literacy was vital in this role, since it involved negotiation with colonial officials and written submissions to the colonial courts. His first diary, for 1914, mainly recorded incidents relating to these claims. Later, however, his diary writing became more inward-looking as well as regular. For forty years, from 1920 to 1960, he kept a daily diary in which he reflected on his economic, social, emotional and spiritual state of being. While dealing with family matters may have been the initial prompt for diary keeping, Watson looks for other reasons for this sustained devotion. She argues that motivation to pursue the practice was reinforced in contradictory ways, intrinsic to the colonial context. Obisesan’s CMS education exposed him to models of diary writing as part of evangelical self-reflection.46 Thus, in the spiritual register, literacy and keeping a diary were closely connected. The CMS, however, ceased to recruit Africans to the headships of district missions in the 1890s, and appointed Europeans to these top posts, closing such career prospects for its pupils. The mission nevertheless educated the next generation of Africans, who formed a nascent Yoruba intelligentsia, frustrated with their limited employment opportunities. This group wielded influence, and Obisesan sought to join it. Likewise, in the political register, the British authorities in the early twentieth century were dismissive of educated Africans and sought to exclude them from the administration of the Nigerian colonial state. In response, some of the mission-educated Ibadan men formed a society that pressed, with limited success, for an advisory role in colonial administration: in 1920 Obisesan became its secretary.47 Literacy enabled him to claim a place in a black literary elite, but it brought him little material success, and this was a major preoccupation of his self-reflection in the diary. The family reimbursement for his work was low, and Obisesan tried to boost his income by trading cocoa, but he rarely made a profit. He wrote in his diary of his frustration with Muslim traders, who were not literate in English, but were more successful than he was. Watson suggests that a key reason was that, in contrast to these Muslims, trade was not a way of life for Obisesan. It was a means to support the gentlemanly, literate lifestyle for which colonialism had, ironically, both equipped and disqualified him. Obisesan’s status depended upon his literacy skills, and this made him anxious. He wrote frequently in the diary about his insecurities in the English language. At the same time diary writing gave him opportunities to improve his literacy. Watson writes, ‘his diary was simultaneously a goal, a discipline by which to reach that goal, and a forum to express frustration at not having achieved it’.48 The diary-as-instrument assisted his dealings with the colonial authorities and helped him establish himself within the Yoruba intelligentsia, by improving the literacy in English that was ‘fundamental to his self-identity and public reputation’.49 It also enabled him to ‘understand the multiple identities of being a colonial subject’.50

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Gender and the diary: the making of masculinity Obisesan’s diary could also be seen as a depiction of the making of Yoruban masculinity within the constraints of colonialism, although this is not the direction in which Watson takes her analysis. Similarly, one way of reading Joyce’s discussion of Edwin Waugh’s diary is as a study of a nineteenth-century individual’s struggles to become a certain type of man. Joyce brings gender to the surface without it constituting his major concern. He explains that the ‘one house’ of humanity to which Waugh imagined that, as a ‘democratic subject’, he belonged, was a male one. Waugh reproduced in his diary contemporary discourses that placed women outside the quest for knowledge and freedom. He constructed his own rational and god-fearing masculinity by differentiating it from ideal femininity (characterised by servility and submission) and aberrant femininity (embodied in his own wife’s slatternly habits and challenges to his authority). He ignored his own wife in the diary except in so far as her behaviour and attitudes obstructed his project of selfdevelopment.51 Studies by Hannah Barker and by Melanie Tebbutt use diaries explicitly for the access they give to the making of masculinity. Barker, in her article ‘A Grocer’s Tale’, focuses on the diary of George Heywood, kept for a year from May 1815 but covering the period 1809 to 1816 (so in part a memoir), to trace the route of this young late-Georgian Englishman up the social ladder from journeyman grocer working for others to independent shop-owner employing his own workers.52 She sees the influences of gender and class as intertwined. She reads in Heywood’s diary his desire to establish himself as an independent man and member of what she describes as the petite bourgeoisie, through both proprietorship and marriage. Barker’s gender analysis involves scrutinising the kind of masculinity that this grocer fashioned for himself in his diary. She argues that George Heywood used a number of models of masculine behaviour taken from individuals and groups in the working- and middle-classes. He filtered them through a lens of virtue, respectability and decency fashioned from both Unitarianism and Methodism. He repeatedly reflected upon masculine behaviour that should be avoided as well as that which was worthy of emulation, in working out what kind of man he wanted to be. This included both ‘husband’ and ‘shopkeeper’, and Barker brings out the tensions between the two. She traces the twists and turns of a path that Heywood hoped would lead to marriage with the shop-owning widow of a proprietor, but which he eventually abandoned because of her snobbish coldness. Marriage to her would have helped his social ascent, but in the end he gave up this courtship in favour of marrying a lower-class servant, on whom he believed he could rely for comfort, affection and a family, if not for enhanced social status. He was proved right, and still achieved his goal of becoming an independent shopkeeper. Barker concludes that Heywood’s diary allows us to ‘glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of “bourgeois” masculinity in this period’.53 Focusing on emotion and the body, Melanie Tebbutt uses her father’s diaries, written in 1936 and 1937 when he was sixteen and seventeen, to explore the kind

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of masculinity that a young working-class man in provincial England pursued before the Second World War. Her purpose is to challenge historiographically based perceptions that prioritise the type of boy that her father was not: a hooligan or a delinquent, the categories of male working-class youth in whom, she argues, social commentators and historians have taken an interest since industrialisation. The diaries show that Les was ‘a quiet, unassuming, working-class boy, strongly attached to his family and neighbourhood, independent, occasionally solitary, yet also one of the lads’.54 She explores his leisure activities: membership of the Boys’ Brigade (a Christian club for adolescent males), keep-fit, cycling, cinema-going, and the search for a girlfriend. She explains that a lacuna structured her enquiry. The absence of expressions of feeling in the diaries led her to try to find out about the emotional lives of young working-class men in this period. Writing in 2012, her enquiry was in harmony with the growing historiographical emphasis on the history of emotion. She wanted to know how young men ‘negotiated the social and cultural changes of the inter-war years’ in the register of sensibility.55 To this end, her book explores stereotypes and expectations of working-class boys and sets them against ‘their own feelings of uncertainty as they encountered new social behaviours and experiences, or worried about measuring up to what was expected of them’.56 She quotes from Les’s diaries to point to his emotional insecurities about embodied masculinity, which she situates in relation to the wider social and cultural context. She explains, for example, that Les took a correspondence course in the hope of improving his height and chest measurements, contextualising this endeavour in relation to inter-war concerns about the deterioration of male physique due to youthful habits of cinema-going and dancing. Les wanted to join the police force, but in spite of his efforts, ‘regularly recorded in his diary’, he ‘failed the Metropolitan Police height regulation by half an inch, an abiding disappointment’.57 In the absence of more comment in Les’s diaries about his feelings, Tebbutt draws on other working-class narratives to substantiate the humiliation felt by young men who did not live up to the image of ‘the perfect, muscular and invulnerable male body’ that was also the ‘route to sexual success’.58 Emotional silence, reproduced in the diary, could be read as a constituent, in itself, of the cultural construction of masculinity to which Les aspired. These two studies, informed by feminism, read diaries for gender. They find in them the ways in which two men in different periods and contrasting social milieus sought to shape their masculinity amidst a confusing medley of contemporary influences. Both see social class as inflecting gender in these individuals’ pursuit of particular types of male identity. Other historians might have read the same diaries primarily for the subjective experience of class, and the pursuit of certain types of status, without considering gender.59 Alternatively, historians could have used them ‘transparently’, for their observations of the social and economic worlds of earlynineteenth-century shopkeepers, and young workers in the English provinces in the late 1930s. Historical practice, that is the specific methodological and interpretative approach adopted, depends not on dictates of correct and incorrect

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procedures, but on the questions that historians pose to the past, arising from their individual and collective preoccupations, in the particular contexts within which they are working.

Contradictions and incoherence Diaries are, by their nature, fragmented. They often contain odd juxtapositions and contradictions, and, as they leave the diarist’s hand, they are raw, uncomposed and unedited. Attention to the fragmentation of the self in diaries, to which Stephen Rendall draws attention, is central to the practice of several historians.60 Carol Acton, working on the diaries of Irishwomen who defied the official neutrality of the Irish Republic by volunteering to serve in the British auxiliary forces in the Second World War, sees these characteristics as difficult to work with, but conducive to the expression of inconsistent feelings about war, which are central to her research.61 Her diarists wrote of pressures from home to return, reinforced by antiBritish sentiment, as well as of a desire to contribute to the defeat of fascism, bolstered by a sense of loyalty to the Irish diaspora engaged in that struggle. One diarist could, in quick succession, declare her opposition to Hitler; deplore the brutality of war including the British treatment of German prisoners of war; delight in the excitement of being a servicewoman; and long for home. In contrast, Acton argues, accounts in letters were subject to ‘personal constraints’, and narratives in memoirs were subject to ‘careful reflection and retrospective consideration’, losing, in both cases, the unevenness that throws light on the subjective complexities of experience in particular historical circumstances.62 Jochen Hellbeck and James Hinton, to both of whom I return later in the chapter, also value the capacity of diaries to capture personal inconsistencies and inner conflicts. Hellbeck, in his study of Soviet citizens’ struggles to integrate themselves within communist society in the 1920s and 1930s, writes, ‘As an ongoing engagement with oneself through time, the diary showed tensions and fissures that other personal narratives glossed over or repressed.’63 Hinton argues that the ‘fragmentary, raw, experimental, unedited nature of the diary’ is vital for the study of the modern British self in the making.64 It is also important to Roger Woods’ interpretation of the journals of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish convert to Protestantism who lived under Nazi restriction in Dresden from 1933 to 1945 and kept a diary throughout this period. A much debated question in modern history has been whether the German population colluded with the National Socialist ‘Final Solution’. Roger Woods, however, makes a forthright case against historians who draw selectively on Klemperer’s diary to ‘prove’ one answer or another.65 Some have represented Klemperer as believing that Adolf Hitler was a ‘Pied Piper’ figure, who led the German people into Nazi extremism against their will. Woods, however, reads the diary to suggest that Klemperer’s numerous interactions with Jewish and nonJewish Germans led him to change his mind constantly on the culpability of the German population for anti-Semitic Nazi policies. One example that he quotes,

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among many, is of Klemperer recording, within the space of one day in 1942, his insistence to a Jewish neighbour that not all Germans were guilty and so should not be punished after the war, and his later decision that the neighbour was right, and that the German people collectively should indeed take responsibility. 66 Woods contends that personal narratives are not conducive to generalisation, and that they necessarily challenge the idea of coherent historical construction, but that they are not wholly individualistic. He argues that Klemperer’s diary is not about the self in isolation, but about a self known through and embedded within a network of social relations and intellectual discourses. In Woods’ hands, Klemperer’s diary lends itself to historical enquiry concerning relationships and subjectivities, rather than to the binary question about collusion. Woods points to its potential for addressing, for example, interactions between Jews who were not incarcerated by the Nazis and non-Jews; relationships within families and communities; the subjective meanings of national identity; and the contradictory nature of experience in Nazi Germany.

The diary and the psyche The scholarship of a number of historians is informed by the idea that diaries give access to unconscious as well as conscious processes. Amy Bell, in her work on popular reactions to the London Blitz and flying bomb attacks in the Second World War, uses diaries to access both types of response. She argues that the wartime diarists she uses were conscious of the relationship of their diary writing to the collective war effort. They ‘kept records not only to remind themselves and their families what they had endured but also as a marker of their belief in continued national survival’.67 But she also sees these journals as spaces within which diarists constructed their inner selves unconsciously, and she uses psychoanalytic insights to illuminate this process. She argues that contradictions between the public discourses of war and intimate responses to the bombing surface in the diaries in unconscious inclusions and modes of expression.68 She argues, for example, that the British culture of stoicism, reinforced in wartime by government and media, with its emphasis on ‘keeping calm’ and ‘making do’, meant that there were few opportunities to express fear publicly, creating psychological tension between the obligation to repress feelings of terror and the threat of their involuntary eruption.69 The public cultural climate inhibited the explicit expression of acute anxiety, even in ‘private diaries’, but Bell suggests that evidence of fear is nevertheless present. She finds it embedded in the text of diaries, which she handles in ways similar to Roper’s reading of unconscious strategies for survival in soldiers’ letters of the First World War that we met in Chapter 2. 70 Thus Bell reads fear in diarists’ documentation of physical symptoms at gut level (nausea, diarrhoea) and accounts of the use of calming products such as laxatives and diuretics.71 She finds it in descriptions of the cityscape battered by bombs, which she sees as metaphors of feelings of abandonment and desolation, such as Joyce Weiner’s diary entry on 24 November 1940: ‘London is deserted, cold, with

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the winds whistling through its empty screens of damaged stone.’72 She also finds it in evidence of the act of inscribing the diary itself. The strain of the V1 bombs is expressed in Florence Speed’s diary in her ‘increasingly erratic handwriting and in lapses in grammar, spelling and punctuation’. 73 Embracing the possibility of writing the history of emotion on the home front in the Second World War, Bell seeks out indirect expression of feeling and includes accounts of dreams and surreal imaginings in her discussion of diarists’ interior responses to Second World War bombing. In contrast, some historians resist readings that use psychoanalytic concepts, and, in particular, rule out diaries that interweave fact with fantasy and fiction from use as historical sources.74 Evidence of desires and fantasies, however, is considered by other historians to provide vital clues to both the subjectivities and the cultural and social worlds of their diarists. Leonore Davidoff, for example, uses the diaries of the nineteenth-century lawyer and civil servant Arthur J. Munby, and those of a domestic servant, Hannah Cullwick, who became his ‘disciple, servant, and eventually his wife’, ‘to show how the themes of fantasy and the manipulation of symbols … throw light on the dynamics of a whole society’.75 Davidoff explores Munby’s relationship with Cullwick through the Freudian theory of a split between affection based on love for the mother, which must not be eroticised, and sexuality which could only be aroused by the debased body of an inferior such as a servant.76 Munby persuaded Cullwick to use her basic literacy to keep a diary of her embodied life of service for him, from 1854 until the 1870s. In it she describes her daily work ‘in her dirt’, scrubbing steps, fetching coal, and sweeping chimneys. In addition to requiring her to keep the diaries, Munby photographed Hannah working as a skivvy, dressed as a young man with her hair cut short, and as a ‘negro slave’, blacked-up, naked and kneeling.77 Hannah and her diaries, writes Davidoff, were the means by which Munby carried through his fantasies about lower class women. Davidoff’s argument is that, based on dichotomies of respectable/not respectable, human/animal, white/black, cleanliness/dirt, love/degradation, masculine/feminine, wife/mistress, middle class/working class, these fantasies tell us much about Victorian dynamics of class, race and gender. Davidoff’s discussion focuses mainly on Munby, though, as a feminist historian, she does not neglect Hannah. She regards her diary as a ‘unique and precious document’ in social-historical terms, seeing its detailed descriptions of poverty and domestic labour as compensating for the sparseness of accounts of nineteenthcentury working-class women’s lives.78 She is cautious, however, about what we can read of Hannah’s subjectivity in the diary. She underlines that it was not independently produced. Munby required Hannah to keep the diary for him alone, and told her what he wanted her to do and to write about. Davidoff sees this enforced diary writing as one of a number of ways ‘in which he could dominate and even “create” her life’.79 She implies, nevertheless, that she has succeeded in accessing at least fragments of Hannah’s consciousness from the diary. These mostly concern Hannah’s memories of acquiring the habit of deference towards middle- and

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upper-class people in childhood, and her growing scepticism about the genuine superiority of her ‘betters’.80 Her doubts were stimulated, ironically, by the education that she received through her relationship with Munby, and the habit of reflection instilled by diary writing. Davidoff published her article about the psychic structures and social situation of Munby and Cullwick in 1979. This does not mean that the end of the 1970s marked a turning point in the acceptability of fantasy and Freud to historians; on the contrary, resistance to psychoanalytical approaches to the diary continued, and Bell, using such ideas in 2009, is still relatively exceptional. Rather, the timing indicates the unevenness and lack of linearity within historiography. Historians of the 2000s who reject psychoanalytic approaches include some who, nevertheless, accept that diarists’ desires and fantasies are an important part of social and cultural history. James Hinton, for example, although keen to engage with Mass Observation diarists’ own psychologically informed ideas, and the contribution of such understandings to their constructions of selfhood, opposes a psychoanalytic approach on the part of the historian. He explicitly rejects the opportunity ‘to play the therapist with dead diarists’, continuing firmly, ‘It is as a social historian, not as a speculative psychoanalyst, that I have approached this material.’81 Hinton resists an overtly psychoanalytic or therapeutically informed approach. But he selects diarists whose writing allows access to their inner thoughts and feelings; he engages with their diaries as psychological narratives; and his analysis of the formation of self is committed to the exploration of interiority, for all that he disclaims any independent, theoretically driven, knowledge of their psyches.

The diary and privacy A strong assumption in historians’ use of diaries is that much of the value of a journal lies in its privacy. Ostensibly produced through the solitary activity of writing, for no immediate audience, a diary has been seen as an intimate record of someone’s personal experiences and inner thoughts and feelings. Some authors suggest that the more outward-facing a diary, that is, written for a specific audience of readers, the less reliable it is. Davidoff does not write in terms of ‘reliability’, but, as we have seen, she warns that the diary that Munby persuaded Cullwick to keep for him tells us a lot about his fantasies, but gives limited access to Cullwick’s subjectivity. Harriet Blodgett is more dismissive of the shared diary: ‘Common sense says that when a diarist has a live recipient for her words in view, she will have to adulterate her self-expression considerably.’82 She illustrates her point from several well-known, published diaries, including Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals (1800 to 1803), kept for her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, and the diaries of Fanny Burney from 1768 to 1839, that Burney later edited for posthumous publication. ‘Throughout her diary career,’ writes Blodgett, ‘Burney had the sense of an audience. It kept her a talented ranconteur, but it also discouraged penetrating self-portrayal.’83 The expectation that a good diary is a private one places a different requirement on diaries than on other genres of personal narrative. Letters are by definition part

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of a dialogue with others and the self-portrait they present is tempered in ways that the writer deems appropriate. Memoirs are produced for a readership and oral history results from social interaction with a public of at least one other person. Where diaries are concerned the common assumption that an explicit ‘audience’ exercises a shaping force that distorts the private record implies that diaries written for a specific readership are less useful to the historian. Not all those who have used diaries, however, have taken this route around the question of audience. Several historians have found that the diaries on which they draw were less private documents than they expected. Avra Kouffman uses ten women’s diaries written between 1670 and 1715 to explore maternity and child loss in Britain in the Stuart period.84 The diarists described their intimate experiences of childbirth while writing under the supervision of Anglican and Dissenting clergymen, often their own husbands. These men used the diaries in two ways. They included extracts from them in sermons and in funeral orations, and they published edited versions of the diaries as guides to appropriate comportment in pregnancy and childbirth. Their purpose was to present the woman diarist as an exemplary Christian mother carefully attending to her children but submitting temperately and resignedly to divine will which inflicted the tortures of childbirth and the frequent tragedy of child and maternal death. Kouffman writes with a feminist alertness not only to male power but also to women’s agency. She explains that clerics advised women to regard their own sins as the cause of maternal misfortunes, but she finds hints of resistance to God’s will, and possibly that of clerical husbands, in the diaries. Sarah Savage, for example, lost five of her nine children and, writing in the 1690s, acknowledged in her diary the struggle to accept death as heaven-sent: ‘my affections are often rebelling.’ 85 Kouffman writes that Savage’s expression of even this much anger was a departure from the obedience and acceptance characteristic of other diaries. She detects slightly less submissiveness in Anglican than in non-conformist diarists, as in the case of Alice Thornton who wrote of her declining enthusiasm for pregnancy and childbirth, and expressed the preference not to be pregnant for the eighth time, while acknowledging that God’s will must be respected.86 Kouffman is clear, however, that the future public role of the diaries, in the hands and on the lips of clergymen, profoundly shaped the ways in which women inscribed their experiences of maternity. Does this public-facing position invalidate the diaries as historical sources? Kouffman sees them as offering a particular kind of access to the past. She argues that, since there were so few ‘culturally-sanctioned’ opportunities for women to write about childbirth and motherhood, they ‘offer a significant, albeit not entirely transparent, window into Stuart women’s precarious experiences of maternity’.87 Their lack of transparency derives from the ways in which they ‘reflect the conventions and attitudes modelled for them by the clerical community’.88 These apparently ‘private’ documents, then, are ‘public’ not only in the sense of having an audience (of clergymen and their congregations) but also in two other respects. First, in the ways in which they work public religious belief into the textual

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reconstruction of the personal experience of childbirth and child loss; and second, their reproduction and development for collective consumption of a set of beliefs and a mode of expression concerning maternity. The Stuart women’s diaries do not offer the ‘penetrating self-portrayal’ that Blodgett would have wanted. Indeed, in her terms they constitute examples of women’s writing shaped by ‘the patriarchal cultural climate dictating an inferior, muted, and service-oriented role’ in which meaning had to be ‘acceptable to a male-dominated audience’, at least on the surface.89 In Kouffman’s hands, however, the Stuart diaries offer a way of understanding such a cultural climate, and the gender relations which prevailed within it. James Hinton, in Nine Wartime Lives (2010), referred to above in the context of psychoanalysis, reconstructs the histories of six women and three men from the private diaries that they wrote for a public organisation. These diarists were among the four to five hundred volunteers who agreed to submit monthly diaries to the British social research organisation, Mass Observation (MO), during the Second World War.90 Although MO invited the ‘observations’ of these volunteers on everyday life during the war, it also encouraged the diarists to ‘observe’ themselves. Making the most of this, Hinton’s approach is to use the diaries not only as sources from which to write a history of wartime social life, but also as opportunities to explore the interiority of the diarists. His analysis concerns the formation of the self, and he argues that regular diary writing fostered diarists’ capacity to articulate ‘the ambiguous, unresolved, contradictory nature of the thoughts and feelings involved in their own ongoing projects of self-fashioning’.91 How did the public organisation for which they were written influence these intimate documents? Hinton argues that the MO diaries may have been composed privately, but the diarists had the audience constituted by MO clearly in mind.92 The founders of Mass Observation, and their employees, conditioned what diarists felt it was appropriate to write, indirectly through their books, radio broadcasts, and articles in the press, and more pointedly through the regular ‘directives’ that the diarists had first signed up to answer when they joined MO’s ‘national panel’ of volunteers. These directives asked about a range of issues, deliberately juxtaposing ‘private’ with ‘public’. Hinton quotes some of the ‘private’ topics that ‘invited critical self-examination’, which included snobbery, sexual behaviour, marriage, friendship, death, religious belief, and the effects of the war on ‘your mind and general outlook on life’.93 Volunteers were also encouraged to write about more ‘public’ topics, such as National Defence Loans and the future of Britain. The emphasis, even in questions about public matters, was consistently on emotional responses, as in ‘Describe in detail your views and feelings about the Greek situation’.94 Mass Observation as audience had paradoxical effects. Diarists wrote for MO because they thought that recording their private lives in this way served a public cause, even if they were vague about just what that was. Hinton explains that Nella Last, a housewife from an industrial town in north-west England, for example, started writing her diary for MO because she read in the Daily Express, a mass-circulation

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newspaper, that MO would be valuable to the government in wartime. Although Nella sometimes wondered how this could apply to her diary, she was reassured by her elder son, Arthur, a junior civil servant, who told her that ‘an ordinary woman’s viewpoint and routine’ were what was needed.95 The paradoxes continue. Although MO was a public organisation it ‘guaranteed privacy’ in two senses: extracts from the diaries were published anonymously, and since diaries were regularly posted to MO, they did not accumulate at home where family members might have read them.96 This was particularly important for some of Hinton’s nine MO diarists, such as Eleanor Humphries whose husband regarded her writing as a challenge to his authority, with the result that she had to keep her MO diary secret. MO diarists, claims Hinton, were more intimate and self-revealing to MO, a public organisation, than they were to the people closest to them. This is borne out by Eleanor, who wrote at length about her flirtations with her husband’s close colleague and with a neighbour, diary content that reinforced the need to conceal the typescript from her husband. Hinton is interested in the MO diaries as sources of private introspection, but he also shows that they are full of social-historical details, concerning, for example, kitchens, bathrooms, housewifery, working conditions, voluntary organisations, dance halls and wartime bombing. He argues that the diarists combined self-interrogation with observation of the social and cultural worlds they inhabited, and emphasises that the links between the two add to our historical knowledge and understanding. Diarists used their journals to explore the relationship between interiority and the external world: to mediate, as Hinton puts it, ‘old self and new self, rational and emotional self, private and public self, ordinary self and higher self’, in an open-ended process enabled by the habit of committing the ebb and flow of everyday life to the pages of the diary.97

The public and the private Leonore Davidoff has described the notion of the public and the private as one among a number of ‘categories of relationship posed as opposite and mutually exclusive terms’.98 She explains that the meaning of ‘public and private’ has been highly mutable over time and context, but that this binary concept has consistently contained two distinctions: on the one hand ‘the open and revealed versus the hidden or withdrawn’, and on the other ‘the collective versus the individual’.99 Davidoff emphasises the difficulties for historians of drawing a firm line between the two in practice. The studies by Kouffman and by Hinton focus attention on the place of some diaries on the boundary between the public and the private, rather than on one side of it. But other historians who use diaries tend, as we have seen, to value them as ‘hidden and withdrawn’ productions of ‘the individual’, in contrast to the ‘open and revealed’ expressions of ‘the collective’ to be found in other sources. This is particularly so of political historians. For example, Ben Pimlott, biographer of numerous prominent political figures, argues that diaries provide historians with a behind-the-scenes perspective on public events, and reveal the personality and

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thought processes of the diarist as well as offering intimate portraits of the people he or she writes about.100 Pimlott affirms the division between the public sphere, for him the meeting places and institutions that are accessible through formal records, and the private, that is spaces from bathrooms to bedrooms where confidential conversations and quiet reflection occur, which are accessible only through personal testimony. However, politicians’ diaries in practice breach the barrier between the two: written in privacy, they record the personal story of political developments for later public revelation. Recent historical scholarship further complicates the idea of the public/private boundary. Examples of the complex permeability of the divide come from the work of two historians who use diaries to understand popular consciousness in, respectively, twentieth-century Japan and the Soviet Union. Both, in different ways, use diaries to explore the relationship of the individual to the state, an association that, necessarily, spans the public and the private. One might assume that historians would not find officially enforced diary writing useful in terms of tapping popular consciousness. However, Aaron Moore’s work with Japanese soldiers’ diaries of the Second World War counters such an assumption.101 Moore’s work connects with research by Naoko Shimazu, which traces the development of a sense of national identity in soldiers’ diaries of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905. Shimazu argues that, after the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905, diary writing was incorporated into Japanese military training as part of an attempt to develop a national consciousness in recruits, and, as she puts it, to ‘close the gap that conscripts felt between the public and the private self’.102 Moore explains that the Imperial Army in the Second World War continued the tradition of using diaries in training and service. The authorities expected diary writing to teach self-discipline through self-reflection. Soldiers’ diaries were regularly reviewed by education officers, as part of teaching men about proper soldiering. In these diaries soldiers told themselves how to behave and what to think, in order to live and fight as loyal and effective imperial subjects, and this often involved reproducing not only official propaganda but also news reporting and war literature. Thus, Moore argues, diary writing that drew explicitly on public ideological constructions shaped the individual subjectivities of the soldiers. Far from seeing the diaries as products of coercion and censorship, and thereby ‘unreliable’, he regards them as useful sources of the state of mind and outlook of Japanese soldiers from 1937 to 1945. Moore’s work brings out some complexities in relation to the public–private divide. While diary-keeping was a publicly authorised tradition in Japan that had been incorporated into military training, there were situations in the Second World War when the authorities discouraged it. Japanese soldiers fighting in China were not supposed to take their diaries to the front line, in case they fell into the hands of the enemy, and their diaries were confiscated when they were being prepared for repatriation, since the state did not want accounts of the chaos of the battlefield to affect support for the war at home. Individual soldiers went to great lengths to conceal and preserve their diaries in such situations, most symbolically by strapping

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them to their inner thighs.103 They also rescued them from fallen comrades in the knowledge that otherwise the diaries would be burnt with the bodies. Both practices suggest that soldiers believed in the value of the individual diary as a personal record compiled not just for self-discipline but also for the benefit of families, comrades and posterity. This did not mean that, for the most part, they intended such diaries to be repositories of rebellion. Moore argues that, on the contrary, soldiers who updated and edited their diaries during the war, for example while in military hospitals, made sure they could not be read as documents of dissent, subtly changing their tone to enhance the patriotism and the heroism of the narrative. In such ways they brought their accounts into closer alignment with the official version of the war, even when they were not required to do so.104 Moore’s case studies show, however, that Japanese soldiers did not confine themselves to patriotic discourse. The soldiers started out using their diaries to ‘self mobilise’, that is to tell themselves of their determination to become, through fighting, ‘a splendid man’.105 In the face of the terrible sights of the battlefield, the accompanying high Japanese death toll, and the requirement to murder civilians, the tone of the diaries shifts. Moore comments that, as the contradictions between official propaganda and the experience of the horrors of the front line intensified, such diarists drew on a linguistic and conceptual ‘bricolage’ consisting of Buddhist, patriotic, military and even, sometimes, anti-war literary discourse, in pursuit of a voice that, as Moore puts it, convinced themselves.106 The habit of diary writing as a form of self-discipline was so strong, he argues, that Japanese soldiers continued to do it as a means of working out what to think and how to behave, even when they were not required to do so, and even when they might be punished for what they wrote. Moore contests the idea that a diary’s ‘reliability’ is related to the degree of ‘privacy’ involved in writing it. He argues that audiences for the written word are multiple and continually changing but ever present (if often impossible to identify definitively). He also argues that the concept of privacy obscures the active presence of forces such as the state, mass media, and military ‘in our most intimate spaces’.107 ‘The individual’s proactive support of state programs,’ expressed and developed through diary-keeping in wartime Japan was, he argues, ‘as important as the state’s tools of intimidation and censorship’ in creating a compliant and cooperative populace.108 Yet his research shows that, ironically, the discipline of diary writing had unintended consequences as far as the military authorities and the state were concerned. It constituted a means by which soldier-diarists not only affirmed their loyalty and patriotism, but also processed and reflected on aspects of war that filled them with revulsion and shook their confidence in its legitimacy. The state authorised a practice that, on the whole, worked well for it, but that it could not wholly contain. Jochen Hellbeck’s work on diarists of Soviet Russia likewise problematises the line between the public and the private. Hellbeck argues that there is a strong Western assumption that the Soviet regime denied its citizens their ‘true thoughts and aspirations’, which, as a result, ‘were voiced only in private realms, shielded

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from the intrusive gaze of the state’.109 The diaries produced during the Soviet era, then, could be expected to have expressed those ‘real’ feelings, assumed to be oppositional to the regime. However, Hellbeck’s extensive study of Soviet diaries comes to a quite different conclusion. Diary writing was a popular activity in Soviet Russia where self-reflection and self-transformation were encouraged in education, the workplace, the army and in politics. Rather than expressing an individualistic self, opposed to the state, Hellbeck argues, ‘these Soviet diarists revealed an urge to write themselves into their social and political order’.110 They used their diaries to reflect on their past and present situation, and to work at becoming new men and women in accordance with, rather than in opposition to, Soviet aims and ambitions. The ‘shared forms of self-expression and ideals of self-realization’ evident in the diaries, suggest that the diarists understood their efforts to be part of a collective exercise.111 Hellbeck argues that, far from expressing reluctance or a sense of coercion, diarists passionately desired to overcome the numerous difficulties that stood in the way of remaking themselves as good Soviet citizens. For example, Anatoly Ulianov filled his diary with accounts of his love life, his boredom and his spleen, but criticised himself for these individualistic and self-engrossed preoccupations, which, he wrote, were an ‘abuse of the diary’. The narrative to which he aspired was ‘politically conscious, activist, and socialized’.112 Such writers strove in their diaries to achieve, as Hellbeck puts it, an ‘illiberal, socialist subjectivity’ in which private life was not a place into which to retreat from the public realm and seek individual autonomy, but was itself ‘a crucial zone of class struggle’.113 The objective was not to divide the private, as a valued separate sphere, from the public, but to unify the two. The obstacles in the way, as perceived by the Soviet diarists, included personal weaknesses, such as the proclivity towards individualism, as well as moments when subjective confidence in the historic mission of communism wobbled. These occurred especially during the Stalinist purges of the mid- to late-1930s, which were officially conceptualised as attempts to root out from the Soviet Communist Party those who were resisting the growth of the classless society by harbouring the remnants of capitalism in their consciousnesses. Hellbeck argues that the purification of the soul along these lines was the very transformation to which most diarists were committed, and which even critics of the development of the regime described themselves as struggling to achieve.114 Diaries were used as incriminating evidence of dissent by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. Yet, Hellbeck writes, some diarists actually turned to the NKVD, as to a confessor, for help with the process of remaking themselves.115 He quotes the case of Piatnitskaya, whose spouse was denounced. She was conflicted in her diary because she was, herself, emotionally unable to condemn her husband as an enemy of the people, but in the absence of such a denunciation she and her sons were excluded from the Soviet collectivity. Desperately lonely, and seeking to purge herself of impure thoughts, Piatnitskaya filled her diary with discussion of her confused state of mind. Hellbeck, alert to unconscious as well as conscious

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processes visible in diary writing, observes that she also made repeated references to laundry, ironing and taking baths. Piatnitskaya, he suggests, was straining to cleanse herself through diary writing.116 In the hands of the NKVD and the public prosecutors, however, diarists like Piatnitskaya were in a no-win situation. Expressions of doubt in the diaries were labelled as counterrevolutionary, and expressions of loyalty were interpreted as attempts to conceal subversion, with disastrous consequences for the diarist.117 Piatnitskaya started to believe that the pages of her diary and her dealings with the NKVD proved that she was, indeed, a counterrevolutionary. Her fate was banishment to a work camp and eventual death.118 The Soviet diaries, according to Hellbeck, are records of the attempts of diarists, as self-reflective individuals, to move from preoccupation with personal and particularist interests to full engagement in the social and universalist mission of Soviet society. He underlines the lesson for historians: The concept of ‘privacy’ as such, has no universal meaning. It acquires positive or negative valence depending on the ideological context in which the self articulates itself … the application of the public-private binary in its liberal inflection, with the assumption that the private realm forms a locus of positive identity, is not useful for an understanding of Soviet subjectivities.119 Placing Hellbeck’s interpretation within Davidoff’s formulation, we could suggest that Soviet diarists did not want to use their journals for ‘hidden and withdrawn’ contemplation of their individuality. They wanted their diaries to help them escape individualism and demonstrate their membership of the collectivity. Hellbeck does not argue that the concept of the public and the private is irrelevant to the Soviet situation, but that the special meaning of the relationship in that context needs to be understood. Moore’s analysis of the parallel case of Japanese soldiers’ diaries, as private documents for the development of public consciousness, leads him, in contrast, to advocate the ‘abandoning of the public/private divide’ altogether, in pursuit of an adequate methodology for the analysis of subjectivities through diaries.120

Conclusion Diarists’ observations of the societies in which they live offer historians portraits of the past, as it unfolded day by day, that are unobtainable elsewhere, illuminating, for example, the bleaker side of life, and painful social tensions. Every diarist writes from his or her unique viewpoint. To some historians this worryingly introduces ‘bias’ and ‘partiality’, but an alternative perspective embraces the singularity of the diarist in its own right. Historians who approach diaries from this angle change the focus of the lens through which they scrutinise them. Seeing them not as reflections of diarists’ social background or windows through which to view society, they explore diaries as sources of diarists’ own self-reflection, self-construction and self-regulation. In such historical practice the subjective content of a diary tells us

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about the interactions of the diarist with their social and cultural world and the pleasures and pains, doubts and difficulties, of inhabiting it. Historians who have moved away from using the diary for information emphasise the importance of understanding diary writing as a practice of self-fashioning and a technique for managing subjectivity. They conceptualise the diary not as a mirror or a window, but as a laboratory in which the diarist experiments with publicly circulating stories about how best to live and what to think, and gauges them against his or her own experience and desires before deciding how to be guided. A diary, in such an understanding, is a site in which futures are imagined, the daily pursuit of those ends is recorded, and anxieties about achieving the desired goals are expressed. The diary’s materiality is part of such studies. It is an entity whose blank pages reproach or inspire the diarist, and within which he or she can compile a ‘bricolage’ of advice and guidance from other people’s writings and from the implicit or explicit expectations of state and society. The diary-asobject is itself a signifier of the psychological importance of keeping a diary at a particular time and place. In some contexts, as we have seen, the value of diary writing as an act of defiance or a means to self-regulation, or both, have made it worth risking life itself to conceal and preserve the physical object. If few historians refer to the diary as a ‘technology of self’, the concept nevertheless encapsulates the way in which many historians think about the role of the diary in the life of the diarist. Coherence is not always a characteristic of diaries. Their fragmented form lends itself to the opposite. While self-contradictory texts might not seem ‘reliable’ some historians have made the case for their importance for challenging overly simplified interpretations of mentalities in the past. Others point to the insights that readings of diaries as psychological narratives that interweave fantasy with fact can generate. A diarist is not necessarily conscious of the meaning or intention of everything he or she puts into a diary. Historians who interrogate unconscious inclusions, be they about stomach upsets or laundry, and modes of expression, such as uncharacteristic turns of phrase or orthographical deviations, find in them indications of emotional states such as fear and repentance, joy and elation. It is possible to read a diary itself as the product and producer of fantasy: an attempt to control or to create the diarist’s world according to the dictates of desire. Diary writing has not always, and everywhere, been a private practice. Historians who associate privacy with reliability have worried about the effects of intended audiences and public discourses on the contents. Those who have explored the public dimensions of personal diaries come to other conclusions. At the very least, the shaping force of an explicit audience invests the diary with conventions and attitudes that were part of the diarist’s lived experience. At another extreme, the audience that elicits a diary may encourage greater intimacy and frankness than the author would have expended in a journal written with no specific audience in mind. Diaries that are neither entirely private nor wholly public, such as the Mass Observation diaries, not only straddle the imagined boundary between private and public, but also explore the straddling act itself.

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‘Technologies of self’ may seem to have been deployed differently in relatively liberal, partial democracies, such as nineteenth-century Britain, and in totalitarian states such as Soviet Russia and Imperial Japan. But historians have challenged the idea that officially sanctioned diaries were simply the products of coercion and censorship, and are therefore useless for historical research. Diary writing that was encouraged by church, school and state in numerous societies for the purposes of teaching self-discipline through self-reflection, tells us about the state of mind of diarists who used the practice to work out what to think and how to behave. State-sponsored diary writing has been important in creating a compliant and cooperative populace, but it could have unintended consequences. Diaries may not have become repositories of rebellion and dissent in either Imperial Japan or Soviet Russia, yet diarists’ quests to affirm their loyalty, patriotism and membership of the collective, required the acknowledgement of doubt, and the struggle to regain confidence in regimes whose legitimacy they found themselves questioning. Historians of the modern West risk uncritically adopting the concept of ‘the private’ as a source of positive identity capable of shutting out external influences. Historians of other parts of the world and other periods demonstrate, through their use of diaries, the ways in which public authority structures have been active presences in people’s most intimate spaces.

Notes 1 I am following other historians in using the terms ‘diary’ and ‘journal’ interchangeably. Editing diaries for publication tends to remove much of the original unevenness. On the differences between edited and unedited diaries, see Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘“I Write for Myself and Strangers”: Private Diaries as Public Documents’, in Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (eds.), Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 23–37. 2 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Newhaven CN: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 53. 3 Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 27. Fothergill is referring specifically to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diaries of Samuel Pepys, Dudley Ryder and James Boswell, which he characterises as systematically introspective, while not omitting the record of daily activity. 4 Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Getting on with Nella Last at the Barrow-in-Furness Red Cross Centre: Romanticism and Ambivalence in Working with Women’s Stories,’ Women’s History Notebooks, 5:1 (1999), pp. 2–10. 5 Steven Rendall, ‘On Diaries’, Diacritics, Fall, 1986, pp. 57–65, here p. 60. 6 Steven Rendall, ‘On Diaries’, p. 63, quoting Béatrice Didier, Le Journal Intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), p. 123. 7 See note 3. 8 Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days, pp. 13–16. 9 See for example the memoir of the British politician David Blunkett, based on his weekly taped diaries, discussed by David Richards and Helen Mathers, ‘Political Memoirs and New Labour: Interpretations of Power and the “Club Rules”’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12:4, 2010, pp. 498–522; see also Ben Pimlott, ‘Dear Diary’, Guardian, 18 October 2002, p. 2. Apocryphal advice to politicians is to ‘keep a diary while you are in office, and when you are out of office it will

74 Historians and the diary

10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

keep you’. Celebrated diaries written and/or edited for publication include Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 volumes (New York: Harcourt, 1977–1984); Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann, 7 volumes (New York: Harcourt, 1966–1976); Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Doubleday, 1952). Examples of diaries which originated as letters include the journal of Edwin Forbes and the diary of Natalie Crouter. Forbes was an American sailor who became part of the convict guard in the Andaman Islands, a British penal colony, in the 1860s. He copied his letters into a journal intended for a correspondent he named as ‘Etta’, so that, should the letters he mailed not arrive, she would still eventually be able to read them in diary form. Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 159. The internment diary of Natalie Crouter began as a letter from the Philippines to her mother in Boston in December 1941. She was unable to send it because she was interned by the Japanese shortly afterwards, but she continued the letter as a diary, in captivity and against the regulations, as a record of an extraordinary period in her life. Lynne Z. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, Journal of Popular Culture 9:4, 1976, pp. 794–807. On the other hand, Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary (London: Persephone Books, 1999) is a diary of the war years 1940–1945 in London that she circulated to family members in instalments in place of letters. As in the case of the diaries exchanged between Rachel Van Dyke and her tutor, Ebenezer Grosvenor, in early nineteenth-century New Jersey. See Lucia McMahon, ‘“While Our Souls Together Blend”. Narrating a Romantic Readership in the Early Republic’, in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (eds.), An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 66–90. Both authors edited and published the diaries on which they also wrote critical essays. See Sue Bruley (ed.), Working for Victory: A Diary of Life in a Second World War Factory (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, Imperial War Museum, 2001); Lynn Z. Bloom (ed.), Forbidden Diary: A Record of Wartime Internment, 1941–1945, by Natalie Crouter (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980; reissued in 2001). Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’. Sue Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers in the Second World War: The Industrial Diary of Kathleen Church-Bliss and Elsie Whiteman’, Labour History Review, 68:2, 2003, pp. 217–234. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, p. 219. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, p. 219. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, p. 225. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, pp. 227–228. An example of women’s wartime agency in the diary is that, as an elected representative of the workers on the factory’s Works Council, Church-Bliss was in the vanguard of the movement to obtain improvements in factory welfare standards, including seating, washrooms, ventilation, cleanliness and an enlarged canteen. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, pp. 218–219. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, pp. 231, 225. For example, single women were allowed only one week off a year, whereas married women were given a week off every time their husbands returned home on leave. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, p. 231. Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers’, pp. 220, 231. James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 189–197. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 798. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 805. Quoted in Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 805. Bloom describes Crouter as having a ‘New England puritan’s contempt for the grafters, shirkers, those without hope, and the vain’.

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27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 798. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 803. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 800. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 802 Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 798. On US anti-Japanese propaganda that portrayed the Japanese in such ways, see John Dower, ‘Race, Language and War in Two Cultures’ in his Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 257–285. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 806. Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘Escaping Voices: Women’s South Pacific Internment Diaries and Memoirs’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 23:3 (Summer 1990), pp. 101– 112. Bloom, ‘Escaping Voices’, p. 101. Bloom, ‘Escaping Voices’, p. 108. She explains that the achievement of psychic space was sometimes matched by the appropriation of physical space, for example though the creation of a dug-out den or the adoption of a platform on which to write secretly. Bloom, ‘Escaping Voices’, p. 106. Crouter kept her diary hidden in a basket while letting go of expensive jade and celadon objets d’art. Bloom sees the choice of the other two diarists discussed in ‘Escaping Voices’, ‘to carry their notes along with their small children’, as ‘an index of the value they attached to their writing’. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 31–33, 37. See Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 16–49. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 19. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, pp. 42, 58–59. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, pp. 43, 41, 80. For another example of a historian’s use of this concept, see Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,’ The Historical Journal, 39:1, 1996, pp. 33–56. Ruth Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence, Our School Going and Our Reading of Books without Getting Money?” Akinpelu Obisesan and His Diary’, in Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 52–77. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 60, quoting J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 14. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 60, (emphasis in original). Diary writing was also part of CMS administrative practice. In the nineteenth century the CMS required its agents to write journals, and sent extracts to its London headquarters. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 60 Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 65. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 60. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 72. Watson, ‘“What is Our Intelligence …?”’ p. 73. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 51. Hannah Barker, ‘A Grocer’s Tale: Gender, Family and Class in Early NineteenthCentury Manchester’, Gender and History, 21:2 (2009), pp. 340–57. Barker, ‘A Grocer’s Tale’, p. 354. Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-war Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 1. Tebbutt, Being Boys, p. xi. Tebbutt, Being Boys, p. xi.

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57 Tebbutt, Being Boys, pp. 110–111. 58 Tebbutt, Being Boys, p. 111. 59 For an example of an insightful use of a diary that does not prioritise gender but explores the strivings of a working-class intellectual and his experience of a range of left-wing organisations in the 1930s in terms of class, literacy, politics and culture, see Catherine Feely, ‘From Dialectics to Dancing: Reading, Writing and the Experience of Everyday Life in the Diaries of Frank P. Forster’, History Workshop Journal, 69, 2010, pp. 91–110. 60 Rendall, ‘On Diaries’, p. 60. 61 Carol Acton, ‘“Stepping into History”: Reading the Second World War through Irish Women’s Diaries’, Irish Studies Review, 18:1, 2010, pp. 39–56, here p. 40. 62 Acton, ‘“Stepping into History”’, p. 40. 63 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) p. 8. 64 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 7. 65 Roger Woods, ‘The Referential and the Relational: Victor Klemperer’s Diaries in the Nazi Years’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 7:4, 2014, pp. 336–349, here p. 347. 66 Woods, ‘The Referential and the Relational’, p. 343. 67 Amy Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939–1945’, Journal of British Studies, 48:1, January 2009, pp. 153–175, here p. 159. 68 Amy Bell, London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz (London: I B Tauris, 2008) p. 1. 69 Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear’, pp. 154–155. 70 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 71 Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear’, p. 160. 72 Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear’, p. 161. 73 Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear’, p. 164. 74 This is characteristic of Lynn Bloom’s early work using diaries. In 1976 Bloom explicitly rejects the idea that writing the history of emotions is a possibility, discounting, for example, the diaries of ‘adolescent girls, who temporarily commit to diaries accounts of lives punctuated as much by wish as by reality’. Bloom, ‘The Diary as Popular History’, p. 806, note 3. This exclusion would presumably rule out The Diary of Anne Frank as a historical source. 75 Leonore Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick’, Feminist Studies, 5:1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 86–141, here pp. 100, 86. 76 Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, p. 99 and note 111. 77 Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, pp. 118–120. 78 Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, p. 105. 79 Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, p. 105 80 Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, p. 108 81 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 18. 82 Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days, p.13. 83 Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days, p.16. 84 Avra Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’ in K. M. Moncrief and K. R. McPherson (eds.), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 171–182. 85 Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’, p. 175. 86 Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’, p. 177. 87 Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’, p. 179. 88 Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’, p. 179. 89 Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days, pp. 12, 13. 90 On the history of Mass Observation see: James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History 1937–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nick Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120

Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 3. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 6. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 3. Mass Observation Archive, Directive, December–January 1944–1945, (emphasis in original). Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 47. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 6. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 6. Leonore Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “Great Divide”: Public and Private in British Gender History’, Journal of Women’s History, 15:1, Spring 2003, pp. 11–27, here p. 12. Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “Great Divide”’, p. 12. Ben Pimlott, ‘Dear Diary’, Guardian, 18 October 2002, p. 2. Aaron Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy: Reading Self-Discipline in Japanese Diaries from the Second World War (1937–1945)’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 68:1, 2009, pp. 30–54. For a similar argument applied to Chinese soldiers’ diaries, see his ‘Talk about Heroes: Expressions of Self-mobilization and Despair in Chinese War Diaries, 1911–1938’, Twentieth-Century China, 34:2, 2009, pp. 30–54. Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 57. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, p. 169. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, p. 173. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, p. 185. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, pp. 189, 193. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, pp. 164 (reliability), 174 (audiences), 194 (influences). Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, p. 194. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 2. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 4 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 9 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 88. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, pp. 9, 85 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 34. In contrast, Alexis Peri argues that the diaries of Soviet citizens blockaded in Leningrad 1941–1943 were not focused on ‘purging and refashioning the self’ in such ways, but on the affirmation of the self through diary writing, as a crucial part of survival. This involved diarists in critical examination of ‘core concepts, practices, and narratives that shaped life in the Soviet Union’. While not anti-Soviet, their writing was at odds with the officially generated celebratory narrative of the siege in the post-war years, and was not used as its documentary base. See Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 4, 239. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 110. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, pp. 98,107. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 109. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p 111. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 96. Moore, ‘The Chimera of Privacy’, p. 185. No other historian who uses diaries as a principal source in the context of western historiography goes so far, to my knowledge.

4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR AND THE HISTORIAN

Social, cultural and economic historians have been attracted to memoirs because they seem to overflow with information about people in the past. But at the same time as delighting in them, many have regarded them as presenting particular difficulties. Even the matter of terminology is less straightforward than it is with other genres of personal testimony. There is no agreed distinction between the terms memoir and autobiography. ‘Memoir’ appears in the title of this chapter as an acknowledgement that ‘autobiography’, literally self-life-writing, is often deployed as a more general term, to include a wide range of genres for recording the history of the self, including some, like oral history and self-portraiture, that do not involve writing.1 In some cases, ‘autobiography’ is used to refer to an account of a whole life, and ‘memoir’ for narratives of a specific segment of the past. In practice, however, nearly all historians use the two terms interchangeably, as we shall see in the work discussed below.2 Scholarship on autobiography and memoir alerts us to a number of issues about the genre.3 Foundational work by Philippe Lejeune proposes the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’, an unwritten agreement between the writer and their public that the autobiography is ‘true’.4 Lejeune suggests that readers expect the contents of a memoir, in contrast to those of a novel or short story, to ‘tell the truth’. Thus, autobiographical texts are read as referential, in the sense that the central character, the ‘I’ of the text, is assumed to be one and the same as the author. They are also read as reflexive, in that the author is expected to record, and reflect upon, his or her ‘real’ life in the pages of the memoir. Numerous historians read memoirs in this way, using autobiography as a source of factual evidence about the author, their experiences, and their social world. They have found within these texts a wealth of detail about social life in the past that is not recorded anywhere else. In the first section of the chapter I explore the practice of drawing on memoir for empirical evidence, or ‘data’.

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Literary scholars, however, urge us to understand autobiography as a creative literary form through which subjectivity is composed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, for example, recognise the hold of the autobiographical pact on publishers and readers, but insist that the interplay of memory and experience means that events are never inscribed exactly as they happened, and that people, including the self at the heart of the text, are depicted only as the author perceived them at the moment of writing. Autobiographies, they write, ‘offer subjective “truth” rather than “fact”’.5 They argue that, while autobiography remains distinct from fiction, the reflexive practices involved in writing it create a new person on the page and a new vision of the self and the social. Fiction or not, more obviously than in the case of any other genre, this form of life writing is selective. Autobiographers do not put everything about themselves down on paper, but choose the dimensions of their lives that they consider worth writing about, or that they feel compelled to narrate, consciously and unconsciously. The second section of the chapter discusses the tension in historical practice between regarding autobiography as a source of data and seeing it as providing access to past subjectivities. In both the first section and the second, I draw on the rich vein of historical work on working-class autobiography, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, to discuss the complexities of reading for fact and reading for subjectivity. Smith and Watson see autobiography as ‘a historically situated practice of selfrepresentation’, implying that the genre of autobiography itself changes over time, in conjunction with shifts in the societal context in which it is produced.6 Numerous different models of autobiographical writing coexist. The third section of the chapter explores historians’ engagement with such models. They include the confessional autobiography, a genre characteristic of both eighteenth-century protestant and twentieth-century communist memoirs, in which the author confesses past errors and traces the emergence of the subject from darkness into the light of new ‘correct’ beliefs.7 Another sub-genre is the political memoir, which, according to Richards and Mathers, constructs a story about the significance of the politicianprotagonist to government or opposition, and the legacy of their contribution.8 A third type is the ‘enforced’ autobiography, extracted by a higher authority, such as a court of law, a mental institution, or a social investigator, that requires details of a person’s life whether they like it or not, and may be used against them.9 Simultaneously, the models of identity available to a narrator change over time, along with social expectations about self-presentation as a woman or a man, or as a member of a particular social class or political group, or a colonial subject. In this section I discuss historical work focused on the interaction of models of autobiographical writing with concepts of gender and the self, using as a case study research on twentieth-century American communist memoirs. The fourth section investigates historians’ responses to the tension between the present and the past in autobiographical writing. Memoirs are more emphatically retrospective documents than letters and diaries. They are shaped by the two points in time that inform their creation: the moment at which they are composed, and the period in the past that they recall. Within this diachronic relationship, the past

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that surfaces in memory undergoes conscious and unconscious processing as it takes written form, and the present in which it is recalled informs the interpretation that is offered and the way it is expressed. There is a necessary tension in autobiography between these two points in time, as well as between two personal subjectivities, ‘me now’ and ‘me then’, a tension that is also present in oral history. In this section I explore historians’ engagement with the idea that the present shapes the past in autobiography, through work on twentieth-century memoirs concerning nineteenth-century family life, and a study of the many versions of the memoirs of one First World War soldier. The fifth section focuses on historians’ engagement with the influence of an audience on the composition of a memoir. Memoirs are more emphatically public documents than diaries, which have an ambiguous relationship to a readership beyond the author, and letters, which are addressed to particular people even if the addressee often provides a bridge to other readers. In the case of autobiography the audience the text addresses is part of the present in which it is written, and has an impact on its composition.10 In this section I address the issue of audience through a historical study of an eighteenth-century slave narrative. The final section of the chapter takes the idea of the shaping influence of audiences a step further. I investigate work that suggests that the relationship of an autobiographer to a specific readership can cause the personal past to be transformed in an autobiography. I discuss research on the memoirs of twentieth-century Indian women politicians and on the autobiographies of Soviet Communists. Throughout, I pay attention to the importance of models of identity, autobiographical genres, and gender.

Reading memoir for fact Jane Humphries, working within the paradigm of economic history, uses memoir as a source of quantifiable data in a study of child labour in the industrial revolution.11 She draws on 600 memoirs of men who worked as child labourers, some of which were published as books or in newspapers, while others were no more than fragments of manuscript found in archives. Humphries shows that there is much to be gained from using memoir for quantification, but her work suggests that, even for economic historians, ignoring its constructedness is problematic. Humphries expects members of the scholarly community of economic historians to be ‘suspicious’ of her use of memoirs.12 She devotes space to showing that the autobiographies are ‘fit for purpose’, and in the process debates the issue of autobiographical truth with social and cultural (as opposed to economic) historians who have used memoirs as sources, notably John Burnett and David Vincent.13 According to Humphries, the success of John Burnett’s edited collections of working-class autobiographies and of David Vincent’s 1981 book, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (which she acknowledges as starting points in her search for workingclass memoirs) ‘owed much to the authenticity of the voices that they tuned in’.14 However, she is aware that Vincent himself is sceptical about ‘authenticity’. She

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quotes his statement that there are ‘unresolved doubts about the “truth” and “relevance” of works which are necessarily subjective in form and limited in number’.15 Vincent argues that autobiographies are not reliable if read as factual accounts, but only if used to study how people ‘understood their lives’, which is the main purpose of his own work.16 Humphries objects to this, which she sees as an abandonment of the ‘actual world’ for the realm of perceptions. She states that, in contrast, she regards autobiographies ‘as reflecting reality’.17 Vincent advises against using memoirs for quantification, stating ‘no truths, either in general or in particular, can be deduced by adding up their contents and dividing the total number’.18 Humphries insists that, on the contrary, such aggregation can be done with confidence because autobiographies are, in spite of some problems, fundamentally reliable. She writes that her own ‘scrutiny of individual documents did not prompt serious reservations about the quality of the information extracted’.19 In any case, she argues, generalisation based on the aggregation of the information derived from the autobiographies she uses is valid, because any unreliabilities are overcome by the effects of quantification: ‘each memoir is responsible for one observation only in a data set of many hundreds of cases. Averaging dilutes mistakes that remained undetected in individual observations.’20 The ‘mistakes’ that she envisages include ‘childish understanding’ and failures of memory; ‘refraction’ through ideology; misrepresentation and deliberate attempts to mislead (for instance concerning self-aggrandisement); as well as ‘inherent subjectivity’.21 Humphries has two ways of dealing with these problems (as she sees them). The first is to argue that autobiographies are as reliable as other sources available for the study of the history of child labour, such as census data (which underestimates it because of employers’ fears of prosecution) and government enquiries and surveys (which focus on a few industries and thus do not offer information about the economy as a whole).22 In any case, she argues, in addition to their specific limitations, these sources are inadequate because they cover only the later rather than the earlier part of the period of industrialisation. Humphries’ preferred source would be the ‘household survey’ used in the study of child labour in Third World countries today, which provides micro-data on parental income and education, number of children, the extent of their schooling, the age at which they started work, the types of work they did, its duration, and so on. Such household surveys were not, however, undertaken in the nineteenth century. Humphries argues that, although memoirs are a poor substitute in that they do not present this kind of information systematically, ‘they can fill some of the lacunae in our knowledge and contribute to a clearer and more reliable history’.23 In short, her first defence is that, in the absence of anything better, historians must do what they can with memoirs. Humphries’ other justification involves defending the autobiography in terms of its content, ‘mistakes’ and all. Thus the ‘weaknesses’ of autobiographies are least ‘when they are used not as eyewitness accounts of external events but as a source of information about their own author’s experience’.24 Since autobiographers are rarely silent about work and training, ‘there is a gold mine of information on

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pressures to work, links between the family and the labour market, the nature of first jobs, remuneration, apprenticeship and schooling’.25 Humphries claims that, even if autobiographers were unreliable about some matters, they were ‘apparently accurate’ on their childhoods, families of origin and early work.26 She acknowledges autobiographers’ occasional inaccuracies with regard to chronology, as well as what she describes as ‘plagiarism’ in their inclusion of accounts of public events taken from public sources such as newspapers. But she defends their ‘veracity with respect to social conditions and their faithfulness to their own stories’.27 The use of autobiography to research the history of childhood labour, she argues, ‘plays to its strengths and avoids its weaknesses’.28 In as far as Humphries’ study is, as she puts it, ‘a ruthless attempt’ to strip out fact from subjectivity, the autobiographies do indeed serve her well, enabling her to draw a number of striking conclusions from the quantitative evidence.29 She claims that boy labour persisted at high levels throughout the period of industrialisation and throughout the economy, and that it was integral to labour processes. Boy workers provided links between adult workers and machinery, enabling materials and products to move around; they met seasonal peaks in demand for labour; and they constituted a labour supply for remote new factories and declining domestic industries. She argues that apprenticeships did not disappear but remained important for human capital formation as well as for the process of industrialisation.30 There were variations in boys’ involvement in the labour force, according to family circumstance and local economic conditions, but the years from 1800 to the 1830s were those in which they started working earliest and their participation rate was highest. In short, ‘children’s labour’ was, according to Humphries, ‘a kind of mastic holding the early industrial economy together’, and its importance for this economy, as for modern global economic growth, has been underestimated.31

Reading for subjectivity Other studies of working-class lives during the British industrial revolution use memoirs in a different way and develop a different type of argument. Approaches informed by social and cultural history share the perspective of David Vincent’s pioneering work of the early 1980s: ‘If we wish to understand the meaning of the past we must first discover the meaning the past had for those who make it and were made by it.’32 These historians let the memoirists themselves shape their projects. Emma Griffin, for example, in her book Liberty’s Dawn, regards working-class autobiographies as documents ‘in which working people set out to describe their lives in their own words and for their own purposes’, and she seeks to understand what these were.33 Similarly, Julie-Marie Strange, in a study of working-class fatherhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, states that her approach is to look ‘to working-class autobiographers for a research agenda’ and to follow ‘the preoccupations and priorities of authors in producing meaningful and coherent life stories’.34 Vincent finds in the 142 memoirs of industrialisation that he analysed an optimism derived from a sense of progress, for all that this was sometimes

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counterbalanced by personal despair, and that it coexisted with awareness of the contradictory force of shared conditions of insecurity.35 Griffin’s work with 350 working-class autobiographies of the period of industrialisation, underlines and extends this assessment. She argues that historical accounts of industrialisation have, over more than a century, constructed a narrative of proletarian immiseration, but ‘the trouble is that our autobiographers simply refuse to tell the story we expect to hear’.36 She makes the case against depicting the industrial revolution in ‘relentlessly dark colours’ by comparing nineteenth with eighteenth-century workers’ memoirs, which, she argues, document chronic under-employment, inadequate remuneration, and insufficient food, lodging and fuel.37 The increase in the opportunities for work that the process of industrialisation brought with it meant higher incomes, crucial for families close to the breadline, less servility, and enlarged possibilities for relatively independent personal choices, about marriage, sex and reproduction, as well as about religious and political expression. Quoting the memoir of Emanuel Lovekin she argues that, in contrast to agricultural labour, work in mills, mines, and factories, and as navvies and quarrymen, offered ‘very good jobs and plenity [sic] of money’.38 Griffin acknowledges that memoirists do not suggest that their industrial employment was easy, enjoyable or healthy, or that support for those who fell on hard times was adequate. She also emphasises that adult men did best out of the changes, children and women less well, and that all of them were vulnerable to violent economic fluctuations. Nevertheless she concludes that ‘Nothing stands out from the autobiographers’ testimony more strongly than the way in which rising levels of employment pushed up family incomes in meaningful and much appreciated ways’.39 She sees the practice of writing autobiography as part of this phenomenon: the desire of workers to record their personal histories, even though their own achievements were modest, was itself an expression of the positive significance of these rapidly changing times in their lives. I am not suggesting that either the economic, or the social and cultural, approach to using memoirs to study the British working-class in the industrial revolution is ‘right’, and the other is ‘wrong’. The important point is that the work discussed here is informed by different questions. Humphries asks ‘what was the contribution of child labour to the industrial economy?’ whereas Vincent’s question is, ‘how did class consciousness develop during the industrial revolution?’ and Griffin’s is ‘was the experience of the industrial revolution as bleak as earlier historians make out?’ Accordingly, their theoretical approaches differ, as do the ways in which they use the autobiographies at their disposal and the conclusions they draw from them. This is not quite the end of the story concerning Humphries’ use of memoirs, however, in that she does not stop with an analysis of the ‘objective data’ that she succeeds in stripping out of the memoirs, even if this is the bedrock of her key conclusions. She also takes some tentative steps into the realm of subjectivity. Even though Humphries criticises the argument that autobiographies are useful as sources of perceptions and not facts, she does not insist that they are useful only for facts

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and not for perceptions. She includes among the advantages of autobiographies the access they give to ‘how working men and women made sense of their lives and responded to the world about them’, which she describes as their ‘inherent subjectivity’.40 This subjectivity is evidently attractive to Humphries, in spite of her warnings about its hazards and her commitment to minimising its distorting effects on factual matters by averaging. Yet her handling of subjectivity signals the difficulty of working across the boundary between quantitative economic and qualitative social and cultural history. Humphries states that her quantitative focus was ‘softened and melded’ by the material in the autobiographies, which ‘contextualised and nuanced’ the relationships and variables that she ‘sought to model’.41 She uses language suggesting that the autobiographies were overflowing: information ‘oozed’ out of her sources and took her beyond the hard statistics that she was ‘ruthlessly’ trying to ‘strip out’ of them.42 More than once she describes being ‘led’ by her sources: the autobiographers ‘interjected their views on the themes and questions of concern, redirected my gaze in new and unexpected directions and, on many occasions, seized the initiative and led me down new paths’.43 These ‘paths’, twisting away from economic models and determinants, took her into the world of family life and relationships, the terrain of social and cultural historians reliant on quite different intellectual tools for traversing the slippery slopes of subjectivity from those with which Humphries began her enquiry. Read in the light of those other histories, Humphries seems too trusting and too convinced by her own arguments concerning reliability, presented defensively to a sceptical audience of quantitative economic historians. Her discussion of workingclass parenting is illustrative. She argues that, although there are cases of paternal abuse and desertion (which she quantifies), ‘the majority of fathers neither abandoned their families nor treated them cruelly, but nor too were they particularly affectionate or involved’.44 Fathers endeavoured to fulfil their role by ‘providing’ as bread winners, but ‘mothers had to love, and according to their sons, they almost all did so’.45 The stories of mothers that Humphries uses, told by men reminiscing about boyhood, are overwhelmingly appreciative. To quote one of her examples, Thomas Lipton wrote of his mother as ‘The best, the bravest-hearted, the noblest mother God ever sent straight from heaven to be one of his angels on earth’.46 Humphries acknowledges the possibility that literary convention might have influenced such gushing accounts: ‘These outpourings of filial devotion could be stylized responses to Victorian artistic conventions’, but she dismisses it: ‘their very excess seems to signal authenticity’.47 Whether hyperbolic prose is a reliable indicator of ‘truth’ seems doubtful. Humphries, however, looks for material reasons for the devotion. She argues that mothers were not ‘economic mainstays’, but they nevertheless held families together (only four out of the total of 600 autobiographies record maternal desertion), and, crucially, mothers transformed the cash their sons earned into care, in the form of food, clothing, nursing, shelter and support. ‘Men who lost their mothers in boyhood often described their emotional deprivation as worse than the material

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hardship that followed a father’s death.’48 ‘Breadwinner frailty’ (the inability of fathers to earn enough) pushed sons into the labour force; maternal care sustained them there. A son’s bonds with his mother strengthened as he surrendered his earnings to her and grew in her esteem, while his father’s status diminished in her eyes and in his.49 Thus, concludes Humphries, the economic division of labour between husbands and wives structured family relationships and created the distant father and the loving mother.50 Humphries’ materialist logic sounds plausible, but even some of the economic historians who reviewed her book raise their eyebrows at it. ‘I wonder about these un-nuanced Madonna-complex descriptions of the mothers in the autobiographies,’ writes Malin Nilson.51 If we think about the narratives as cultural constructions, they speak less to the lived experience of motherhood than to the strength of the breadwinner ideal, both at the time described and at the later point when the autobiographies were written. The socially and culturally constructed idea that a man’s role in life was to provide for his family could arguably have informed sons’ determination to demonstrate retrospectively that, from an early age, they were more successful in doing so than their fathers, to the benefit of their mothers. It is also probable that the autobiographies contained a number of omissions, such as the invisible (to sons) work and earnings of mothers and thus the extent to which mothers were, in practice, also bread winners. Furthermore, Humphries does not consider the possibilities of gendered differences in memories of the ‘mother-child bond’ and ‘the closeness between mothers and children’.52 Humphries conducts her discussion in terms of ‘children’, even though she uses only men’s and not women’s memoirs, a point to which I return in Chapter 6. The inclusion of women’s autobiographies, as another of Humphries’ reviewers points out, would have produced a different picture of family dynamics: ‘Girls worked closely with their mothers and had more conflicts with them, so they were less idealistic about the mother-child bond,’ comments Ginger Frost, a historian of childhood and the family in the nineteenth century.53 Wendy Webster’s work, on representations of gender in women’s autobiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bears this out. Webster concludes that the tension she observes in women’s memoirs, between the demands of family and domesticity and their desires for other kinds of lives, was in part an inter-generational one between mothers and daughters. The identity aspired to by the daughter was in conflict with the destiny represented by a mother’s life: hard work and drudgery.54 Much of Carolyn Steedman’s work is devoted to this type of analysis. One of the memoirs that she discusses is Jipping Street by Kathleen Woodward, first published in 1928. Jipping Street describes the experience of a girl growing up in London before the First World War. Steedman analyses it as an expression of the tension, resentment and debt between an aspiring daughter and a resigned mother.55 Steedman’s work also introduces alternative ways of thinking about the notion of ‘reliability’. She stresses that Jipping Street is ambiguously autobiographical in that it is based on Woodward’s life but its details do not coincide exactly with her biography. She argues that it is unwise to mine the book for historical

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evidence, even though she identifies some historical realities in the narrative. Rather, she sees it as a ‘psychological account of growing up female and working class’ that charts the emotional conditions of a girl and young woman in East London, in particular those generated by her relationship with her mother, which was fraught with difficulties of exploitation, rejection and manipulation.56 The seeming falsifications, such as the geographical and chronological inaccuracies and displacements, the dreamlike quality of some of the events described, and the depictions of both demonised and idealised relationships, express feelings and carry meanings that constitute ‘psychological evidence’ even if they do not establish ‘historical truth’ in the way that it is usually understood.57 Steedman sees Woodward’s account as contrasting with the versions of the working-class family offered in literature and history, in particular in ‘traditional male working-class autobiography’ in which mothers are martyred saints to whom sons are bound in love and gratitude.58 These, as we have seen, are the types of accounts on which Humphries bases her conclusions about affective relationships in working-class families. Steedman’s work and that of other historians, including Wendy Webster, Ellen Ross, Helen Rogers, and Julie-Marie Strange, suggests that to explore such relationships effectively through memoir requires a methodology sensitive not only to material factors but also to the cultural, emotional and psychological inflections of autobiographical subjectivities.59

Gendered subjectivities and models of autobiography Some historians relate gender differences in the selectivity and omissions in autobiography to the models of autobiographical writing available to memoirists. James Barrett explores the memoirs of former members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) published between the 1930s and the 1990s, to find out about emotional and personal issues that indicate ‘the costs and also the attractions of the movement’.60 Writing in critical response to historical treatments of Western communism that prioritise ideology, organisation, and group identity, and ignore subjectivity, he discusses the everyday experience recorded in memoirs, in order to trace the emotional history of belonging to the organisation. Barrett’s aim in using communist autobiographies is ‘to “populate” our histories with fleshand-blood subjects’, as opposed to ‘the cardboard characters’, assumed to be pawns of an international Soviet conspiracy, that ‘filled the scenery in older political histories of the movement’.61 Barrett offers a cultural analysis that is sensitive to gender and subjectivity. He acknowledges that ‘an autobiography represents, not the unmediated story of a person’s actual experience, but rather a constructed narrative full of conscious and unconscious choices on the part of its author’.62 He identifies qualities distinctive to the communist memoir in both men’s and women’s memoirs, notably ‘a fusion of the personal and the political’ in which ‘self-realization came through collective experience and party activity’.63 He notes, however, that men, on the whole, excluded personal experience, such as love affairs, marriage, the birth of children,

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parenting, and the death of friends, whereas these matters figure more prominently in communist women’s memoirs. In particular, women wrote about the fraught issue of motherhood. He quotes Myra Page, who stated that ‘among the Left, women as active as I was were not expected to have children … you made a choice’,64 and he cites painful autobiographical accounts of abortions and even a hysterectomy enforced by party demands, as well as anguished accounts by communist mothers of long periods of separation from their children while they were working for the party.65 Barrett explains the difference in part in terms of the gendered models of autobiographical writing that prevailed at the time the authors were writing, both those provided by communism, and those current in the USA. The models that were generally available placed a lower value on relationships and family in men’s than in women’s writing, and Communist Party discourse of the 1920s confirmed this denial of the importance of affective relationships to men. According to the CPUSA marriage was ‘a bourgeois trap’ that would enslave an otherwise virile man, for whom women in general were a burden.66 Barrett’s reading of the selectivity and omissions of communist autobiography brings out painful evidence of the lack of ‘fit’ between the CPUSA as a patriarchal and authoritarian organisation and ‘personality, personal relationships, and emotions’.67 He thinks that the absence of a ‘role for personal expression and identity’ in the party hit women particularly hard.68 One could argue that communist men were also deprived, but the models of masculinity, as well as of autobiographical writing, current not only in communist culture but also in American society, made it even more difficult for them to bring such dimensions of human experience to consciousness, let alone to place them on the page. Barrett’s history of communist emotion might have lent itself to a discussion informed by psychoanalysis. He does not offer one, even though he acknowledges the eruption of the unconscious in memoir, for instance in accounts of nocturnal anxieties and disturbing dreams.69 More broadly, the experience of being an American communist appears to have been an uneasy psychic combination of personal awakening and denial. The memoirs record the enrichment and elation it was possible to feel, but indicate that the experience of intense emotion was focused on political rather than individual and personal matters. Barrett refers to memoirists’ complaints that the trivialisation of the personal in the party left them bereft of emotional support at moments of crisis. Barrett’s analysis supports the approach of William Reddy to emotional regimes. Reddy argues that emotional responses are not constants, but that the cultural norms and expectations in circulation in specific social settings contribute to configurations of what it is possible to feel, and so shape emotional experience.70 For communist men the continuities between the emotional regimes of the Communist Party and the wider American society were strong, while for women the communist emotional regime contrasted starkly with expectations of women’s maternal and relational sensibilities in the wider society. Both men and women, however, recalled in their memoirs the denial of the personal in the communist

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emotional regime. Barrett convincingly argues that ‘the personal side of the communist experience has a history every bit as much as its more public dimensions’.71 His article does not tell us, though, whether over time (especially after the feminist challenges of the 1960s and 1970s) American ex-communist men and women started to see the ‘personal as political’ and to reflect to a greater extent in their autobiographical writing on the ‘human dimensions’ of their communist pasts.

The present meets the past Those who prefer the immediacy of diaries and letters to the retrospectiveness of autobiographies complain that memoirs are not only selective and self-justifying but also coloured by the values and attitudes of the later point in time at which they are written.72 Some of the historians who use memoirs, however, engage with the cultural tropes with which recollection is invested. In this section I explore examples of historical work that explores the implications of the cultural context in which autobiographies were written, as well as, in the second case, the psychic dynamics of narrative construction. Emma Griffin, in an article on ‘the emotions of motherhood’, uses memoirs to complicate the history of mother–child relationships in working-class families in Victorian Britain (1837 to 1901). Her approach adds another dimension to the use of memoir to study the history of affective relations in nineteenth-century Britain, discussed earlier, as well as having wider methodological implications. The problematic within which she works is that ‘autobiographical accounts of family life involve the reinterpretation of earlier lived events at many years’ remove’.73 She explains that the authors of most of the available accounts of growing up in the Victorian era were born after 1850 and wrote their memoirs in the twentieth century, by which time ideas concerning mother-love had changed profoundly. Thus these memoirists had to ‘negotiate the difference between contemporary norms and their own earlier experiences’.74 This negotiation is a major focus of her work. Griffin argues that memoirs written during the Victorian period itself, about preVictorian childhoods, conceptualised and described motherhood primarily in terms of physical rather than emotional labour. Thus, as one of the memoirists she quotes put it, mothers were remembered for ‘toiling hard to keep the home together’ and were appreciated, for example, for their baking, brewing, knitting and sewing.75 In contrast, many autobiographers who wrote about growing up in the period 1837 to 1901 were exposed to twentieth-century ideas that laid greater stress on a mother’s supposedly natural capacity for love and emotional nurturing. This cultural shift provided ‘a new framework within which working-class autobiographers could reevaluate their own early years’ as well as creating a space ‘for discussion of the more intimate elements of family life’.76 Griffin shows the difficulties for some writers of incorporating the twentiethcentury language of maternal love into accounts of family life in which declarations of love did not feature. She explores the possibility that mothers’ performance of

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practical tasks in harsh material circumstances might have been expressions of love, but concludes that autobiographers did not usually see their mothers’ domestic labour in this way. Indeed, memoirists’ explorations of ‘the space between modern values and their own earlier experiences’ lead Griffin to conclude that Victorian mothers frequently withheld any kind of evidence of affection from their children.77 Faith Osgerby, for example, described her mother as a hard-working, competent housewife, but indicated that this did not compensate for a childhood ruled by thrashings for minor infractions that put her in a constant state of fear. She wrote, ‘I can never remember in all my life being cuddled or kissed or “loved” as we love our babies today.’78 Griffin quotes memoirists who, writing in the context of twentieth-century cultural values, retrospectively craved the emotional expression of love that their busy mothers withheld. George Acorn, for example, wrote of his mother’s ‘heroic’ struggle to meet the family’s physical needs, but reflected sadly, ‘If only to her strength of purpose had been added some spiritual sympathy, some ray of tender love, I know I should have responded with generous affection.’79 Griffin reads the autobiographies both to understand the twentieth-century cultural paradigms of maternalism through which the authors perceived their nineteenth-century experiences, and to explore the contrasts between emotional practices in the two centuries. She uses the memoirs to argue against the view that cultural changes occurred without underlying emotional behaviour altering. In other words, she challenges the idea that the ‘facts’ of mother-love might have been the same in both centuries, even though the language of familial relationships and affection changed as one century gave way to the other. She argues, on the contrary, that autobiographical evidence suggests that the form that emotional ties take is not a historical constant. As in the case of James Barrett’s memoir-based study of emotion in the CPUSA, Griffin’s analysis of emotional relationships in Victorian families supports Reddy’s argument that the cultural norms and expectations that constitute a society’s emotional regime themselves shape emotional experience.80 Like Barrett, however, Griffin does not take a psychoanalytic approach. In contrast, Michael Roper analyses a set of memoirs by one man to understand how they were affected by the psychological, as well as the cultural, contexts in which they were written. Lyndall Urwick produced numerous accounts of his First World War experiences between 1914 and the 1970s. Roper’s specific focus is on Urwick’s ‘re-remembering’ of his withdrawal as a junior officer from the front at Aisne in September 1914 due to enteritis (intestinal inflammation), which ensured his survival in the face of almost certain death in the imminent Aisne offensive. Roper’s comparison of Urwick’s accounts of this episode with each other and with the Battalion diary provides much evidence of autobiographical selectivity and inaccuracy.81 His aim, however, is not to expose Urwick’s ‘re-remembering’ as invalid, but to understand its origins and meanings by interrogating each account in relation to the moment in time when it was composed.82 Roper claims that three factors interact in the process of composing a memoir at any particular moment: public narratives; psychic needs; and position in the life

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course. On the first of these, Roper’s argument is that the public narrative of the soldier hero that prevailed in the decades following the First World War emphasised the bravery and endurance at the heart of military masculinity, and provided a socially valued framework within which Urwick could explore his wartime experiences. This story interacted with other ‘cultural scripts’ such as those concerning the incompetence of the unheroic staff officer, who, safe behind the lines ordered men to their deaths.83 It also shifted over time, incorporating, for example, greater public acceptance of shell shock as part of the trench soldier’s experience after the Second World War, and, in the 1970s, growing scepticism about ‘honourable’ military traditions in general. Roper argues that, while such public narratives provided the language and concepts in which Urwick could express his memories, ‘the psychic needs of the past and the present’ simultaneously drove the formation of memory in his unconscious.84 Urwick composed his first account in a letter to his mother shortly after the event. In this, Roper argues, Urwick presents the war as play and the soldier as a child, crawling away from danger, in an unconscious appeal ‘to his mother’s memory of the sick infant’.85 Urwick wrote his first memoir in 1955, at the height of his reputation as a management expert, when he was hoping for a knighthood. His military status (he had ended the war as a major) gave him kudos, but his age and status in 1955 placed him in a similar position to that of the staff officer of the First World War, reviled by young men such as he had been in 1914. He now endeavoured to rehabilitate the figure of the staff officer as a force for good rather than a cowardly incompetent.86 He concentrated in this 1955 memoir on his own period as an officer behind the lines, referring only briefly to his enteritis, and focusing on the social value of administration, which was at the heart of the philosophy of management he had subsequently developed. Urwick’s 1970s memoir, in contrast, was written at a time when he was disappointed about his lack of recognition; he had not received a knighthood. Roper suggests that, in this memoir, Urwick was trying to resolve his memories of fear and humiliation, which now, in the context of changing public languages of war, could be publicly addressed. Roper uses the Freudian theory of psychic ‘splitting’ between the ego (fear, desire to escape) and the superego (duty, loyalty), to suggest that Urwick could at last acknowledge the tension between the two. He argues that, in the 1970s, Urwick turned away from individualistic ambition and instead represented the war as an occasion for collective endeavour, stressing active service and the solidarity of the regimental soldier. This focus, however, stimulated selfdoubt about his own bravery and comradeship in leaving the front for a base camp job because of his sickness, making the Aisne incident too uncomfortable for direct recall. It prompted the production of a ‘screen memory’ of being ordered to withdraw, rather than crawling away of his own accord, that is, a memory that ‘screened’, or covered up, his shameful memory of the triumph of fear over duty.87 Roper argues that Urwick’s obsessive memoir-writing was indicative of ‘the continued capacity of his feelings to haunt’ over a period of sixty years, and that his efforts were an attempt ‘to forget the events of the Aisne by re-remembering

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them’.88 The connections between writing, psychic needs at different life stages, and shifting public narratives explain the discrepancies between Urwick’s numerous versions of this episode in his life. Historical practice that seeks the history of emotion in personal narratives, and that which uses a psychoanalytic methodology to elicit the production of memory as a psychological process, are different tasks, while having much in common. The features they share include a commitment to the idea that the memoir is a construction involving conscious and unconscious choices, that it is shaped by models of identity and of autobiographical genre that shift over time, and that it composes subjectivity. There is a wide gulf between these approaches and history premised on the idea that autobiographies reflect reality which uses data extracted from memoirs to generalise about economic and social developments. A key difference is that characteristics of the memoir that are regarded as ‘distortions’ by historians who aggregate and average, such as selectivity and the refraction of later ideologies, are seen as vital clues to the history of emotional and psychological processes by those who focus on subjectivity. However, all three historical methods depend on what can be found in the archives. Roper’s methodology in ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero’ depends not only on a commitment to a psychoanalytical approach to personal narratives, but also on the sources he was able to access. The availability of repeated accounts of the same experiences composed at different points in a person’s life, as well as access to appropriate alternative sources (notably, in his case, the Battalion history) make it possible to identify the key inconsistencies that are clues to the underlying psychic processes influencing the production of numerous different narratives.

Audience The readership for a memoir is part of the diachronic relationship within which it is produced. It is integral to what David Vincent describes as the ‘event of communication’ and what Donald Spence refers to as ‘the enabling context’ of memory.89 ‘Audiences’ include not only family or other readers close to the memoirist, but also publishers, sponsors, and editors, as well as the wider reading public. Historians engage with the influence of these audiences in a variety of ways, from seeking to minimise what they see as the distortion resulting from the pressures they exert, to endeavouring to understand the content of the memoir in the context of the writer’s relationship to his or her readership. David Vincent, Wendy Webster and Mary Jo Maynes all point out that the working-class autobiographies of the nineteenth century that achieved publication in Britain, France and Germany were written for the middle class, the reading public that spent money on books.90 This motivation increases Jane Humphries’ suspicion of the reliability of memoirists, some of whom she suspects of inventing or embroidering adventurous lives to boost their sales.91 Webster and Vincent, however, see the use of literacy to procure earnings as just another way of deploying labour power, and the relationship with readers as an important aspect of

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the ‘event of communication’. Webster discusses the autobiography of a povertystricken woman, Jane Jowitt, written in the 1840s, which was in part a plea for charity to support her in her old age, and was cast in the registers of respectability and gender that, Webster argues, the author regarded as appropriate for a middleclass readership. The style and form of the memoir were ‘imitative of the language of this audience’, involving literary references and quotations from Shakespeare.92 Middle-class codes provided Jowitt with a framework within which to present herself as one of the deserving poor, a woman who had striven for respectable independence but who was overtaken by misfortunes and suffering, and who merited relief from wealthy benefactors. Vincent takes a different approach. He argues that the practice of writing for the middle class gave memoirists the opportunity to assert working-class identity across the class divide. He suggests that composing an autobiography was an opportunity to reconstitute the wholeness of a working-class life in the face of the dehumanising force of political economy, as well as to challenge the stereotypes presented in the press. Specific groups had particular messages to communicate: working-class radicals wanted to record their contribution to history, and ex-servicemen after the Napoleonic Wars wrote in protest at their post-war neglect. Common to both groups was the ‘fear that their political past was in danger of obliteration’.93 From the middle-class point of view, reading the memoirs of loyal, patriotic workingclass individuals was reassuring in the context of the increasingly bitter and confrontational class relations of the first half of the nineteenth century.94 Vincent acknowledges the influence of middle-class codes such as those that Webster perceives in Jane Jowitt’s writing, but he regards the working-class memoir as a relatively robust form in itself, that drew in the main on two popular forms in expressing the personal past, the spiritual autobiography and the oral tradition of fireside story telling.95 Publishers were, though, a vital part of the process: without them an author could not reach a wide public. Vincent sees their influence as interfering with the content and organisation of working-class memoir, and he uses the language of ‘distortion’ to describe it. He does not, however, regard such shaping pressures as having an invalidating effect. He also rejects the idea that it is possible to ‘eliminate or average out the problem of distortion’. He warns, however, that there is a need to ‘clarify the influence’ of publishers, editors and intended audiences.96 Such ‘clarification’ is at the centre of Ryan Hanley’s treatment of the autobiography of an eighteenth-century slave, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, published in 1772.97 The problem that Hanley seeks to explain concerns the attitude to slavery expressed in this memoir. He explains that Gronniosaw’s Narrative was the first text ‘claiming to have been written by a black author to be published in Britain’, but in contrast to later slave narratives, it did not call for the abolition of the slave trade.98 On the contrary, it adopted a tone of ‘obsequious humility’ towards slave owners, and its stance on slavery was, at best, ‘subdued’ and, at worst, compliant.99 As a result, the Narrative did not, in any obvious way, contribute to the anti-slavery movement and

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has been relatively neglected by historians of race, who have expected slave narratives to be documents of resistance. Hanley reconsiders Gronniosaw’s Narrative in order to understand how and why ‘a formerly enslaved author came to produce a text advocating a proslavery ideology’.100 Hanley’s answer underlines the importance of understanding authors’ relationships with their readership and the significance of ‘the moment of now’ in the composition of a memoir. He subscribes to the idea that ‘black writing in the eighteenth century, like all writing, was influenced by a number of factors beyond the author’s memory and imagination’.101 He brings these factors to the surface by researching the publication history, as well as the content, of the Narrative. He focuses on the members of the network involved in the production process, the religious doctrine to which they adhered, their participation in slave-owning, and Gronniosaw’s dependence upon them. He explains that, at the time of publication, 1772, Calvinists were under attack from Arminian (Wesleyan) Methodists for their support of, and involvement in, the slave trade. Calvinists believed that enslaving non-Christian Africans brought them to God, whereas Methodists argued that corporeal freedom was necessary to achieve salvation. Hanley argues that ‘the financiers, amanuensis, producers, printer and readers of Gronniosaw’s text were Calvinists seeking to prove that freedom was not necessary to achieve salvation. Many of them derived the bulk of their wealth from the institution [of slavery]. It can hardly be surprising, then, that the Narrative does not call for the abolition of the slave trade.’102 Hanley’s argument is not that Gronniosaw’s memoir is ‘distorted’ by these pressures, and should, as a result, be disregarded. Rather, he suggests that a Calvinist subjectivity is composed in the Narrative. It is impossible to disentangle it from either the Gronniosaw whose historical existence Hanley verifies from sources outside the autobiography (including correspondence, baptismal records and an obituary), or from the imaginations of those with whom Gronniosaw interacted and upon whom he was dependent. Yet this life story, read as a product of its specific social and cultural context, offers us an enhanced understanding of the interconnected history of slavery, religion, race and black writing. The work of Vincent, Webster and Hanley suggests in different ways the power of audience to shape the self-presentation within an autobiography. These historians argue that this mediation does not reduce the reliability and resonance of the memoir as a historical source. On the contrary, exploration of the publication history of, and the readership for, a memoir in the context of shifting belief systems, economic relationships, and public discourses, augments the history that it is possible to write.

Rethinking the past for the present Audience also occupies an important position in an analysis of the autobiographies of Indian women politicians by Annie Devenish, and a discussion of Soviet subjectivity based on communist autobiographies by Igal Halfin.103 In the hands of

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these historians the implications of the writing context for the past that is written about are yet more profound. The diachronic relationship not only shapes the past constructed in the autobiographical text but, in these cases, transforms it. Devenish analyses the relationship between the political and cultural context in which three Indian women politicians wrote their memoirs, the audience they addressed, and the selves they ‘performed’.104 The autobiographies focus on three periods of political engagement in their life courses: the anti-colonial, nationalist movement of the 1920s and 1930s; electoral and parliamentary politics in the 1930s and 1940s; and the years after Independence in 1947. The women wrote their autobiographies in the very different political circumstances of the 1970s and 1980s, and Devenish sees this moment of communication as transforming their pasts. She regards the texts as sites of self-performance that provided a stage upon which each author offered a public version of herself which engaged with the present context of her audience.105 The diachronic character of the memoirs is central to Devenish’s analysis. She explains that, from the late 1960s to the 1980s, a second-wave women’s movement developed in India. It questioned the legacy of the first-wave movement to which the three women, Ray, Pandit, and Chattopadhyay, belonged, and criticised the limited effects of earlier equality and legal reforms. Writing in this context, the older women activists saw their memoirs as handing on to the younger generation the lessons they had learned and the principles by which they had operated politically. Central to the older women’s view of themselves and society was the idea that merit, rather than articulations of gender, class or caste difference, had conditioned their political careers. They rejected the strategy adopted by present day Indian feminists of making political claims based on difference. Their memoirs denied antagonism between the sexes and insisted on the importance to women of qualifying for political participation as citizens, rather than, as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay put it, ‘isolating themselves from a cohesive society’ by claiming special privileges as women.106 Devenish observes that maintaining this approach required significant omissions from the memoirs. Aspects of the life history that illustrated the discriminatory practices inherent in ‘the gender relations of their day’ could not be included.107 For example, Devenish understands, from a biography, that Chattopadhyay defied Hindu tradition, first by remarrying as a widow in 1923, and then again by divorcing her violent second husband in 1933, at a time when divorce was taboo. This deviance from the gendered moral code prevailing in India in the 1920s and 1930s constrained her political career: because of it Mahatma Gandhi blocked her appointment to the Executive of the Congress Party in 1936. Devenish states, however, that Chattopadhyay makes no mention of this in her autobiography, according to which she made a deliberate choice to devote herself to creative work focused on the revival of village handicrafts (part of the Gandhian political philosophy of rural self-sufficiency) rather than to the political struggle for positions of power. Devenish explains the silences in the autobiography as a form of self-protection from the public gaze. She argues that Chattopadhyay explicitly separates the story

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of her public career from that of ‘the private self lodged within inner recesses of her relationships and emotions’.108 She suggests that Chattopadhyay did not want her readers to judge her anew for the choices she had made concerning marriage and family, nor did she want the Gandhian movement, within which she had forged an independent professional identity, to be judged as discriminatory. Such a portrayal could only fuel the demands of Indian women in the 1970s and 1980s for a new feminist politics based on gender difference. Devenish’s work supports the conclusion of Richards and Mather that politicians who write memoirs are ‘driven by a concern with legacy and the desire to convey a particular version of history’.109 The feminist and post-colonial lenses which Devenish deploys enable her to tease out, in addition, the didactic and intergenerational dimensions of this motivation in the case of these Indian women politicians, and to show audience, diachronics and selectivity at work in the construction of memoir. The intertwined effects of diachronics and audiences are also powerfully illustrated by the life histories that Igal Halfin discusses in his book Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. 110 Halfin explains that written autobiographies, between one and five pages in length, were required of all applicants for Communist Party membership in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from members who were subjected to scrutiny because of suspected political deviance.111 These were, then, enforced autobiographies in the sense that they were not undertaken as voluntary exercises but in response to the requirements of a higher authority. They were quite different from the American Communist memoirs discussed earlier in this chapter, which were not written as part of applications to join or stay in the CPUSA but as retrospective accounts of current or former membership, and were produced, published and sold within a relatively liberal democratic regime. Halfin’s research focuses on students and academics at institutions of higher education in three Soviet cities, Leningrad, Tomsk and Smolensk.112 He explains that there was no official guidance about how applicants should present their autobiographies to the Communist authorities, but expectations were communicated by numerous examples that circulated via lectures, newspaper articles and evenings of reminiscence.113 Halfin does not comment on these models, but his account suggests a marked emphasis on narratives of emotional disentanglement rather than the formation of affective relationships, consistent with the cultures of communism observed by Barrett and other historians.114 Halfin’s emphasis is on the process of selectivity involved in compiling a suitable autobiography: ‘Rather than providing a detailed individual chronicle, the studentautobiographer carefully selected and ordered a set of events from his past, typically presenting a complex narrative.’115 This needed to be interpretative, imbuing the life story with meaning, and had to focus above all on the author’s conversion to Communism. ‘Whatever precipitated the awakening of the Communist autobiographer was right; whatever obstructed it was wrong.’116 The autobiography was written for, and was judged by, members of the local Communist Party cell, who might require the student to read it out, and who questioned him or her about it, at a Party meeting.

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Halfin sees the pressures to produce the right sort of autobiography as extremely powerful, but he does not conceptualise the outcome in terms of distortion. Rather, he draws on post-structuralist theory to distance himself from the idea that there were realities in the outside world that could be distorted in the autobiography. He argues that the interaction of the autobiographer with public discourse is all-important: Communist ideology generated a notion of the revolutionary self with which the autobiographical subject was closely involved, and to which the writing contributed. ‘The forces that shaped the New Man did not operate from top to bottom … or from bottom to top …, but constituted a field of play delimited by a set of Communist beliefs and practices.’117 Applicants worked within this discursive field, reproducing the identities it offered, to delineate in their autobiographies their progress towards the person worthy of Communist Party membership that they hoped to present. Their audiences sought to interpret the autobiographies not only in terms of the details of the life history they offered, but also as evidence of deeper aspects of the character of the applicant. Halfin regards this as paralleling a religious process of spiritual growth, conversion, and acceptance into the ‘brotherhood of the elect’, hence his description of it as ‘the Communist hermeneutics of the soul’.118 Halfin’s post-structuralist understanding of the self that is inscribed in the autobiography marks him out among historians who use memoir and autobiography. He indicates that his analysis is of the subject as constituted by the text, and he argues that this figure is essentially literary. The autobiographer, according to Halfin, is not ‘a real historical actor’ but ‘the protagonist abstracted from an autobiography’.119 His point is that we can only know autobiographers through the way they present themselves in their writing, which means that the autobiography is ‘a locus of discourse rather than a reflection of a self’.120 Some of the historians discussed in this chapter (such as Humphries) would not accept this position, on the grounds that autobiographical writing is based on, and provides data about, the material realities of a life. Others (including Vincent, Griffin, Roper, Steedman, and Webster) might be more open to such ideas, but would seek to understand the distinction between the ‘historical actor’ and the ‘protagonist abstracted from an autobiography’ not as a sharp division but as a relationship, for which the autobiography itself offers evidence that may be supplemented from other sources. Halfin himself moves towards this position when he writes of a tension between representation and intentionality, that is between ‘the way the author is presented and the way he wanted to appear’.121 He claims to be able to detect this tension in omissions, distortions and insinuations. He may state that he does not see the autobiographer as a ‘real historical actor’, but he nevertheless sees him (or her, although he writes as though gender is insignificant in this history) as an agent at work in the ‘field of play’: ‘Each autobiography tells us something about the way in which authors assimilated, manipulated, and challenged the officially prescribed identity blueprint.’122 Evidence of these processes makes it difficult to regard the people Halfin depicts, fighting for their Party membership in the 1920s, and, in the late 1930s, for their

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lives, as abstracted protagonists rather than historical actors. His sources, in practice, include more than the autobiographies alone. He also draws on questionnaires that applicants and suspects were required to complete, their covering letters, and records of the hearings at which they defended their life histories to the ‘troika’ investigating Oppositionism, and to ‘verification commissions’.123 He vividly reconstructs the cut and thrust of accusation and self-defence, pardon and condemnation, tracing the painful process by which the pressures on Party members shifted over time. By the late 1930s, ‘bad’ choices and associations had become hanging offences for the perpetrators and those they incriminated, even when they had previously been excused and however earnest their recantations. At the end of the book Halfin resurrects the concept of the historical agent, albeit one in a dialectical relationship with public discourse: ‘Only by treating the historical actor not as a stable ethical persona but as an agent and product of an ever-changing official discourse can we reconstruct the actual dynamic that led to the Great Purge.’124 In Halfin’s account, the diachronic relationship between the pre- or erroneousCommunist self of the past and the enlightened self of the present day structured and informed the composition of the applicant’s memoir, which itself contributed to the development of Soviet discourse. He does not suggest that the manipulation of tropes and figures of thought in such cases amounted to fabrication. Rather, he describes them as central to ‘the poetics of autobiography’ that enabled autobiographers to turn the real events in their lives into narratives that contained the right meanings for themselves as aspiring Communists, and for their judges. As Halfin puts it, admission to the Party was momentous, and an applicant would be rejected if this was seen as necessary to protect the purity of the Communist ranks.125 Staying in the Party also required maintaining ‘the purity and consciousness of the Bolshevik self’, evidenced by unwavering adherence to Soviet politics.126 As the Party line shifted over time, and as ‘Oppositionism’ was more precisely defined and vilified, such adherence became increasingly difficult for some to substantiate. Halfin’s account indicates that Soviet autobiographers altered their language and tone in accordance with the political changes. During the Great Purge of 1936–1938, however, an autobiography, even if it was thoroughly proletarian and carefully crafted, could no longer save someone who had been denounced. Halfin effectively traces the rise and fall not only of individual Communist autobiographers, but also of the autobiography as a genre that offered both the means to ‘purify the soul’, and evidence of purification in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Halfin’s post-structuralist approach places the spotlight firmly on the construction of the self through language that constantly required adjustment in relation to shifts in political discourse and audience responses. What his approach omits, however, is contextualisation in the social and material world. One of his more critical reviewers writes, ‘pounding the rather simple texts of these poor kids with such a full arsenal of sophisticated literary theory is sometimes like using a sledgehammer to kill a gnat’.127 The reviewer’s exasperation with post-structuralism is clear, but his comment also inadvertently indicates what is missing from Halfin’s

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discussion. The birth dates of the autobiographers, which appear sporadically in the text, suggest that many of them were not the ‘kids’ that an American professor might be accustomed to teaching. Those born in the 1890s were adults in their twenties, thirties and forties when they were at university, applying to join or stay in the Party in the 1920s, and fighting for their survival in the 1930s. Others were not students at all, but university teachers. Crucial social and material context is missing from Halfin’s account: the social composition of Soviet higher education; the industrial and economic development of the three towns under scrutiny; the interplay of Party membership with gender, religion (particularly Judaism), and family. Halfin evidently regards these social settings as unimportant compared with the cultural and ideological context that informed students’ and academics’ understandings of themselves and the Soviet world, and that provided the language and ideas through which they presented their accounts of themselves. But greater attention to social context and materiality would, arguably, enhance the history of the Soviet subject that he conjures, with the help of post-structuralism, from the autobiographies.

Conclusion This chapter opened with a discussion of the work of an economic historian for whom memoirs are reflections of reality that can provide reliable ‘data’ even though they contain inaccuracies and distortions. It concludes with an example of research informed by post-structuralist theory that regards the protagonist of an autobiography as a literary construction. The objective of the first endeavour is to extract the kinds of facts that make it possible to engage in scholarly debate about economic and social change in a field characterised by quantitative methods. The aim of the final project is to interrogate the subjectivity of the citizens of an oppressive regime as they sought, initially, to integrate themselves and, latterly, to stay alive. These two studies with their very different ambitions were published in 2010 and 2003 respectively, and thus do not bookend a linear development over time. The approach that historians take to the use of memoirs is guided by the questions they pose, and memoirs have, since the 1970s, stimulated a wide range of questions and modes of analysis. Historians have regarded autobiography as providing social and economic information about the past, and they will no doubt continue to do so. There is also, however, widespread and growing acceptance among historians of the essentially literary quality of memoir, and its value as a source of perceptions, attitudes and emotions. Taking this approach is to accept that these personal narratives compose the subject, in other words that subjectivity, constituted through the writing on the page, is a major part of what they have to offer. Historians, as we have seen, vary in the way they read that subjectivity, while they are increasingly open to allowing the memoirist to set the historical agenda. Historians with the tools of cultural analysis in hand have examined the lives depicted in memoirs in order to open doors to wider histories concerning the

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meanings of everyday relationships and the feelings they invoked. They have found, in memoirs, evidence that emotional experience is context-dependent. The cultural norms and expectations that shape it are not static but change over time, and vary between the different communities to which an individual may belong. Relationships and emotions are central to conceptualisations of the psyche. In some historical work inaccuracies, displacements and exaggeration in memoirs are read as psychological evidence about the autobiographer and the characteristics of personhood in the past that she or he exemplifies. These historians do not see deviations from known biographies or other sources, or discrepancies between a memoirist’s accounts of the same experiences over time, as distortions or inaccuracies that call into question the value of the memoir as a historical source. On the contrary, they see such features as offering opportunities to discover new and different ‘truths’. They combine attention to the psyche with a cultural and social approach. In their view, the selectivity of an autobiography is largely unconscious, and it has a relationship to life stage and to public discourse, that is, to the generalised accounts of identity and the social order that circulate in society. Since public discourse has a history, changing over time along with the movement of the individual through the life course, shifts in perceptions of the past and understandings of the self occur during a lifetime. Change works at unconscious as well as conscious levels, legible in the memoir with appropriate tools of analysis. Historians who do not use a psychoanalytic approach, but are committed to a cultural analysis, share this sensitivity to the relationship of memoir to discursive shifts in cultural values over time. Much of the historical practice explored here works with the idea that the composition of a life history in a memoir is diachronic, relating simultaneously to the temporal context of creation in the present, and the past that provides its subject matter. Autobiographical writing does not happen in a social vacuum, and historians have engaged with the mediating influence of audience on the text. The readership of a memoir is part of the enabling context within which the subject constructs his or her history, and, as such, requires historical scrutiny. A wide range of historical work shows that it is possible to identify the influences of audiences on literary form (as well as authors’ resistance to those forms), on self-censorship, and on conformity to (or rebellion against) ideological expectations.128 Historical work that treats subjectivity seriously respects the post-structuralist idea that narratives of the self are shaped within specific contexts by prevailing discourses. However, claims that it is only possible for the historian to study the subject as constituted by the text are relatively rare. Even Halfin, who goes further than others in this direction, does not treat his autobiographers entirely as abstracted protagonists. They are also, in his hands, historical actors, that is, real people, albeit in constant dialogue with the shifting discourses through which they make sense of their lives for particularly pressing purposes. Responses to his work are indicative of a preference within much historical practice not to relinquish the idea of the autobiographer as a historical agent with an existence beyond the page, who can be understood not only textually, but also through the contextualising possibilities of social as well as cultural history.

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Finally, historians’ uses of memoirs show that gender makes a difference. No one claims that memoir has been a particularly feminine form. On the contrary, the relative absence of memoirs by women, before the twentieth century, has been a problem for historians. While some regard women’s autobiographical writing as a form of protest, and others see autobiographical defiance as a social class phenomenon, the gendered features of memoirs repay scrutiny. Many historians insist that accounts written by men and women differ profoundly; others read memoirs for the gendered perspectives of their protagonists even when there do not appear to be marked differences. Memoirs illustrate the interaction of individual men and women with the differentiated expectations relating to male and female behaviour prevalent in societies over time and their contents are shaped by gendered expectations of what a man or a woman may write about.

Notes 1 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Other scholars are similarly inclusive. See, for example, Julia Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995) and Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1992). 2 Carolyn Steedman differentiates between memoir, which she sees as dictated by ‘a series of external factors’, and autobiography, which has as its focus ‘inner experience – lived and felt experience’. Attractive though this distinction is, it is difficult to maintain in practice, and other historians have not followed it. See Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram, 1992), p. 44. 3 There is a large scholarly literature on autobiography, much of it inspired by feminism, which is indicative both of the importance of the turn to the personal for feminist scholarship, and the influence of feminism on the field of auto/biographical study. In addition to other citations made here, ‘classics’ in this extensive field include (in alphabetical order) Shari Benstock, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986); Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 4 Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Pact’ in Paul John Eakin (ed.), Katherine Leary (trans.), On Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 21. 5 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 10. 6 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 14. 7 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject; George Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in J. Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48. 8 David Richards and Helen Mathers, ‘Political Memoirs and New Labour: Interpretations of Power and the “Club Rules”’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12:4, 2010, pp. 498–522.

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9 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self’ in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 25–39. ‘Eighteenth-century enforced narratives and the invented voices of the fictionalized poor from the same period show autobiography to be something that was often demanded: a thing that could be fashioned according to requirement, told and sold, alienated and expropriated’ (p. 36). See also Liz Stanley’s discussion of ‘audit selves’ in ‘From “Self-made Women” to “Women’s Made-selves”: Audit Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Woman’, in Cosslett et al., Feminism and Autobiography, pp. 40–60. 10 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 165–179. 11 Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 5. 12 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 12. For responses from economic historians, see, for example, the review by Peter Kirby, Economic History Review, 64:4, 2011, pp. 1387–1388: ‘the selected autobiographers … tended to write later in life, they were all male, and most of them had acquired literacy through their engagement in political activism or as a consequence of their conversion to religion … It is not clear how the relatively small sample of autobiographies justifies a general conclusion of a widespread fall in the age at starting work during the classic industrial revolution period.’ Kirby refers to autobiographies as ‘exceptionally difficult sources’. 13 John Burnett, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1974); John Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1982); David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study Of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1982); John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (Brighton: Harvester, 1984, 1987, 1989). 14 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 15. 15 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 4. Vincent uses the term ‘relevance’ in the way that scholars now use ‘referentiality’, that is, to ask to what the autobiography relates, and to question the convergence of its contents with historical reference points. 16 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 1. 17 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 24. 18 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p.10. 19 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 19. 20 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 20. 21 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 5, 16. 22 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 6–7. 23 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 6. 24 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 6. 25 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 6. 26 As against this, some of the examples she herself quotes, such as Flora Thompson’s autobiography, Lark Rise to Candleford, suggest anything but accuracy. Barbara English has shown that Thompson omitted numerous ‘facts’ from her account of her family of origin, including her father’s drinking and depression, and the death of four siblings. See Barbara English, ‘Lark Rise and Juniper Hill: A Victorian Community in Literature and in History’, Victorian Studies, 29, 1985, pp. 7–34. Thompson’s memoir is hardly an ‘accurate’ rendering of her childhood, even if the details of her own schooling and of the timing and nature of her first job are correct (and would have been usable by Humphries, had she included girls in her study). While Humphries acknowledges English’s work, she does not allow it to modify her view of the basic accuracy of accounts of working-class childhoods. Thompson’s omissions are the kinds of deviations from biographical detail that cultural historians such as Carolyn Steedman find fascinating, and, as we shall see later, seek to explain.

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51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 19. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 20. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 13. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 10. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 8, 11. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 6. Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 10. Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 2. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 199 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, p. 55. Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, p. 244. Griffin explains that the eighteenth-century workers’ memoirs that have survived were written because of the success that the author achieved. In contrast memoirs of the period 1790 to 1850 were mostly more humble documents of personal change, often written as part of an effort to develop the author’s literacy or at the behest of their children. Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, p. 45. Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, p. 246. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 6, 16, also 24. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. xii. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 13. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 13–14, also p. xii. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 137. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 137. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 137. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 138. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 142. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 147–148. For an opposed interpretation of the working-class father relating to the later Victorian period, see Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class. She traces the many ways in which the affective importance of fathers features in the adult memories inscribed in autobiographies, concluding that ‘the marginalization of men in family life is false’ (p. 211). Malin Nilson, Review, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 59:3, 2011, pp. 296–298, here p. 297. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 146. Ginger Frost, Review, Journal of British Studies, 50:2, 2011, pp. 516–517, here p. 517. See, among her other publications, Ginger S. Frost, Victorian Childhoods (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009). Wendy Webster, ‘Our Life: Working-class Women’s Autobiography in Britain’, in Frances Bonner, Lizbeth Goodman, Richard Allen, Linda Janes and Catherine King (eds.), Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender (London: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 116–127, here pp. 123, 126. These are the same preoccupations as those of Steedman’s autobiographical account of her own and her mother’s lives, in the 1920s and the 1950s. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986). Carolyn Steedman, ‘Kathleen Woodward’s Jipping Street’, in Steedman, Past Tenses, p. 119. Steedman, Past Tenses, p. 125. Steedman, Past Tenses, p. 119. Webster, ‘Our Life: Working-class Women’s Autobiography in Britain’; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Helen Rogers, ‘“First in the House” Daughters on Working-class Fathers and Fatherhood’, in T. Broughton and H. Rogers (eds.), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 126–137; Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class.

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60 James R. Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism’, International Review of Social History, 53, 2008, pp. 395–423, here p. 397. Barrett uses upper case for Communist Party and lower case to refer to ‘communism’, ‘communist’ and ‘the party’. I have followed this practice here. 61 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 400. 62 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 397. 63 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 423. 64 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ pp. 414. 65 In the case of Peggy Dennis the separation from her son lasted a lifetime, when his supposedly temporary stay in a Comintern Children’s Home in the USSR turned into a permanent arrangement. Barrett writes, ‘Peggy Dennis recalls the anguish she felt in this situation’. Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’, p. 415. 66 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 407. 67 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 423. 68 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 423. 69 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 418. 70 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). We shall meet Reddy again in the next section. 71 Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ p. 421. 72 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), pp. 93, 94. Tosh’s examples are mostly modern political autobiographies. 73 Emma Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood: Love, Culture and Poverty in Victorian England’, American Historical Review, 123:1, 2018, pp. 60–85, here p. 66. 74 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood’, p. 67. 75 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood’, p. 68. 76 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood,’ p. 68. She makes the point that memoirs involved ‘the rendering of complex lived experiences into simple, intelligible narratives, acceptable to surviving family members, to the book-buying public, or to other audiences. Inevitably, finished works contain silences, absences, and contradictions’ p. 66. 77 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood,’ p. 71. 78 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood,’ p. 71. 79 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood,’ p. 71. 80 Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood,’ p. 63, citing Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. 81 Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, (Autumn) 2000 (50): pp. 181–204. 82 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, p. 184, drawing on Donald Spence, ‘Passive Remembering’, in U. Neisser and E. Winograd (eds.), Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 311–325. 83 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, pp. 188. 84 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, p. 183. 85 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, pp. 194. 86 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, p. 188. 87 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, p. 192. 88 Roper, ‘Re-remembering’, p. 192. 89 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 5. Spence, ‘Passive Remembering’, p. 321. 90 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 9; Webster, ‘Our Life’, p. 117; Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Gender and Narrative Form in French and German Working-class Autobiographies’, in Personal Narratives Group (ed.), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 103–117, here p. 113.

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91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120

Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 17, 22. Wendy Webster, ‘Our Life’, p. 118. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 27. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 36. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 37. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 10. Ryan Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 35:1, 2015 (published online September 2014), pp. 1–22. Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, p. 1. Several black authors had been published in America in the 1760s. See Hanley, note 3. Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, p. 2 (quoting Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen [eds.], Black Writers in Britain 1760–1890 [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991], p. 7) and p. 14. Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, p. 4. Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, p. 3. Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, p. 16. Each faction used pamphlets and conversion stories to promote its cause, and Gronniosaw’s Narrative was sold as one of these. Annie Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self: A Study of Identity Making and Self Representation in the Autobiographies of India’s First Generation of Parliamentary Women’, Women’s History Review, 22:2, 2013, pp. 280–294. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). The women are Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988), Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990), and Renuka Ray (1904–1997). Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self’, p. 283. Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self’, p. 291, quoting Kamala Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses Outer Spaces: Memoirs (New Delhi: Navrang, 1986), pp. 123–124. Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self’, p. 292. Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self’, p. 289. Richards and Mathers, ‘Political Memoirs and New Labour’, p. 518. Unlike Barrett, Halfin uses upper case to refer to ‘Communist’, ‘Communism’ and ‘the Party’, so I have followed this convention here. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 43. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 28. Halfin explains that students and academics were considered within the Party to be particularly prone to mental and physical degeneration and political deviance, and universities were seen as potential hotbeds of oppositional ideas. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, pp. 44–45. Barrett, ‘Was the Personal Political?’ discussed above. See also Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006), discussed in Chapter 3. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 45. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 48. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, pp. 43–44. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 7. The term ‘hermeneutics’ refers to the theory and method of interpretation as applied to textual and non-textual sources of communication. The term was originally used in relation to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scriptural and philosophical texts. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 44. Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 19. The literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, elaborate on the idea that individuals are constituted through discursive practices, in Chapter 2 of Reading Autobiography, pp. 15–48.

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121 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 44. 122 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 44. In discussing these ideas, Halfin acknowledges his debt to post-structuralist historians and philosophers such as Hayden White and Charles Taylor, as well as to post-colonial theorists, notably Gayatri Spivak. 123 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, pp. 59–60, 213, 221. Halfin emphasises that the survival of such records is patchy, see especially pp. 214–215. 124 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 271. 125 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 59. 126 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 98. 127 J. Arch Getty, Review, Journal of Modern History, 78:3, 2006, pp. 787–789, here p. 787. 128 For an example, from African scholarship, of an analysis of the influence of different audiences on the production of multiple memoirs by one man, see Stephan Miescher, ‘The Life Histories of Boakye Yiadom (Akasease Kofi of Abetifi, Kwawu): Exploring the Subjectivity and “Voices” of a Teacher-catechist in Colonial Ghana’ in Luise White, Stephan Miescher and David William Cohen (eds.), African Words, African Voices. Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 162–193.

5 ORAL HISTORY AND HISTORICAL PRACTICE

In the 1970s and 1980s historians across the globe became excited about the potential of face-to-face interviews, recorded on tape, for opening up new areas of history. In the European and African contexts, in particular, historians saw oral history as giving a voice to those hidden from history, including the intersecting categories of women, workers, black people and the colonised, and restoring them to the place they had been denied in the historical record.1 Elizabeth Roberts, pioneering British oral historian, argued in 1984 that such an endeavour was urgent. Although social observers and reformers had written extensively about the working class in the early twentieth century, and historians had drawn on their work, ‘it is rather less common to hear or read about how working-class people saw their own lives’.2 She claimed that ‘ordinary people’ rarely kept diaries or wrote letters, making oral evidence vital: ‘Through old people’s spoken testimony about their lives and those of their parents, one can attempt to reconstruct a picture of everyday life over the last century.’3 As Roberts indicates, oral history has been prized for enabling historians to address areas of social life for which written documentation is particularly lacking. Labour historians in the 1970s and 1980s used the methodology to research the history of workers beyond the formal records of employers and trade unions.4 Historians of the more private and intimate aspects of life, such as marriage, family and sexuality, valued the opportunity to ask questions directly in order to compensate for sparse or reticent written sources, including diaries, letters and memoirs.5 Thought of as ‘recovery history’, oral history has been used to elicit the memories of those involved in a great many areas of human activity in order to rescue them from historical omission. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think of an aspect of social life in which giving participants a voice does not add to the historical record, even when other evidence exists.6

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The development of oral history stands out from that of other genres of personal narrative in five main respects. First, the genre involves the generation of sources by historians themselves. A subfield of history has developed in which historians attribute to themselves and their practice the main distinction between these types of personal narratives and others – its orality. The terms ‘oral history’ and ‘oral historian’ are in general use, whereas equivalents such as ‘memoir history’ and ‘personal document historian’ are not. Second, because of the indispensability to oral history of living interviewees, use of the method as it has developed in the past four decades has necessarily focused on the relatively recent past, that is the period since the late nineteenth century. However, the insights of oral history theory have been applied to much earlier periods, and they have also been used to understand aspects of the oral tradition, that is the transmission by word of mouth of stories of family and community, including those containing magical or supernatural elements.7 Third, changing technology helped the take-up of the method, notably the reduction in size of recording equipment, from the heavy reel-to-reel machines of the 1960s through the cassette recorders of the 1970s to the 1990s, to the small digital instruments of the 2000s and the tiny combined audio and video recorders of the 2010s. Historians who use other types of personal narratives are not dependent on technology in this way. Fourth, there has been an enthusiastic take-up of the method outside academia. Non-academic groups have used oral history for a wide variety of purposes, including therapeutic reminiscence work with the elderly, legal advocacy (such as aboriginal land claims), and processes of truth and reconciliation.8 Historians in and out of such groups have been concerned with the ethics of oral history interviewing, and the effectiveness of oral narration for the purpose in hand. Finally, to a greater extent than in the case of other genres, users of oral history have been required to defend its reliability for historical research. Distinguished and influential historians, including A. J. P. Taylor and Eric Hobsbawm, dismissed the methodology in its early decades. Taylor wrote in 1972 of oral history as ‘old men drooling about their youth’ and Hobsbawm declared in 1997, ‘Most oral history today is personal memory which is a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts.’9 The doubts expressed about oral history were more strongly urged than they were for other types of personal narratives for two reasons: its non-documentary status, and its similarity to social science methodologies that also used interviewing techniques. The first implied that oral history was at odds with traditional historical archival practice. The second invited suspicion because relatively open-ended interviews did not elicit data that was readily susceptible to quantitative methods, at a time when these were dominant within social science, and when social scientists who favoured a qualitative approach were struggling to assert its value.10 This produced, in the early days, vigorous defences of oral techniques that confirmed oral history’s development as a sub-field.11 It also led, over time, to productive engagement with the meanings of ‘reliability’ and ‘unreliability’ that enhanced understandings of the potential of oral testimony for historical research.

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Such engagement was encouraged by the ascendancy of autobiography in the humanities and social sciences in dialogue with the four intellectual trends outlined in Chapter 1: the cultural turn propelled by post-structuralism; feminism; post-colonialism; and psychoanalysis. These developments made a huge difference to the acceptability among historians of evidence that was reliant on memory and was produced retrospectively in conversation with another person. The understanding that all history consists of narratives about the past, whether these are stories told by governments, film-makers, historians or individuals talking about their own lives, had the potential to break down hierarchies of knowledge sources.12 And the acknowledgement that narratives are subjective, and are composed for specific audiences in quite particular ways, opened up spaces in which to analyse and interpret the meanings under construction. The incorporation of thinking about narrativity and subjectivity into oral history practice represents a major change since its early days as ‘recovery history’. In 2010, reflecting on the development of oral history as a method and a discipline, the American oral historian, Ron Grele, argued that a shift had taken place from a focus on witnesses who could supply historians with facts, to one on meanings and subjectivities, or, as he put it, ‘from concern with data to concern with text’.13 The trajectory from facts to meanings should not be overstated. On the one hand, oral history continues to be used to recover evidence about the past, and this can have considerable political importance, as in the case of the ‘fact finding’ oral histories about women’s experiences of the Partition of India, and of conflict in Kashmir, compiled by Urvashi Butalia.14 On the other hand, early oral historians such as Elizabeth Roberts and Paul Thompson may have set out with the idea of collecting evidence about the past from oral testimony, but they were also interested in how people saw and spoke about their own lives. Furthermore, even though Grele is of course right that there is an increasing amount of work that regards oral history recordings less as sources to be mined for data and more as texts to decode, practitioners of the cultural approach do not minimise its demands. As the historian Daniel James puts it, ‘if oral testimony is indeed a window onto the subjective in history – the cultural, social, and ideological universe of historical actors – then it must be said that the view it affords is not a transparent one’.15 As we shall see, oral historians do not all take the same approach to its challenges. Sceptics in the 1970s and 1980s argued that the methodology was flawed in two crucial respects. One was that memory was an unreliable medium from which to reconstruct the past because it is selective, affected by the cultural context in which recall takes place, and susceptible to interactions with an interviewer. The other objection was that oral history interviewees could never be representative of larger populations, implying that well-founded generalisation would be impossible.16 Even historians who have adopted a cultural or, to use Alistair Thomson’s term, a post-positivist approach that focuses on meanings rather than on quantification, feel the need to address these complaints, to a greater or lesser extent.17 I tackle the issue of representativeness in Chapter 6. This chapter explores oral historians’ responses to critiques of the reliability of memory and the validity of the method, and investigates their engagement with the turn to narrative and subjectivity.

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Section one considers historians’ responses to three types of alleged unreliability in oral history narratives: the collective misremembering of an event; contradictions within one person’s life history; and inconsistencies between different groups describing a shared past. In the examples used, the historians concerned do not back away from the complexities of the memories they tapped, but probe the seeming inaccuracies to search out their deeper meanings. They are all, in different ways, committed to Alessandro Portelli’s idea that ‘errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings’.18 In the second section of the chapter I explore oral historians’ responses to the relationship between the present and the past in personal recall. One of the criticisms of oral history has been that, since memory stories are composed after the event, they are contaminated by present-day ways of thinking, such that ‘oral history provides one with modern attitudes rather than access to attitudes from the past’.19 A response to this accusation is to insist that there is never a clear space from which to view ourselves. As we saw in relation to memoir in the previous chapter, public discourses and ideologies are active as we live our lives, mediating our understandings of ourselves and the meanings of our experience contemporaneously as well as retrospectively. This is particularly obvious in repressive regimes where present consciousness as well as collective memory is fed by officially sponsored master narratives which personal stories tend to reproduce.20 But public versions of the social order, past and present, are influential in all societies. Feminist scholars have insisted that the gendered, classed and raced character of such public discourses imposes contradictory burdens on women and men concerning what it means socially and culturally to be who they are. It is never possible to fulfil all the demands of ideal femininity or masculinity, and the gap between what we perceive ourselves to be, and what we believe we should be, makes some experiences and feelings hard to express.21 In this section I discuss oral historians’ explorations of the relationship of public discourses concerning gender and sexuality to personal recall and narration. The third section addresses historians’ responses to the idea that memories are constructed in dialogue with the public interpretations of the past that circulate through, for example, film and television, schooling and politics. I examine oral historians’ explorations of the dialogue of narrators with specific versions of the past presented in such media. And I discuss the work of historians who argue that individual memory responds to, and itself contributes to, such cultural constructions, and that it is possible to study these interactive processes historically.22 In the fourth section I explore historical work that engages with silences and evasions in oral testimony. Oral history offers interviewees the chance of achieving composure, in the dual sense of composing a coherent account of the personal past and achieving psychic and emotional equilibrium from its telling, that is, getting a sense of inner well-being from the process of recall. Personal composure is never assured, however, but depends on many factors. These include the narrator’s state of mind, conditioned for example by how secure she feels about the value of her life, what kinds of memories the moment of recall stimulates, and how the

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audience for reminiscence responds.23 Oral history risks the opposite of composure, that is, the inability of the narrator to tell a comfortable story of the self, resulting in a state of ‘discomposure’, evident in confusion, distress and silence.24 The issues of composure and discomposure recur in what follows, but the fourth section focuses on their relationship to silence, exploring the contrasting approaches of three historians who have sought to make silences speak. Each uses oral history to study memories of difficult periods of the past. Throughout the chapter, I comment on two features of oral historians’ work that are characteristic of wider historical practice, and one that is peculiar to oral history. These are historians’ uses, in conjunction with oral testimony, of a variety of written documentation; their contextualisation of narrators’ histories of the self in material circumstances; and their attention to the effects on the oral narrative of the intersubjective relationship between interviewer and interviewee.

Reliability and the cultural turn Alessandro Portelli introduced a now widely celebrated essay, first published in 1981, by stating, ‘The oral sources used in this essay are not always fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a weakness, this is however, their strength.’25 It was a challenge to the evidential preoccupation of social historians at the time, and opened up new ways of thinking about memory-based testimony. The details are as follows. While researching the relationship of folk song to working-class identity and consciousness in the Italian steel town of Terni, Portelli kept coming across accounts of a dramatic and tragic event in the town. This concerned the occasion when the police shot dead a twenty-one-year-old steel worker, Luigi Trastulli. Portelli became interested in these accounts, and recorded them. There were many different versions, but a relatively consistent feature was the chronological displacement of the shooting of Trastulli from a pacifist demonstration against NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in 1949, to an industrial dispute prompted by the sacking of over 2,000 workers from the steel works in 1953. Portelli explains this collective misremembering in terms of its symbolic value. Trastulli’s killing symbolised for the workers of Terni the assault of the employers and state authorities on their way of life. Hence they embedded it in the mass layoffs of 1953 that devastated the town’s working population, rather than the peace demonstration of 1949. Other shifts accompanied the construction of this central symbol: narrators relocated Trastulli’s death from the midst of the crowd of workers pouring down the street from the factory to a wall occupied by him alone, arms outstretched, on which the shooting left a smear of blood. Portelli sees this as evoking both relatively recent wartime executions of resistance partisans, and folk versions of the death of Christ. He observes that narrators also rearranged their own personal chronologies to fit the placing of the event in the context of the huge upheavals of 1953, which marked a turning point in all their personal histories. He suggests that they merged the two dramatic events in Terni’s history – the shooting of Trastulli and the massive factory layoffs – into one coherent story that

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illuminated and encapsulated their own life histories. He also offers a psychological explanation for the ‘inaccuracies’ in the story. Details, he says, were manipulated to compensate for the humiliation of the killing of Trastulli in two dimensions: the inadequacy of the workers’ response to a comrade’s death (since, although the workers were angry, there was no organised protest); and their larger powerlessness to counter either layoffs at the factory or international political alliances, both of which they saw as hostile to their interests as workers. Portelli concludes the essay: ‘Beyond the event itself, the real and significant historical fact which these narratives highlight is the memory itself.’26 Portelli’s analysis dramatically added the idea of ‘truths beyond the fact’ to the historical agenda. But while this was novel, in other ways he worked as a conventional historian. He writes that he began his enquiry by checking the archival and printed records ‘to attempt as faithful and minute a reconstruction as possible’.27 Rather than seeing the documentary sources as correcting the oral accounts, however, he draws attention to the many errors in the newspaper reports (including the misnaming of Trastulli), as well as the ways in which the police reports and the district attorney’s account did not simply record the event, but attempted to build up a case against the workers by implying that they were demonstrating illegally and thus themselves responsible for Trastulli’s death. Portelli’s meticulous scholarship shows that neither the documentary nor the oral sources are ‘accurate’. His objective in comparing the two types of accounts is not to condemn either as ‘biased’, which is too crude and simplistic a concept for his analysis, but to understand the ‘subjective truths’ of the oral narratives, through ‘the creative “errors” they contained’.28 A different kind of inconsistency in oral history is analysed by Justin Willis, a historian of Africa. He discovered what he describes as ‘dissonance’ between his first and second interviews with a woman from Buhweju, in Uganda, concerning which of two clans her ancestors belonged to. The Buhweju woman’s seemingly contradictory attachment of her lineage first to the pastoralists, and then to the agriculturalists, was initially confusing. But the discrepancy alerted Willis to the possibility that the division between the two clans was more permeable than historians and anthropologists, steered by documentation in colonial archives, had realised. Willis does not connect the dissonance explicitly with public discourse, audience, or gender, although he notes that the presence of the woman’s husband at the second interview made a difference to her mode of narration and that in this interview her account conformed more closely to conventional expectations. Rather, he argues, the ways people edit and use their knowledge of the past selectively, and present alternative versions in accordance with changing circumstances, provide important clues to the complexities of lived experience.29 Inconsistencies within one life history are also the concern of Daniel James in his discussion of the personal narrative of María Roldán in his monograph, Doña María’s Story. Roldán had been a shop steward (a trade union representative for a specific section of a workforce) in the 1940s and 1950s, at a huge meat-packing plant in Berisso, on the Rio Santiago, fifty miles from Buenos Aires.30 James had

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met her while researching the Argentine working class and the politics of Peronism.31 The book about her that he subsequently published is not a biography, although it includes many biographical details. Rather, he uses Doña María’s life story as a vehicle through which to explore the characteristics and contradictions of working-class women’s lives in this community. James writes that he valued María’s testimony for adding to knowledge of the meat-packing industry, but he came to regard her as more than a ‘source of empirical data’: she was an active agent, ‘narrating, telling me a story about her life, reconstructing her past in a selective way that would both legitimize it to me and make sense of it to herself’.32 Understanding this marked the beginning of a journey, for James, away from the use of oral testimony to access ‘objective knowledge’ and, by drawing on social anthropology, literary theory and oral history theory, into the analysis of historical subjectivities. James argues that ‘the relationship between personal narratives and history … is complex’.33 Two aspects that struck him as particularly problematic were the ‘existence of subtexts and silences, evasions and tropes’ in oral history accounts which caused them to deviate from ideas of what ‘hard’ empirical evidence should look like, and their relationship to ‘a public discourse structured by class and gender conventions’.34 His work with these issues is illustrated by his discussion of the two different stories that Doña María told of acquiring ownership of a house. In the first story, her husband is the protagonist, obtaining a plot of land to put a house on, so that ‘you and the kids will be comfortable’.35 In the second version, which is longer and more detailed, Doña María takes the initiative: she buys the plot herself, and with the help of a building contractor arranges for a house to be put on it.36 Her husband is initially appalled because he thinks they cannot afford it, but Doña María prevails. James sees the contradiction not as a sign of the unreliability of Doña María’s testimony, but as an indicator of a tension between what could and could not be said in public in this Argentine town during her lifetime. He regards the second story as harder for Doña María to tell, because of the gender discourse prevalent in her community. It casts her husband as un-masculine in that he is too timid to take the risk, and Doña María as unfeminine since she appears to be the dominant partner in the marriage. He states emphatically, though, ‘We need have no doubt that this is, factually, the authentic version of how she acquired her first house.’37 ‘Authenticity’ is a concept used to refer to something that is genuine and valid, and that contains core truth. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to find it used in work by a historian who has taken the cultural turn, and who not only accepts but explores the possibility of multiple meanings contingent on context and audience, rather than any single truth. James’s invocation of authenticity in relation to the two stories of the house implies that María presented a false version to the community, and a true one to himself. Although this is possibly a minor lapse in James’s use of terminology, it is worth pausing to discuss the meanings and uses of ‘authenticity’. If James was referring to documentation concerning the purchase, his statement that the second account was ‘factually, the authentic version’ would pass

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unnoticed. He is, however, delivering a judgement about ‘truth’, with the authority of a historian, based on the telling of the story. This jars with the theory and method that he expertly deploys to illuminate the two accounts. In his discussion of the stories, he offers a cultural explanation for the inconsistency, relating to gendered ideologies and audience. He suggests that cultural models that would reconcile Doña María’s bold actions with conventional expectations concerning wives were not readily available to her. Publicly, then, Doña María needed to present her husband as manly and a good provider, hence the first version. Once trust and intimacy had developed between Doña María and James, through the inter-subjective relationship they developed over the nine months of 1987 during which they met regularly, she was less conscious of her interviews as public occasions, and it was possible for her to represent her marital gender relations differently. She could figure as the dominant partner, without it mattering whether James regarded her husband as effeminate.38 James illustrates the reputational risk for Doña María in telling the second version with a quotation from another of his woman interviewees, who spoke sarcastically of Doña María ‘striding along and her little husband running along at her side’.39 Doña María knew that she was an exceptional woman, but her position in her locality, and her respectability, required her to counteract such images in as far as she could, by presenting a life story that conformed to the gendered social norms of the community’s public discourses. When she was confident that Daniel James’s moral compass was not calibrated by these discourses, she could construct her own agency more explicitly, without, evidently, sacrificing composure, in either of its meanings. Since James convincingly explains the difference between the two versions in terms of context and audience there is no need to arbitrate on the greater ‘authenticity’ of one compared with the other. James does not invoke the concept of authenticity when he describes other incidences of apparent unreliability or inconsistency in Doña María’s testimony, although he does refer to it in a more theoretical discussion of story telling as performance. He argues that the purpose of dramatisation, through gestures and asides, as well as the use by the teller of direct dialogue, is to ‘enhance the authenticity of the events being narrated’.40 The purpose of including seemingly irrelevant detail is to ‘establish the narrator’s credibility and the authenticity of the story’.41 James is referring in both cases to ‘authenticity’ from the point of view of the intersubjective relationship between the teller and the audience, acknowledging the relativistic and subjective nature of the truths claimed by these means. It is perhaps a sign of the intellectual journey that James reflexively records, from fact-seeking historian to interpreter of meanings, that he uses the concept of authenticity in these two different ways, one relating to objective truth and the other to subjective meanings. His overall conclusion concerning Doña María’s story is consistent with ‘post-positivist’ approaches to oral history. He argues that Doña María’s narrative strategy needs to be read against the grain. As he puts it, her ‘adoption of forms of self-representation drawn from stereotypes of traditional female roles found in official discourse should not simply be taken at face value.

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They reflect not only the influence of dominant ideologies and myths, but also the power of the storyteller to imbue these forms with her own meanings, her own subjectivity.’42 I return to historians’ negotiation of the concept of authenticity in Chapter 7. A fourth historian, Caroline Daley, found neither consistent misremembering within a community, like Portelli, nor contradictions within individual narratives, like Willis and James, but consistent divergences between groups remembering shared pasts.43 Daley interviewed four pairs of brothers and sisters as part of her project on the life stories of residents of a remote New Zealand township, and was struck by contradictions between siblings’ accounts of the community in which they had grown up. For example, men denied that their mothers participated in gambling in any form, whereas their sisters told stories of mothers ‘having a flutter’ on the horses, courtesy of the itinerant baker who ran a book. Men insisted that gardening was compulsory for boys at the school they all attended, but that girls took no part in it, whereas women had vivid memories of growing onions under the instruction of the headmaster. Women denied that fights occurred between Protestant and Catholic children after school, while men revelled in describing such conflicts, including the insulting chants that accompanied them. Women claimed that there was no drunkenness in the town, whereas men told detailed stories about the antics of local inebriates. Daley poses the problem of what to make of these opposed versions of shared lives: ‘an initial response might be to discount the memories, since they are so clearly at odds.’44 She, however, decided to explore the contradictions further. Daley concludes that they can be explained in terms of the interaction between material conditions and culture and ideology. Thus girls were at home helping their mothers in the kitchen when the baker-bookmaker called, so witnessed maternal betting which boys did not see; likewise girls were indoors at the time the local hotels turned out their clientele, whereas boys were on the streets observing the drunks reeling home. An iron fence divided boys from girls in the school playground, limiting brothers’ awareness of their sisters’ activities in general, and specifically with regard to growing onions. Gendered ideology contributed not only to the spatial divides at the root of these different perceptions but also to the way they could be talked about at the time and subsequently. Domesticity was coupled with notions of feminine respectability: it was not seemly for women to drink or be associated with drunks; and the social undesirability of violence on the streets meant it was more respectable for women to deny religious tensions. In any case the material reality was, as one woman put it, that girls ‘didn’t have time to argue on the road. We had to get home to milk our cows.’45 For boys and men, on the other hand, fighting and telling stories about drunkenness were associated with memories of the ‘male larrikin culture they either felt they should belong to, or wanted to belong to’.46 Daley argues that sisters and brothers constructed themselves in conformity to the ideas of femininity and masculinity that had been hegemonic when they were growing up and that had determined the spaces they frequented, the timetabling of

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their days, the jobs they had to do, the characteristics they could display, and their knowledge of one another. As Daley puts it, ‘While gender-specific experiences obviously lead to gendered memories, the gendered nature of the culture these people grew up in also has had a profound effect on how they present their histories.’47 One could add that the persistence of gendered cultures into the present day presumably also influenced the way narratives were shaped in the telling. Far from seeing the interviews as hopelessly unreliable, Daley argues for their importance in expanding our understanding of the gendered character of the material and ideological world these people experienced as children and recalled as adults.

Public discourse and personal recall Both James and Daley point to the power of gendered ideology in the production of personal narratives. Other historians, also drawing on feminist insights, have explored the ways in which the vocabulary available to narrators, and the gendered meanings it communicates, make some matters easier or more difficult to talk about, producing fluent narratives on the one hand, and evasions or apologetic elaborations on the other. Juliette Pattinson discusses accounts of learning to kill, in oral histories by women and men recruited as secret agents to the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Second World War. Their task was to contribute to resistance in occupied countries, and women as well as men were taught combat skills. In interviews decades later, however, a repeated refrain among the women was that they felt they were going against nature in learning to kill. Pearl Witherington, for example, in an interview in 1983, used a common construction, ‘We’re made to give life, not take it away.’48 Pattinson writes that a gendered division of labour in the operational field (based on gender ideology) meant that female agents rarely used their combat training on missions; they were more often wireless operators and couriers than saboteurs and assassins. Nevertheless, they had acquired the skills to kill. The women who recall using them felt they had to give reasons for doing so. Nancy Wake, for example, who led a large group of French ‘maquis’ in the hills of the Auvergne in Southern France, gave a fluent and flamboyant account of killing dozens of Germans, but added a justification for her actions, stating that the root of her aggression lay in witnessing the Nazi persecution of Jews in Vienna before the war. Men, in contrast, did not feel the need to offer such explanations: on the contrary an appetite for action, violence and ‘daredevil masculine bravado’ was expected of them. Pattinson’s interpretation of the gender differences in these narratives is that ‘Killing is not a natural activity for men either, but they, unlike women, have a discourse available to them in which they can articulate their experiences of violence which does not substantially trouble public sensibilities’.49 Some of the men she interviewed were, however, reluctant participants in the masculine culture of belligerence, and they had even more difficulty than the women in finding ways of talking about their experiences. ‘I would rather keep that to myself,’ was the response of one man when asked about the effect that killing had on him.50

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Charlotte Linde’s insight that explanations are used as discursive devices in life stories ‘to establish the truth of propositions about which the speakers themselves are uncomfortable’ would have been a useful addition to Pattinson’s discussion.51 SOE women were aware that, in telling stories of themselves as killers, they were declaring their deviance from both wartime and current gendered norms, and this arguably caused both their discomposure and the urge to remedy it. On the other hand, men for whom the memory of killing was profoundly uncomfortable had fewer options. Even the strategy of explanation was not available to them. The discourse of ‘natural’ masculine aggression rendered them silent. The problematic tension between discourse and subjectivity is also the focus of Rebecca Jennings’ work on the history of lesbianism in Britain from 1945 to 1970. Jennings records women’s stories of their awareness of the painful gap between the versions of lesbianism available in the public domain and their sense of who they were in the 1940s and 1950s. She quotes Diana Chapman, for example, who said that, in the late 1940s, she thought she was a lesbian and in an effort to understand herself better, turned to popular medical and scientific literature. Reading it, however, was no comfort. ‘I had a stack of those blue pelicans – told me that it was immature and that I should really get my act together and reconcile myself to my femininity and find myself a good man and have children … which I tried to do without very much success.’52 Women like Diana sought to use concepts in public circulation, such as ‘career girl’ and ‘bachelor girl’, which described single women outside the framework of marriage and motherhood, to give themselves an acceptable social identity that would, at the same time, enable them to live as lesbians. Jennings shows that the ambiguity of these terms within public discourse made those who adopted them suspect: ‘a career girl’ for example was seen as neglecting her social and biological duties, or worse still as unsuited to them, unless she was pursuing a career in order to find a husband.53 Suspicion in the workplace that a lesbian would be predatory, or that lesbianism was contagious, led to efforts to ‘pass’ as heterosexual, made agonising by the silences that passing imposed.54 The absence of ‘affirmative models of lesbian relationships’ underpinned the difficulties.55 Use of the heterosexual marriage model by women seeking to conduct same-sex relationships in the 1950s and 1960s, led to the adoption of polarised ‘butch-femme’ roles and identities, in which one of the women was domestic and the other was not. It worked for some women, but left others uncomfortable. Pat Arrowsmith explained, ‘it wasn’t clear to me in my relationship with Wendy that we were one thing or the other … It was all a bit queer for two kind of rather butch-like women to be getting together and I felt this was a bit abnormal you see.’56 In these examples the respondents recalled the discomforts of their younger selves in a period before they were able to ‘come out’ as lesbians, with rueful irony and sometimes with humour. They also shaped their stories in relation to the idea that there were better times ahead. Jennings sees this idea, however, as part of a myth of liberation that could be as limiting as it was facilitating. The Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969 represented a turning point in the availability of a subcultural metanarrative that filled the vacuum in public discourse, and opened up

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the possibility that a lesbian identity could now be given explicit expression.57 Women who contributed to collections of lesbian personal narratives celebrating the inauguration of gay and lesbian liberation were encouraged to emphasise their identity in these terms, that is to tell a ‘coming out’ story in which everything improved after 1969, and to de-emphasise aspects that did not fit. Jennings comments, however, that ‘when contemporary interpretations of an event did not allow for the articulation of a lesbian identity or when individual women did not possess a coherent understanding of their own sexuality as “lesbian” at a given point in their past, interviewees were unable to produce a coherent lesbian narrative’, resulting in confusion and silence.58 Whether positive or negative, she argues, mythologies in the public domain that do not assist the interpretation of a personal past tend to silence it.59 While this is a convincing argument, one could add that public discourse, as well as subjectivity, has a history. Popular narratives of sexuality, as of other aspects of life, sometimes encompass greater complexity as they develop. They do not always close down, but may even open up, the possibilities for telling histories of the self over time. Some historians argue that public discourses which are at odds with memories of lived experience and its meanings at the time can facilitate recall and narration. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher interviewed couples born between 1905 and 1924 about their heterosexual activity in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. They argue that the discourse concerning sexual permissiveness, and the public visibility of sexuality and intimacy that developed in the 1960s and persisted thereafter, were of major importance to their interviewees, but in a negative sense. Their respondents saw this public narrative of sexual liberation as representing their pasts inappropriately, and marking a development that they did not welcome, and they positioned themselves against it. Paradoxically, respondents’ negative assessment of the increased openness about sex that the ‘sexual revolution’ inaugurated stimulated them to overcome their habitual reticence about their own sexual behaviour, and to speak openly about it to their interviewers. Szreter and Fisher argue that ‘the changes in public discourses around sex provided respondents with both a reason and an ability to talk about sex’.60 In order to explain, for example, why they felt that too much emphasis was placed on sex in the present day, respondents had to describe the importance of reserve, ignorance and innocence for them in the past, and the pleasure they derived from these alternative ways of conceptualising sex. The ‘silent history’ that the authors claim to have uncovered was full of contradictions. Thus respondents stressed the value of privacy and discretion, even though reticence about sex had caused problems for them personally. They criticised teenage sex and co-habitation, while speaking of their own youthful frustrations and the agonies of inexperience on their wedding nights. Yet, argue the authors, their interviewees prized the values of the past, which were central to their sense of identity and respectability, over those of the present.61 Szreter and Fisher suggest that the dialogue that oral history facilitates between the past and the present can illuminate the practices and values prevalent in a previous era, even when there are major discursive ruptures between them.

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A difference from the research into sexual attitudes and behaviours undertaken by Jennings is that Szreter and Fisher’s study was framed within the dominant discourse of heterosexuality. Even if respondents felt that the version of sexual attitudes and behaviours that had developed out of the sexual revolution did not encapsulate their experiences, the parameters concerning the fundamental meaning of ‘sex’ remained the same. They could draw on older versions of the configuration of heterosexuality in composing their stories. In contrast, a positive public story about lesbianism in the years between 1940 and 1970 was not available to the interviewees in Jennings’ study.62 This is not to underestimate the infrequency with which Szreter and Fisher’s respondents had discussed sex with anyone over their lifetimes, or the difficulties they sometimes had in finding language in which to express themselves. As Szreter and Fisher put it, however, ‘what we discovered … was privacy but not taboo’.63 The intersubjective relationships that developed in the interviews were important in penetrating this privacy. Szreter and Fisher report that respondents welcomed the chance to reminisce and that a relationship of trust developed that enabled them to talk about ‘sensitive, shameful or socially unacceptable experiences’ such as extra-marital affairs and encounters with prostitutes. More unexpectedly, they explain one particular man’s ‘construction of an extraordinarily detailed and rich life story’ in terms of a flirtatious relationship that developed between him and Fisher.64 The performative aspects of interviewing, as well as the messages about heterosexuality that Szreter and Fisher consciously and unconsciously brought to the interviews, were evidently significant. The reader can only wish they had written more about how they interacted with the narrators and their narratives.

Personal memory and popular culture A number of oral historians have highlighted and problematised the relationship of personal memory to the public versions of the past that circulate through media such as film and television. The language, tropes and narrative forms through which experiences are publicly represented can easily be absorbed into personal narratives. Historians’ responses vary from anxiety about the departure from factual accuracy that this may involve, to acceptance of the relationship as part of the history they are studying. Christopher Browning, in work on Starachowice, a cluster of three Nazi slavelabour camps in Poland where Jews were forced to work from 1939 to 1944, writes in terms of ‘mistaken’ accounts and the ‘contamination’ of memory by public images generated later. He states that the study of Starachowice, a small and obscure camp, has a ‘significant advantage’ for the historian because ‘survivor memories of Starachowice are relatively pristine, uncontaminated by the later incorporation into individual memories of archetypal images broadly disseminated in popular consciousness’.65 He emphasises the ‘overall credibility’ of the 300 oral accounts on which he draws, which enabled him to explore the experience of

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survival in the face of terrible suffering, and to delineate the relationships between inmates, their guards and their neighbours outside the camp, that jeopardised or enabled it. Browning suggests, however, that historians need to exercise critical judgement concerning ‘mistaken testimonies’ that ‘incorporate iconic Holocaust tropes gained from post-war exposure to widespread representations in documentaries, movies, memoirs and novels’.66 He acknowledges that this is a sensitive issue, in that any questioning of the factual accuracy of Holocaust testimony can be seen as disrespectful, or even tantamount to denial, and he goes about it with tact and caution. He points for illustration to memories of former Starachowice camp members of their transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Arrival at Auschwitz is graphically depicted in widely read memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, as well as in mass-circulation films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).67 It involves, in these accounts, the separation of the fit from the unfit, and of men from women and children, by the Schutzstaffel (SS), on the ramp onto which the prisoners were unloaded from the railway wagons that had transported them. This was a life-and-death selection process. The majority of Starachowice testimonies, however, state that they did not experience it. Browning puts this down to the numerous selections to which the prisoners had been subject prior to leaving Starachowice, and attributes the relatively high survival rate of the prisoners to this pre-selection. Yet eleven interviewees nonetheless ‘relate that the transport was subjected to selection on the ramp, with none other than the notorious Dr Josef Mengele himself directing people to the right and the left’.68 Browning explains these ‘false memories’ (as he sees them) in terms of the powerful images circulating in the public domain. He also adduces historical details from other testimonies that suggest that the narrators conflated later experiences of selection with the iconic public images of arrival at Auschwitz, to create ‘a vivid memory of something that actually had not occurred’.69 Browning takes a literal approach to the testimony. A more psychological interpretation would be that some interviewees drew unconsciously on the well-known version of Auschwitz as a route to articulating experiences that trauma rendered inexpressible. Under pressure to tell a story, these survivors of horrendous suffering unconsciously reached for a trope that placed them within a public history of immense importance and that resonated with audiences for their testimony. As this suggests, the release of personal memory that was previously unspoken can be triggered by the public circulation of stories from the past, and Browning’s study provides further examples. A single account of the arrival at Birkenau, that of Joseph K. recorded in 1948, describes how the Starachowice prisoners believed they would be gassed (in spite of the absence of selection) when they were herded into the showers shortly after arrival, until they realised that water rather than gas was raining down on them. Browning states that, before 1990, no other testimony repeated this story. Then it was used by Spielberg in Schindler’s List, and the scene drawn from a single personal memory became part of a powerful public memory. After release of the film, comments Browning, six videotaped testimonies in the

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Visual History Foundation collection, funded by Spielberg, recalled the same experience, and twenty survivors included it in the narratives on which he himself draws.70 Browning, by implication, regards these memories with scepticism while not declaring them to be false. He takes a more positive view, however, of the ways in which it became increasingly possible, over time, for survivors to recall and narrate other experiences ranging from relatively minor transgressions to rapes, revenge killings and also homosexuality. Such experiences were, he suggests, locked within what he describes as ‘secret’ and ‘communal’ memories. Memories in the first category were shared with no-one for many years, for reasons of shame or guilt, but came out in ‘confessional’ moments in interviews, when a respondent painfully admitted a transgression such as the theft of a bunkmate’s bread or the abandonment of a family member. Those in the second were shared only within communities of survivors, as a result of a tacit consensus that no outsider would understand them and because, as with both rape and revenge killings, they were felt to be deeply shameful and might be damaging to the reputations of members of the community.71 Browning does not spell out the reasons for the gradual unlocking of such memories. It might be suggested that popular culture, which he criticises for contaminating personal memory, in practice contributed to this process. It may have done so both specifically in representing the Holocaust in increasing depth and complexity, and more generally in breaking down taboos concerning, for example, homosexuality and sexual violence. In addition, respondents’ life stage may have played a part in releasing memories. As we saw in Chapter 4, in relation to Michael Roper’s analysis of Lyndall Urwick’s memoirs, life stage interacts with both psychic states and public narratives to influence the ways in which memories are composed. Other historians have taken a more positive view than Browning of the relationship of popular culture and personal memory. Alistair Thomson, writing about the memories of Australian and New Zealand soldiers of the First World War he elicited in the mid-1980s, states, ‘In some interviews I felt like I was listening to the script of the film Gallipoli.’ 72 Gallipoli, released in 1981, portrayed the Anzac contribution to the protracted battle for the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915–1916 as sacrificial, made by willing and daring young men from the colonies at the behest of callous and impervious British generals.73 The use by interviewees of tropes from this film prompted Thomson, however, not to dismiss their accounts as false memories but to probe the ways in which public discourse concerning the Anzacs ‘worked, or sometimes didn’t work, for veterans of the war’.74 Thomson traces the changing nature of the Anzac legend across the decades. Public narratives in the interwar years stressed ‘mateship, good times and national achievement’, and these provided some interviewees with positive ways of articulating their stories, at the same time as leaving no space for memories of fear and feelings of inadequacy, difference and disillusionment.75 In contrast, public narratives of the 1980s, including the film Gallipoli, gave new emphasis to the horror of war, the suffering of the ordinary soldier, and the responsibility, for both, of politicians and generals. At the same time these representations usually presented the ‘digger hero’ as a

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‘national legend’.76 Thomson comments that the Anzac narratives of the 1980s ‘offer fresh ways for veterans to articulate their military past and to reconstitute their Anzac identities. Yet the stories and meanings that do not fit today’s public narrative are still silenced or marginalised.’77 Thomson gives, as an example, the changing account of Fred Farrell. Fred’s suffering on the Western Front made him a fervent critic of the war, which he saw as a business enterprise, fraught with tensions between officers and other ranks, and leading to the postwar abandonment of ex-servicemen by governments. Fred was scathing about patriotic motives and avoided commemorative sites and ceremonies from the 1920s to the 1970s, during which time he channelled his efforts into the labour movement as well as peace and anti-nuclear campaigns. In the context of the shifting public story of the First World War in 1985, however, Fred went through a volte face. He visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, which he was persuaded to see as a peace rather than a war memorial, and he accepted invitations to tell his war story to youthful audiences. As Thomson puts it, the changing public discourse of the war enabled Fred to undergo a profound reconciliation with his wartime past that was important for his composure in his old age. He argues, however, that Fred became able ‘to live with the legend’ only by letting go of his more radical analysis of the war.78 Thomson does not suggest that interviewees are duped by representations of the past in popular culture but that more subtle interactions are at work: between original experiences, public ways of talking about them, and the point in the life stage at which recall is taking place. Although Thomson states that some interviewees’ narratives were almost identical to the script of Gallipoli, he does not, as we have seen, focus directly on this issue. In contrast the direct relationship between a television programme and oral history testimony is the subject of scrutiny in my jointly authored book, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War. The book draws on oral history interviews with former members of the British Home Guard, a part-time force that undertook military training, became armed and uniformed, and performed defence duties, in response to the threat of invasion from 1940 to 1944. Men were the targets of Home Guard recruitment and women were officially excluded, but women campaigned for full membership, formed a parallel organisation, and were recruited by some Commanding Officers.79 There was an almost complete absence of public representations of the Home Guard in the immediate post-war years. From 1968 to 1979, however, a BBC sitcom, Dad’s Army, celebrated and satirised the force, attracting record numbers of viewers. Research in the BBC archives showed that the scriptwriters, Jimmy Perry and David Croft, drew on their own experiences in the Home Guard and in the Army, as well as on letters sent in by viewers of the first series, many of whom related incidents they had witnessed personally.80 Perry and Croft coloured their representation of the British home front with tropes such as unity in diversity, muddling through, comic bravery, and ironic patriotism. In interviews with former Home Guards undertaken in the late 1990s, this sitcom was an unavoidable reference point. Most respondents mentioned Dad’s

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Army unprompted and all knew about it. Many used an anecdotal style of narration in which they gave an account of an incident with a comic denouement, similar to the structure of a Dad’s Army episode. Indeed several suggested that the experiences they described were ‘typical Dad’s Army’ and that the scriptwriters should have included such stories in the series.81 Both men and women ‘recognised’ the seven key characters in Dad’s Army, whose identities they could fasten to real life Home Guards they remembered.82 Their personal narratives shared with Dad’s Army an emphasis on comic incompetence and comradeship, and, like the sitcom, were invested with nostalgia for the Second World War as a period of greater solidarity and common purpose than the present day. ‘Thinking about it now,’ said Ray Atkins, ‘takes me straight back to the feeling of how things once were in this country … All of the British population had this feeling of being in it together and backs to the wall and all that … all pulling together, all working together.’83 Numerous interviewees who spoke of enjoying the show nevertheless maintained a critical detachment towards it. Some suggested that it was ‘true to life’ while allowing for the exaggerations of the comic requirements of a sitcom. Others dismissed it as utterly false: nothing like that happened in their platoon; they were much better organised and trained; and they became efficient fighting units.84 Some of the women were resentful that their contribution was not represented in the sitcom, some argued that inclusion would have provided plenty more opportunities for humour, and some felt silenced by it. When asked whether she talked to her family about her experiences in the Home Guard, Winnie Watson said ‘… they don’t ask. Well, actually, Dad’s Army done it a bit. I mean, if you say you were in the Home Guard, it’s a bit of a joke.’85 Overall, Dad’s Army facilitated men’s memories of the force, and the values of comradeship and patriotism that some wanted to remember, while marginalising women’s memories, but the show provided an overarching interpretation that affected the imaginative possibilities open to all the respondents. In Dad’s Army we have a vivid example of the ‘cultural circuit’ between personal and popular memory in action.86 Personal stories of Home Guard experience became part of a generalised, public account that combined and exaggerated many features of personal narratives; the power of the sitcom’s construction meant no-one could ‘remember’ the Home Guard outside it. Yet, at the same time as using it as a vehicle for memory, individual narrators were still able to resist and criticise it when recalling their own experiences.

Evasions and silences The Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini is rightly celebrated for drawing attention to the importance of gaps in oral testimony. She undertook research on the memories of members of the Turin working class of the Fascist era in Italy from 1922 to 1943, to test ideas about whether workers resisted or colluded with Fascism. She found, however, that it was not easy for her respondents to talk about these years. The Fascist period in Italy was, after its end, identified with evil and

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shame, and in consequence there was a widespread desire ‘to keep quiet about it’ even among those who were not directly responsible.87 The testimonies she collected were characterised by ‘leaps in time’ from the period of working-class activism in 1919 to 1921, immediately before Mussolini seized power, to that of resistance to the Nazi occupation of Italy that followed his death in 1943 and continued until 1945. Narratives that made this leap not only put the inter-war period of Fascist rule in the background, but, argues Passerini, rescued the narrators’ agency from the defeat that the Fascist victory represented. The silence was not total, however. Passerini found that respondents would talk about areas of life that did not ‘bear the obvious imprint of Fascism’, such as work (though not Fascist trade unions), marriage, children and the hardships of everyday life.88 They avoided, however, discussion of how they used their free time. Passerini explains that workers’ leisure was structured by the Fascist leisure organisation ‘dopolavoro’, as well as by the Fascist-controlled organs of popular culture, radio and cinema. To have spoken of leisure activities would have been to create an appearance of acquiescence with the regime. Passerini comments, however, that the focus of existing historical work on the question of collusion or resistance exaggerates the silence because it ties consciousness and subjectivity too tightly to formal politics. Her research suggests that ambivalence towards, and disapproval of, the regime, as well as acceptance of some of its aspects, flourished among workers in ‘an area of behaviour and attitudes not belonging to the political sphere in the strict sense’, nourished by working-class cultural traditions.89 She points to the persistence of jokes, parodies and blasphemies that sent up the regime. She also quotes stories told to her of minor acts of defiance, such as failing to remove a hat when a Fascist parade was passing, whistling a revolutionary song in front of a Fascist guard, or wearing red, the symbol of socialism. She uses archival documentation to contextualise such stories. Reports in the police archives of ‘small-time, everyday subversive activities’ indicate that they belonged within ‘a vast spectrum of similar incidents: insults to the Duce, subversive graffiti, shows of anti-fascist sentiment’.90 In the oral histories, memories of violence perpetrated on the speaker or on others known to them, when they took such risks, are a grim accompaniment to the recall of such activities. Passerini thus discovers a rich, if indirect, commentary on Fascism within interviews that initially appeared to be silent about this painful period in Italian history. Her work suggests that although the tissue of memory is torn in some historical circumstances, it is not necessarily obliterated. Traces are available in stories of everyday life to those who have an ear for them. Orlando Figes’ discussion of ‘private life in Stalin’s Russia’ also engages with silences in life histories, but in a completely different way, closer to a traditional historical concern to get at the ‘facts’, even though Figes professes to be interested in subjectivity. Figes explains that for millions of Russians ‘their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about’ because, in the Soviet era, revealing personal experience could and did lead to arrest, imprisonment, deportation to labour camps, and death.91 Silence was not

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complete, however: families might have been wary of speaking about opinions, religious beliefs, and family traditions in front of neighbours or even children, but, argues Figes, ‘they learned to whisper’.92 The concept at the heart of his book The Whisperers is that the memory of such whispering could be tapped, making it possible to write a history of the individual in Soviet Russia. Teams of researchers from the Russian public organisation ‘Memorial’, with whom he worked in three Russian cities, asked over 250 respondents how they preserved family values in conflict with the values of the regime, and how the terror affected intimate relationships and emotional life.93 The challenge of persuading people accustomed to concealing the memory of their family past to talk was, evidently, enormous: ‘many older people were extremely wary of talking to researchers wielding microphones (a device associated with the KGB)’.94 In spite of this, one of Figes’ selection criteria was that respondents had to have documentation, such as bundles of letters, diaries, newscuttings and photographs, that provided documentary evidence against which the oral testimony could be checked. Figes observed that ‘myths’ had grown up in families about relatives who had been removed or executed, in the context of official lies and silences. In contrast to the practice of other historians quoted here, Figes used the documentation he collected to challenge such myths within the interviews. He was determined, as he saw it, to strip out an overlay of fictions to get at the truth, not just in his later publications, but directly, in dialogue with his respondents. Figes writes robustly that oral testimony is more reliable than the literary memoir because ‘unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones’.95 Using the documentation ‘to supplement or corroborate the testimony given during interviews’ he and his researchers undertook such cross-examination.96 Figes gives two examples of the straightening-out process. Elena Martinelli, whose father was executed in 1938, saw her family as victims of repression. But she was confronted in the interview with documentary evidence indicating that, prior to falling out of favour, her father had been a senior Gulag chief and a repressor himself. 97 In contrast, Tamara Trubina believed that her father was a patriot who had volunteered to work in a labour camp from which he was later sent away, only to be told by the interviewers that he had been a long-term prisoner and victim of repression, and that he was executed rather than exiled. Figes writes: ‘Shown the documents which proved that her father was a long-term prisoner in the Gulag, she at first refused to believe them and insisted that there must be a mistake. Mentally she was not prepared to see herself as a “victim of repression” in the Soviet system.’98 He does not, however, discuss the psychological effects on respondents of being made to confront ‘the truth’ in such ways. Figes may be unique among contemporary oral historians in adopting such a confrontationist strategy: those who write about the ethics of oral history interviewing insist on the responsibility of the interviewer for the narrator’s psychological well-being, as well as discussing the potentially exploitative nature of the research relationship.99 Figes does not refer to such issues.

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He nevertheless acknowledges that the creation of family myths arose from the emotional need for a past on which to base an identity.100 He states that he checked what he was going to publish with the respondents, and he claims that, with only one exception, they were co-operative, correcting drafts but never forcing him ‘to change my overall interpretation’.101 Scandal accompanied the translation of The Whisperers into Russian, however. According to press reports, first one, then another, Russian publisher would not accept the book. The second dropped it after checking the life histories referred to against the original interviews (in Russian) in Memorial’s archive, and finding factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Figes’ use of them.102 Figes defended himself along the lines that a ‘handful’ of mistakes was to be expected in such a long and complicated book.103 The allegation that he altered testimony to fit his thesis – which he denies – is, however, a serious one. Such a tragic corruption of historical practice would not only deprive us of the meanings within personal narratives, however tangled they might be, but would also shamefully exploit witnesses. Figes is not alone among oral historians, as we have seen, in using interview material alongside documentary evidence. The cultural turn, however, makes others less inclined to assert that their intention is to ‘disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones’.104 They may draw on alternative sources, as Portelli does, to establish factual details concerning, for example, time and place, but the purpose of comparing personal narratives with them is to understand inconsistencies between the two types of account rather than to seek to ‘correct’ the oral testimony. Figes’ decision to confront his interviewees with discrepancies, and to adopt what he describes as ‘skilful and patient questioning’ techniques until they accepted the ‘truth’ of documentary evidence is highly unusual.105 He regards oral history with more suspicion than other practitioners and archival material with more trust. He states more than once that oral history as a discipline is ‘hostage to the tricks of memory’, by which he presumably means that oral history can be captured, or oral historians can be hoodwinked, by distortions or inaccuracies of recall.106 He evidently styles himself as a historian-detective, intent on getting the story right. The idea of the historian as a ‘detective uncovering secrets, breaking codes’ is not uncommon.107 Daniel James, in a reflection on his own historical practice, writes that his motivation in researching the history of Peronism in the Argentine meat-packing industry was, initially, to detach fact from fiction, and he comments that such an approach is basic to the analytical function of historical discourse. In James’s case, however, a particularly unpleasant interviewing experience led him to rethink his oral history strategy. He describes the difficulties he experienced when trying to delve into divisions and decline in the political life of a former political activist. This man had been a firebrand leader in one of the meat-packing plants in the 1950s; the organiser of mass meetings that ended in gun fights; active in resistance to the Argentinian regime after 1955; and involved in internecine battles within Peronism. The former agitator, however, now wanted to tell a story of community strength, survival, and the unifying power of Peronism, and got

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annoyed with James’s repeated return to the theme of division and strife, on which he preferred to remain silent. At the time, James thought that if he persisted he would get the story he wanted: ‘effective questioning would track the beast of historical objectivity, the facts, down to its lair.’108 But even a follow-up interview did not lead to a better dialogue, and James’s sense of discomfort became ‘a physical unease’.109 He realised that his pressure on the interviewee for dates and other types of factual accuracy endangered the relationship. He, as interviewer, was evidently experiencing feelings of acute discomposure. James writes that he did not go back to the former firebrand after the second interview, and did not get further with interpreting his narrative than recognising that the man was aggressively trying to make him listen to a story about his place in history, his sense of himself, and the meaning of his life. He regards his withdrawal from this man as ‘a lost opportunity’.110 Despite the enforced retreat, however, James did not restrain himself from pressing his much more co-operative interviewee, Doña María, on inconsistencies in her story. Their more positive intersubjective relationship, as well as James’s decision to abandon the quest for the ‘beast’ of objectivity, guaranteed continuing dialogue. While James occasionally challenged María, who sometimes responded robustly, such exchanges did not imperil their relationship.111 Daniel James’s reflections on oral history are profoundly different from those of Orlando Figes. James insists that oral sources are not the ‘iconic renderings of actual sequences of events’ based on truth and factuality that are expected in the West.112 Rather, oral narratives are ‘premised on notions of fidelity to meaning rather than to criteria of strict accuracy associated with information’.113

Conclusion The biggest change that oral history has undergone since the 1970s is the readiness of many historians to see personal memory narratives as the products of numerous social and cultural interactions, rather than as windows opening straightforwardly onto the past. Public discourse, popular culture, life stage and emotional and psychic needs interact with experience as it is recalled for specific and general audiences. Reflexivity characterises the work of some of the historians who have taken this route, who chart an intellectual journey from the fact-gathering of the historian-detective to the search for meanings of the historian attuned to narrative and subjectivity. Inconsistencies and contradictions, omissions and silences, no longer threaten historical practice in such hands, but are subject to analysis. Signs of seeming unreliability, such as collective and individual misremembering, are scrutinised for the light they throw on the symbolic meanings of chronological and locational displacements. While some historians suggest psychological reasons for them, material factors and specific political situations are prominent in the work of even the most cultural of oral historians, who argue that they help to explain both the importance of the past and the reasons for, sometimes, misremembering it. Ideologies that circulate in localities, especially gendered ideologies, colour the version

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of the past that can be told in different situations, as well as memory itself. They can explain seeming inconsistencies within communities of narrators as well as within single narratives, and furnish the vocabulary in which to frame the personal past. The language of oral histories is a product of both then and now. Imbued with gender, class and ethnicity, it facilitates what is told when there are current public discourses that make sense of events in a life, but impedes narration when there are none. Special justifications, elaborated to explain deviance from cultural norms, are clues as to the difficulties of composure. Recollection includes not only what happened, but also the memory of the gulf between discourse and experience. Circulating myths that are at variance with experience offer no help with the processes of narration, whether they are part of the dominant ideology or of a subcultural discourse. Uncomfortable memories of painful adjustments on the one hand, and silences on the other, menace the processes of composure, in both its senses. The present is an inescapable part of oral narratives of the past. Its vectors are numerous but one of the most powerful is popular culture. For some historians, the inflection of memory by film or fiction is a form of contamination leading to mistaken accounts and false memories. Sympathetic to their subjects though they may be, such historians reserve their right to exercise critical judgement and, in their academic publications, to point out and discuss errors. Yet it is also possible to explain memories of things that did not happen in terms of psychological needs, and to observe the capacity of shifts in popular culture to crack open taboos concerning, for example, abortion, sexual violence, homosexuality, or cowardice. The approach of some historians is to trace changes in cultural representations that, over time, provide a language that enables narrators to find a voice. For all the benefits of composure that this might bring, however, conformity to new ways of thinking about the past can impose new silences. Popular culture is not entirely separate from personal experience: a cultural circuit is at work. Via this circuit, personal, locally told stories nourish generalised popular versions of the past transmitted, for example, in film, fiction and television. At the same time the public accounts set the parameters of personal narratives. Widely circulated popular representations may facilitate narration, in form as well as content, but they may also have other effects. The selectivity, exaggeration and emphases of the generalised account may stimulate resistance (‘it was not like that’), or they may exclude and silence. Some historians suggest that public discourses at odds with lived experience can unlock memory: positioning the self against current ideas, they argue, brings the values, attitudes and behaviours of an earlier era to the surface. Profound though the differences between the beliefs and attitudes of different eras may be, however, key reference points in the conversation need to be shared for dialogue to be possible. The contributions of the intersubjective dynamics of an interview to such dialogue are often unacknowledged, or only fleetingly referred to by oral historians; deeper reflection may further illuminate the composition of the narrative.114

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Unlocking silence is perhaps central to the role of the oral historian. Historians who deal with difficult periods of history, involving repression, powerlessness and trauma, as well as oppression and disruptiveness, know that these things are hard to talk about, and most tread carefully. Yet there are some very different approaches to the idea that silence may not be complete. Passerini’s argument, for example, is that historiographical emphases on the formal, public processes of the past can deafen the historian to oblique clues about the personal experience of political processes, in stories of everyday life. In contrast, Figes claims that the historian can not only tap, but also rectify, ‘whispered’ stories of the self in oppressive regimes by confrontational interviewing. Oral historians commonly draw on a wide variety of types of documentation, including police and newspaper reports, government enquiries, court records, diaries, memoirs, letters and photographs. The aim of those who accept the subjective truths of histories of the self is not to use documentation to correct the oral testimony, but to compare different narratives, and in some cases to establish a factual base from which to explore the divergence of oral accounts and seek explanations for those deviations. Respect for the narrator who instils meaning into their account, even if it is at odds with public versions found in documentation, characterises the practice of such historians. Oral history respondents are, after all, the interpreters of their own pasts; their personal histories are the building blocks of the identities they construct for themselves. It is unusual for an oral historian to assume responsibility for exposing as ‘myth’ the view of the past that has shaped an interviewee’s life story. Yet, as we have seen, there are historians who, even while using it, distrust oral history, who identify themselves as historian-detectives, and who seek to confront their interviewees with ‘the truth’. Rather than celebrating the complexities of oral narratives as the route to ever-deeper historical insights, they want to straighten out the crooked path of personal testimony. Others, however, with tools in their hands to read against the grain, have insisted on the historical insights to be gained from the analysis and contextualisation of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions. They have laid claim to the value of ‘truths beyond the facts’ and have unpicked the notion of ‘unreliability’.

Notes 1 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978; later editions 1988, 2000, 2017); Luise White, Stephan Miescher and David W Cohen (eds.), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). For the denial of African history see Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965): ‘there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness … and darkness is not a subject for history.’ These comments caused huge controversy as well as indirectly stimulating the use of oral methods to research African history. In the USA, in contrast to the ‘history from below’ approach elsewhere, a leading branch of oral history, originating in the 1950s, was devoted to the collection of the memories of members of elites as part of a project to record the building of

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2 3

4

5

6

America. See, for example, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/ora l-history-center (accessed December 2017). Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-class Women, 1890– 1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 3. See also Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Roberts, A Woman’s Place, p. 3. Roberts does not mention working-class autobiography, but to be fair Vincent had only recently published Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (discussed in Chapter 4), and Vincent and Burnett published their annotated bibliography the same year as A Woman’s Place. Publications were beginning to flow from the Workers Education Association and the Worker, Writer and Community Publisher movement in the 1980s. See, for example, Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1974); Paul Thompson, Tony Wailey and Trevor Lummis, Living the Fishing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Jacqueline Sarsby, Missuses and Mouldrunners: An Oral History of Women Pottery Workers at Work and at Home (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988). See, for example (in alphabetical order by author): Lynn Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the “Good Woman” in 1950s and 1960s Britain’, in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (eds.), The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 60–83; Kate Fisher, ‘“Lay back, Enjoy It and Shout Happy England”: Sexual Pleasure and Marital Duty in Britain, 1918–1960’, in K. Fisher and S. Toulalan, Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 181–200; Laura King, ‘“Now You See a Great Many Men Pushing their Pram Proudly”: Family-oriented Masculinity Represented and Experienced in Mid-twentieth Century Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 10:4, 2013, pp. 599–617; Emma Vickers, ‘Queer Sex in the Metropolis? Place, Subjectivity and the Second World War’, Feminist Review, 96, 2010, pp. 58–73; Pippa Virdee, ‘Negotiating the Past: Journey through Muslim Women’s Experience of Partition and Resettlement in Pakistan’, Cultural and Social History, 6:4, 2009, pp. 467–483. In addition to aspects of personal life, oral historians have explored, in particular, rural and urban work; trade union experience; education; wars as periods of disaster, violence, starvation and also opportunity; migration, religion, death and persecution, as well as involvement in a range of political, voluntary and other types of organisations. Examples, from a great many histories based on oral testimony, include (in alphabetical order by author): Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Sarah Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1979); A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alana Harris, Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–82 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Steve Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); E. W. McFarland, ‘Passing Time: Cultures of Death and Mourning’, in L. Abrams and C. Brown (eds.), A History of Everyday Life in Twentieth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Picador, 2006); Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970); Zhou Xun, Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958–1962 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press 2013).

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7 N. J. Higham, ‘Bede as an Oral Historian’, Jarrow Lecture, 2011 (Newcastle-uponTyne: Bealim Signs, 2011), pp. 1–20; Catherine Cubitt, ‘Folklore and Historiography: Oral Stories and the Writing of Anglo-Saxon History’, in E. M. Tyler and R. Balzaretti (eds.), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 189–223; Lynn Abrams, ‘Story-telling, Women’s Authority and the “Old Wife’s Tale”: “The Story of the Bottle of Medicine”’, History Workshop Journal, 73, Spring 2012, 95–117. 8 See, for example, Joanna Bornat, ‘Oral History as a Social Movement: Reminiscence and Older People’, Oral History, 17:2, 1989, pp. 16–20; Hope M. Babcock, ‘“[This] I Know From My Grandfather”: The Battle for Admissibility of Indigenous Oral History as Proof of Tribal Land Claims’, American Indian Law Review, 37:1, 2012, pp. 19– 61; Paul Gready, ‘Culture, Testimony, and the Toolbox of Transitional Justice’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 20:1, 41–48, 2008. For an overview, see Alistair Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’, Journal of American History, 85:2, 1998, pp. 581–595, particularly pp. 588–592. 9 Taylor quoted by C. J. Wrigley, A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 265; Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), p. 206. Taylor dismissed the value of memoirs and edited diaries too. 10 See for example Colin Bell and Howard Newby (eds.), Doing Sociological Research (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977); Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 11 In the UK the defence was led by Thompson, The Voice of the Past. 12 See, for example, Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 175–181. The pervasive use of human stories in community, museum and media contexts has accompanied the academic trend. 13 Ron Grele, ‘The History of Oral History’, Columbia University, 30 June 2010. http s://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPIGiv3sIQ (accessed November 2016). 14 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). See also Urvashi Butalia (ed.), Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (London: Zed Books, 2002). 15 Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 124. For a discussion of cultural approaches to oral history, see Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010). 16 For discussion of such early criticisms, see Brian Harrison, ‘Oral History and Recent Political History’, Oral History 1:3, 1972, pp. 30–48; Alistair Thomson, ‘Unreliable Memories: The Use and Abuse of Oral History’, in W. Lamont (ed.), Historical Controversies (London: University College Press, 1998), pp. 23–34. 17 Alistair Thomson, ‘Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History’, The Oral History Review, 34:1, 2007, pp. 49–71, especially pp. 53–57. 18 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 2; see also Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). Other oral historians who developed the idea of ‘truths beyond/behind the facts’ include Ronald J. Grele, ‘Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History’, in Ronald J. Grele (ed.), Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory and Practice of Oral history and Oral Testimony (Chicago, IL: Precedent Publishing, 1975), pp. 126–154; and Michael Frisch, ‘Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay’, Oral History Review, 7:1, 1979, pp. 70–79. See also Thomson, ‘Unreliable Memories: The Use and Abuse of Oral History’. 19 Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 11: they raise the possibility in order to reject it. See also Jo Fox, ‘“To be a Woman”: Female Labour and Memory in Documentary Film Production’, Journal of British Cinema and

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20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Television, 10:3, 2013, pp. 584–602 for acceptance of the view that oral history is ‘more of a reflection of the present than the past’ (p. 597). See, for example, Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, Picador, 2006), pp. 9–10. Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses’, in S. B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 11–26; Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Cultural and Social History 1:1, 2004, pp. 65–93. Richard Johnson et al., Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1982), Chapter 6, ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’. See also Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On’. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 22–25. Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure.’ Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, in T. Cosslett, C. Lury and P. Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 91–106. Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event’, in A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 1–26, here p. 2. Portelli, ‘The Death of Luigi Trastulli’, p. 26. Portelli, ‘The Death of Luigi Trastulli’, p. ix. Portelli, ‘The Death of Luigi Trastulli’, p. ix. If other oral historians have rarely found such cases of consistent collective misremembering, this may be because, by its nature, it is not the sort of thing a historian can go out and look for. As stated above, Portelli was researching folk song and working-class consciousness when he became aware of the other stories his interviewees were telling him. Justin Willis, ‘Two Lives of Mpamizo: Understanding Dissonance in Oral History’, History in Africa, 23 (1996), pp. 319–332. Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class 1946– 1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). James, Doña María’s Story, p. 123. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 124. James, Doña María’s Story, pp. 125, 124. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 37. James, Doña María’s Story, pp. 224–225. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 226. James, Doña María’s Story, pp. 226–227. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 227. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 184. For a similar usage see Lynn Abrams, ‘Story-telling, Women’s Authority and the “Old Wife’s Tale”: “The Story of the Bottle of Medicine”’, History Workshop Journal, 73, Spring 2012, 95–117, here p. 107. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 203. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 243. I discuss the idea of authenticity in relation to personal narratives further in the final chapter. Caroline Daley, ‘“He Would Know, But I Just Have a Feeling”: Gender and Oral History’, Women’s History Review, 7:3, 1998, pp. 343–359. Daley, ‘“He Would know”’, p. 346. Daley, ‘“He Would know”’, p. 352. Daley, ‘“He Would know”’, p. 352. Daley, ‘“He Would know”’, p. 355. Juliette Pattinson, ‘“Turning a Pretty Girl into a Killer”: Women, Violence and Clandestine Operations during the Second World War’, in Karen Throsby and Flora

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

Alexander (eds.), Gender and Interpersonal Violence: Language, Action and Representation (London: Palgrave 2008), pp. 11–28, here p. 20. Pattinson, ‘“Turning a Pretty Girl into a Killer”’, p. 25. Pattinson, ‘“Turning a Pretty Girl into a Killer”’, p. 25. Charlotte Linde, Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 92. Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-war Britain, 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 39. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, pp. 44, 57. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 59. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 91. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 93. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 11. The Stonewall Riots were provoked by a police raid in June 1969 on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, where gays and lesbians congregated. At this time all but one US state criminalised homosexual acts. The riots, which recurred over several days, are seen as triggering the gay liberation movement. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 11. See also (for a parallel interpretation) Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, ‘Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall Lesbian History’, Radical History Review, 62:2, 1995, pp. 59–79. Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 13. Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 18, 51. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 9. Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 14. Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 5, 6, 8. Christopher R Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, this edition 2011), p. 234. Browning, Remembering Survival, pp. 7, 11. Elie Wiesel, Night (1956, English translation, New York: Hill & Wang, 1960); Primo Levi, If This Is A Man (1947, English translation, London: The Orion Press, 1969); Schindler’s List (US, director Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1993). Browning, Remembering Survival, p. 11. Browning, Remembering Survival, p. 236. Christopher Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 84; Browning, Remembering Survival, p. 237. Browning, Remembering Survival, p. 9. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1994), pp. 7–8. Gallipoli (Australia, director Peter Weir, Associated R&R Films, 1981). Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 8. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 173. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 214. Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 214–215. Other examples of this phenomenon include Jonathan Moss, ‘“We Didn’t Realize How Brave We Were at the Time”: The 1968 Ford Sewing Machinists’ Strike in Public and Personal Memory’, Oral History, 43:1, 2015, pp. 40–51. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 214. Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Chapters 2 and 3. Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, Chapter 6. Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, p. 229. Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, pp. 228, 254–255.

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83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114

Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, p. 210. Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, pp. 230–231, 255–256. Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, pp. 257–258. This concept originated with Richard Johnson and Graham Dawson. See Dawson, Soldier Heroes, pp. 24–26. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; first published in Italian 1984), p. 67. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, p. 68. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, p. 7. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, p. 69. Orlando Figes, ‘Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral history’, History Workshop Journal, 65, 2008, pp. 117–137, here p. 117. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Penguin, 2008), p. xxxii. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 119. ‘Memorial’ was established in the late 1980s to ‘represent the victims of repression and record their history’. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 122. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 128. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 121. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 124. Figes, ‘Private life in Stalin’s Russia’, pp. 125–126. There is a large, mainly feminist-inspired, literature on oral history ethics. For a foundational statement, see Daphne Patai, ‘Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake?’ International Journal of Oral History, 8, 1987, pp. 5–27. For a recent overview, see Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, ‘Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics’, The Oral History Review, 43:2, 2016, pp. 338–366. Figes, The Whisperers, p. 633. In Trubina’s case, he argues, the family myth served to support her position within the party and the state in the 1960s. Figes, The Whisperers, p. 664. Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Orlando Figes and Stalin’s Victims’, The Nation, 23 May 2012. See also Robert Booth and Miriam Elder, ‘Orlando Figes’ Translation Scrapped in Russia Amid Claims of Inaccuracies’, Guardian, 23 May 2012. ‘Exchange: Orlando Figes and The Whisperers’, The Nation, July 2012. Figes, ‘Private Life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 128. Figes, ‘Private Life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 135. Figes, The Whisperers, p. xxxv; ‘Private Life in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 123. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 138. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 129. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 132. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 132. Examples of challenges and robust responses include James’s questioning of Doña María about her idolisation of Evita, Peron’s second wife, in spite of charges of corruption (which María criticised in others), and María’s condemnation of ‘Patria Socialista’ when her own views were practically identical to that party’s manifesto. Doña María’s Story, pp. 235–239 and pp. 110–114. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 133. James, Doña María’s Story, p. 136. This is particularly so of some African oral history. More than one Western oral historian describes their initial frustration with interviewees who did not put themselves at the centre of a life story, but voiced accounts of the history of their community, based on the oral tradition. Only when researchers understood this mode of story telling, improved their linguistic skills, and learned how to give appropriate verbal and nonverbal encouragement, did they find ways towards more personal life histories. See, for

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example, Marjorie Shostak, ‘“What the Wind Won’t Take Away”: The Genesis of Nisa – the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman’, in Personal Narratives Group (ed.), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 228–240; Corinne A. Kratz, ‘Conversations and Lives’, in Luise White et al. (eds.), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 127–161.

6 REPRESENTATIVENESS

It might seem reasonable to expect historians to be clear about the social location of the people whose narratives they use. If they are to generalise and create a coherent story about the past, they must surely need to indicate the section of society that their sources represent. But following the cultural turn, with its attack on positivism,1 its focus on the construction of meanings, and its reflexivity about scholarship, some scholars who use personal narratives have been dismissive of the idea that it is necessary, or important, even to consider the issue of representation, let alone to demonstrate representativeness. Lynn Abrams, referring to the development of oral history in the 1970s and 1980s, reflects on this trend. She writes about early practitioners’ efforts to verify their evidence by cross-checking with documentary sources, and adds ‘Oral historians working predominantly within a social-science framework were also concerned about the representative nature of their data, recommending the use of scientific sampling methods and making strenuous attempts to obtain a representative sample of interviewees.’2 She explains that they gave respondents numbers denoting ‘scientific tags’, and declares that ‘an aura of pseudo-science pervaded much of what oral historians did’, citing, as an example, Paul Thompson’s project on ‘The Edwardians’.3 She goes on to discuss Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village as a forerunner of the more creative, intuitive and imaginative approach that, she claims, oral historians now adopt, implying that the search for the representative sample is a thing of the past.4 However, many of the historians who use not just oral history but all the genres of personal narrative discussed here, remain concerned about it. The issue is something of a minefield, starting with the terminology. Some historians continue to use the terms ‘sample’ and ‘representative sample’ to refer to the selection of oral history interviewees, or of documents such as memoirs, letters and diaries, that they have chosen to work with. Some of them express anxieties about, or criticisms of, the statistical ‘bias’ and ‘non-representativeness’ of such

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selections. Others avoid the language of sampling, but still claim that the case or cases they discuss are, or are not, ‘typical’ of a wider population in one respect or another. Others again use different terminology, but declare their intention to draw evidence from personal narratives to confirm, modify, challenge, or disprove either their own interpretations, previous historians’ claims, or received wisdom about a generalisation. Such approaches are common in the social sciences, and they are derived, in turn, from natural science methodologies. The logic of the scientific method is that hypotheses are generated by accumulating enough observations to formulate a ‘law’, that is, to generalise about how and why things happen.5 The hypotheses are then tested by acquiring more observations: if these are consistent with the hypothesis, it stands; if not, it must be modified or discarded. In some usages, a single case that fails to ‘fit’ the hypothesis serves to ‘disprove’ it. Some of the historical work described in this chapter follows this logic. In practice, however, taking this path is problematic, in the social sciences in general as well as in social and cultural history specifically. Many generalisations about human populations attempt to summarise a wide range of behaviours and attitudes and have to be qualified by words such as ‘normally’, ‘generally’ or ‘frequently.’ Examples include, in the context of emigration to the USA, ‘the family as a social and economic institution was generally strong’ or, with reference to the experience of trench warfare in the First World War, ‘officers frequently thought of their men as child-like’.6 Some historians choose to challenge what is considered to be ‘normally’ the case, others are concerned to explore a range of possibilities, and some focus particularly on cases that fall outside what are considered the ‘normal’ limits. Those who, implicitly or explicitly, adopt the logic of generalisation as described above, or aim to look beyond the individual case to say something about the wider society or culture which the individuals whom they study inhabit, cannot escape the need to locate the authors of the narratives they use in relation to other members of that society or culture. They do so in a variety of ways. The first section of the chapter explores historical studies that work with the sampling techniques used in social survey research, in which a sample is drawn from the larger population to be studied. Survey research almost universally uses demographic characteristics, such as age profile, geographical distribution and social class, gender and occupational composition, as the criteria that guide the drawing up of a sample, which must either match the characteristics of the target population as closely as possible, or be statistically convertible to them. Historians often follow this approach, but it is problematic in a number of respects. First, historians need reliable and meaningful data on the population they wish to sample, and the kind of data they require may either not have been collected at all (for example in the era before population censuses), or have been collected patchily (for example by philanthropists or government departments). Second, even when population data were collected, the portrait of society depicted in such records may be hard to use because of changing interpretations of, for example, social class, race and

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occupational categories, changing understandings of the interaction between social class and gender, and shifts in the meanings of social class, gender and race themselves. Third, the logic of the ‘representative sample’ is that it is a ‘random’ selection from the larger population. Historians face the obvious difficulty that practically none of the evidence on which they draw can constitute such a random sample. This is the case whether they are using a collection of diaries, letters or memoirs that have survived and found their way into the archives, or recruiting their own oral history respondents from a target population, since willingness and availability to be interviewed will not be evenly distributed within that population. The second section interrogates historical work that uses personal testimony for the evidence it contains concerning not only ‘facts’ but also the feelings, attitudes, values and behaviours of the larger population to which narrators belong. This raises the possibility of researching the implications of people’s exposure to specific cultural changes, and thus of using cultural categories (such as support for a particular type of politics, adhesion to a specific faith or expression of a set of attitudes) as the basis for the selection of the sample. However, although there may be some data about the occurrence of these features in past populations, it is extremely unlikely to be comprehensive. Thus historians may claim to know what the main patterns of attitudes and values were in the past, and hence to be able to choose respondents who are representative of them, but such claims about what was ‘generally’ the case are problematic. Another possibility is that historians may explicitly wish to target people who held a specific set of attitudes, and so seek them out on the understanding that they are a culturally distinctive sub-group. Alternatively, historians may want to recruit respondents with a wide range of views, values or experiences, but find that their quest is frustrated. This can be because existing records have been compiled only from people with specific types of engagement in the processes the historian is interested in (such as being an activist of some sort), or because such people are the only ones who volunteer to participate in research. The third section discusses the practice of historians who distance themselves from the idea of the ‘representative sample’. Some, but not all, dispense with the thorny problem of ‘typicality’, seeing the personal narratives of individuals as of value, however unusual or unique those people were. One approach is to emphasise the light that the testimony of one person can throw on the multifaceted relationship between the individual subject of history and the wider culture and society: Michael Rustin characterises this as ‘the luminosity of the single case’.7 Historians who take this approach tend to use personal narratives to explore constructions of the self and subjectivity in interaction with shifting discourses that circulated in the material world of everyday life in the past. In the fourth section, I identify types of historical practice that likewise value the potential of the individual case to throw light on the relationship between the subject and the wider social and cultural context, but address the issue of exceptionality more directly. The concept of the ‘exceptional normal’ drawn from Italian microhistory describes an approach that is particularly relevant to situations of

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extreme archival sparseness. It involves the use of whatever personal material exists in the archive on the understanding that, exceptional though the people concerned and the reasons for their appearance in a document may be, such records constitute the only means by which a historian may access the social world within which they lived. Alternatively, historians sometimes choose one individual’s testimony even when there are numerous personal records of the type of experience it describes (such as schooling, migration or war) because the exceptional characteristics of the narrative facilitate a type of analysis that is not otherwise possible. Finally, scholars who focus on the history of the practice of composing personal narratives, and who analyse the relationship of such processes to the wider culture and society, also embrace exceptionality. It is not necessary for them to demonstrate the ‘typicality’ of either the testimony they use, or the values and attitudes expressed in those narratives. The relationship of the creative processes in which narrators were engaged to a genre of expression, a way of exercising the imagination, and a set of emotions within a specific social, cultural, economic and political context, is what these historians seek to capture.

Historians and the sample As described above, one response to the challenge of the ‘representative sample’ has been to identify the characteristics of the population being researched, and to construct a sample that matches them. According to this approach, if the group studied does not conform to the larger picture, the historian is using a ‘biased sample’. Oral historians working in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Paul Thompson and Elizabeth Roberts, used UK Census data to model the social, demographic and occupational structure of the population in the periods and areas they were researching, and sought to generate samples of interviewees that were representative of this structure.8 The difficulties of doing so include the problem that survival beyond the average life expectancy of the group makes older respondents exceptional in demographic terms. In addition, filling all the occupational slots in a sampling frame can be difficult because of traceability (many potential subjects would have changed their occupations in the course of a lifetime and/or moved away) as well as willingness to participate (on which any project using live subjects depends). Samples representative of past populations are even harder to achieve in the case of written sources of personal testimony. The selection of narrators who match the target population is problematic when not everybody wrote diaries, letters or memoirs, and only a fraction of those that were written have survived. Some historians who use such material, however, seek to compare the profile of the authors of the written sources that are available with the characteristics of the larger population, in order to gauge the representativeness of their ‘sample’ of personal testimony. Jane Humphries, whose book Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution we met in Chapter 4, places the issue of using patchy available data as

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the basis for generalisation at the centre of her methodology. An economic historian looking for information concerning child workers in the period of British industrialisation, she writes that she ‘stumbled on’ working-class autobiography as a possible source of ‘quantitative information on age at starting work, first jobs and so on’.9 She became convinced of its potential to answer questions about trends in children’s work, the causes and consequences of child labour, and the causes and chronology of its decline. All the same, the extent to which the 600 autobiographies at her disposal (an impressive total) are ‘representative’ is a major concern for her.10 Autobiographers, asserts Humphries, were ‘unusual, even exceptional, individuals’ who must be regarded as ‘atypical’, notwithstanding the spread of literacy between 1700 and 1841.11 This admission early in the book does not vitiate the endeavour, however: Humphries insists that the question is ‘not whether the autobiographers were exceptional but whether their circumstances were exceptional’, and she states that she is confident that the conditions in which they grew up were ‘typical’.12 As she moves through the themes of the book, she aggregates and averages key aspects of the autobiographers’ early experiences, and compares them with ‘known features of the working-class population’. By ‘benchmarking to normal standards’ in this way, she claims to establish their ‘representativeness’ and to be justified in using the detail they supply to generalise about child labour in the industrial revolution.13 The people who wrote autobiographies may have been atypical, argues Humphries, but what they tell the historian is nevertheless representative. How does Humphries’ methodology of ‘benchmarking to normal standards’ work in practice? Her discussion of the relationship of child labour to schooling provides an example. She compares the years of schooling that autobiographers received, which she calculates from their own accounts, with national averages, which, as she explains, are not robust. They have been compiled from ‘scarce and problematic’ data drawn from government select committees and rare instances of schools that kept continuous records.14 Nevertheless, Humphries shows close conformity between the autobiographical evidence and the national averages, at between two-and-a-half and three years of schooling between 1780 and 1840.15 Having ‘benchmarked’ the autobiographers’ schooling experiences in this way, Humphries uses the detailed evidence in the autobiographies to generalise about the determinants of, motivations for, and economic benefits of schooling for working class children in the Industrial Revolution. She states that children’s capacity to earn, and families’ need of the income, in the context of the changing occupational structure of the period, were major reasons for children to miss out on schooling. Nevertheless, she argues, working-class people enthusiastically pursued strategies to obtain schooling from, for example, dame schools, Sunday schools, workhouse schools and night schools, in spite of the prevalence of violence within them and the low quality of the education they offered. These strategies minimised both the direct costs of education to families, and the loss of earnings consequent upon attendance. The individual stories that she quotes, of determination to obtain schooling against the odds and belief in its benefits, are

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moving, such as that of the ‘anonymous chimney boy’ who wrote, ‘I have always loved the Sunday school for it was there that I met the kind friend who took me to his night school and taught me to write.’ 16 However, there are, of course, no general statistics concerning these attitudinal and emotional dimensions, and, hence, there is no possibility of ‘benchmarking’ them. Thus, judging these findings by the rigorous requirements of the paradigm of representativeness that Humphries uses, it is difficult not to conclude that the enthusiasm for education that she reports may well have been specific to the autobiographers. As people who at some point in their lives decided to record their life stories, they are likely to have valued the contribution that schooling, however limited, made to their capacity to do so. The ‘benchmarking’ methodology is central to the main argument of Humphries’ book. She shows that the autobiographers’ families ‘fit demographic expectations’ (calculated from painstaking analysis of household budgets) in terms of their size, structure, and inclusion of ‘non-nuclear kin’.17 There is one exception, which is a higher than average rate of paternal death before sons reached the age of fourteen. Humphries states that, since fatherlessness had a profound impact on life chances, ‘it is important to know if the autobiographical evidence over-samples the fatherless’.18 She concludes that it does not, on the grounds that some of the fathers recorded by autobiographers as ‘dead’ had probably never been married to their mothers, or had deserted their families, in the turbulent context of the times, in which separation and desertion were increasingly common. Putting together national rates of paternal death with those of desertion gives a figure similar to that of alleged deaths combined with acknowledged desertions in the autobiographies. The argument sounds convincing. However, not only is the demographic data with which Humphries compares the autobiographical evidence fragile (as she says, national rates of paternal death and desertion in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘are very difficult to pin down’) but, in addition, the interpretation of some autobiographical deaths as desertions is based on surmise.19 Humphries nevertheless offers generalisations concerning the history of child labour informed by the idea of a high proportion of absent fathers and lone-mother households, not only among the autobiographers but in the population generally: the vulnerability of households to loss of the male breadwinner helps to explain their dependency on child labour, while a grim logic dictated that orphans, with no family at all, were the youngest children to enter the workforce, particularly between 1790 and 1850, the height of the industrial revolution.20 These generalisations seem entirely plausible, but scrutiny of Humphries’ rigorous application of her methodology highlights the difficulties. One is the patchiness of the demographic and economic data used for comparison with the statistical evidence wrested from the autobiographies. Another is the impossibility of ‘benchmarking’ the affective and attitudinal content of the autobiographies: the meanings with which authors infuse their remembered experiences nuance and contextualise the statistics, but cannot themselves be generalised to the population as a whole. Meticulous though Humphries’ work is, it is difficult to see it as providing ‘unambiguous answers’ to questions about child labour.21 Her use of the autobiographies, however, is still

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striking. Her combination of rigorous quantitative analysis with numerous moving stories about child exploitation means that her scholarship both conforms to the prevailing current of economic history and deviates from it: the personal narratives that she quotes humanise the dry facts on which she, as an economic historian, bases her work. Few historians who use personal narratives go as far as Humphries with either sampling or quantification, and many adopt more impressionistic methods of contextualising the authors in relation to evidence of the social composition and distribution of the larger population. A common characteristic of such writing is the use of the list, often a list of occupations that is indicative of the social class or status of members of the group they are studying. David Vincent, for example, in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, justifies basing his discussion of working-class consciousness in the period of British industrialisation on 142 autobiographies in terms of the wide range of occupations from which these working-class autobiographers were drawn and their extensive geographical distribution. He states that they include farm labourers, servicemen, beggars, hawkers, servants, navvies, factory workers, printers and shoemakers, and that they came from London, northern industrial towns, and Scotland.22 Vincent is apologetic about the gaps in his coverage, but nevertheless urges us to accept that these 142 memoirists are ‘representative’ of the British working-class population even if they are not ‘a statistically accurate cross-section’.23 Amanda Vickery, in Behind Closed Doors, sets out to discover the experience of domestic interiors from 1688 to 1832 across class and gender divides from personal diaries and letters.24 Like Vincent, she resists quantification, but also, like him, uses the list to indicate who her subjects were: ‘Positioned below the nobility in the social hierarchy but above the vulgar’ they included ‘lesser gentry, distressed gentlewomen, doctors, surgeons, lawyers, clerics, schoolmasters, governesses, architects and stone masons, farmers, shopkeepers and manufacturers’.25 In the very different context of work on Soviet Russia, Jochen Hellbeck, in Revolution on My Mind, uses a set of pairings to indicate the range of diaries on which he draws. He states that they were written by ‘old and young, rich and poor, artists and intellectuals, students and housewives’.26 Lists are rhetorically impressive indicative gestures, although of course they lack precision. As Hannah Barker states, ‘within occupational groups, huge differences in wealth and status could occur’.27 Thus in Vickery’s list ‘farmers’ could embrace smallholders at one extreme and large landowners at the other, and ‘shopkeepers’ might be poor journeymen or wealthy proprietors. In addition, Vickery emphasises the decisive factor of archival availability in determining which social groups it is possible to study using personal narratives. She states that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century diaries and letters are relatively plentiful for the ‘most exalted families’ and sparse for the ‘poorer majority’, and emphasises that she has succeeded in ferreting out the diaries and letters of those from ‘middling and genteel homes in London and the provinces’ from over sixty archives. Thus it is on the ‘middling’ social group that she focuses.28 Humphries, Vincent, Barker and Vickery are well aware that social composition is not only a matter of occupation and social class, but also of gender. Vincent

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laments the fact that only six of the 142 working-class autobiographies that he found were written by women, but he does not regard them as ‘unrepresentative’, even if these women were evidently particularly unusual in terms of both the practice of writing autobiography and the survival of what they wrote. He includes them in his discussion of working-class people’s understandings of their lives. Humphries, on the other hand, excludes the few women autobiographers that she found. She explains that she has done so not because of a lack of interest in gender. On the contrary, she has a long-standing concern with the history of women, as her numerous previous publications, based on other kinds of sources, indicate.29 However, she found that her quantitative methodology could not accommodate this small number of female autobiographers. She states that comparing the experiences of boys with those of these few girls statistically ‘turned out to be unmanageable’.30 Humphries emphasises that, even though she does not include female autobiographies, women are not absent from her study: they appear as female relatives from the perspective of male autobiographers. There are two major objections to this approach. The first is that, even though female relatives do indeed appear in the book, women who were child labourers do not speak for themselves, nor are they counted in Humphries’ aggregations. As the economic historian Malin Nilson points out in a review, ‘Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution’ is, in fact, ‘a story about boys, boyhood and boys’ labour during the industrial revolution’.31 The second objection is that, as many historians who have used personal testimony to recover women’s history have argued, accounts of women from the perspective of men can give only a partial picture because of differences in both experience and perception.32 In Humphries’ own terms, then, her account of child labour in the industrial revolution is not as ‘representative’ and complete as she claims. There are, however, historical reasons for the relative paucity of women’s autobiographies in this period. Mary Jo Maynes, writing about the French and German working class in the nineteenth century, insists that we need to accompany ‘the social-historical interpretation of autobiographical texts’ with ‘a social history of autobiography’.33 Accordingly, she develops an explanation for the gender imbalance in terms of interlocking processes of class and gender in the production of memoirs. She argues that the writings of Rousseau and Goethe established autobiography in the late eighteenth century as an expression of the success and ascendancy of the male middle class. Focused on the development of the individual personality, autobiography gave ‘literary form to a new kind of class consciousness’ and can be seen as integral to the cultural formation of the bourgeoisie.34 The appearance in the nineteenth century of working-class autobiography synchronised not only with the spread of literacy, but also with the creation of working-class political and labour organisations, themselves at the heart of the development of a class conscious proletariat. A major class difference, she argues, was that where middle-class autobiography celebrated individualism, working-class autobiography, like the organisations that fostered it, was built on collectivity. These organisations encouraged self-improvement and offered opportunities for self-education as part

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of the effort to ameliorate the condition of the working class as a whole, but they were, in the main, in both France and Germany, exclusively masculine and misogynistic. The result was that ‘women workers, who lacked the professional organizational framework of the male artisans, did not produce a similar autobiographical literature’.35 The gradual appearance of women’s autobiographies later, argues Maynes, correlates with women’s admission to the various branches of the working-class movements in both countries. Maynes’ thesis parallels a similar explanation offered by Vincent in the British context. He suggests that working-class women lacked confidence with regard to writing, in spite of literacy levels only a little lower than those of working-class men, and that this was linked to their exclusion from the working-class organisations that provided ‘the training and stimulus for self-expression for so many of the male autobiographers’.36 Women’s subordinate position in the family, where husbands rather than wives passed on family history to future generations in written form, reinforced the inequality. The contrasting case of Quaker women’s literary practice supports the point: as Phyllis Mack has shown, women’s spiritual authority was respected within seventeenth-century Quaker culture and, thereby encouraged to write, Quaker women produced a wealth of letters as well as visionary texts.37 Historicising the gender bias in working-class autobiography as a component and outcome of the place of masculinity and femininity within class formation takes us beyond dismissal of women’s autobiography on the grounds that there is too little of it for ‘manageable’ analysis. The argument points to one of the contradictions of the requirement to ‘benchmark to norms’. This methodology cannot guarantee representativeness when one of the ‘norms’ in question is the exclusion of women, or other groups such as colonial subjects, from the social processes within which historical documentation is generated. The complications, not only for historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also for those of the mid-twentieth century, of comparing the composition of the group under scrutiny to other sources of data, are exemplified by a study based on oral history. In Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants, James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson explore the experience of migrants from Britain to Australia in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The authors use interviews with around 500 migrants, including some who had gone out to Australia and returned to the UK. Some of the interviewees volunteered in response to a television documentary and some to an appeal published in the ‘local press and regional radio’ in Britain and Australia.38 In both cases, people were asked to send in written accounts, including memoirs, diaries and letters, from which interviewees were selected. The authors argue that the diverse genres of personal narrative ‘from settlers in Australia and returnees in Britain … offset concerns we might have about a sample based upon a single approach’.39 In addition to these reassurances about their ‘sample’, Hammerton and Thomson offer the reader a quantitative review that assesses the ‘representativeness’ of the interviewees. They compare them with a sample of emigrants studied in 1959, and with the total British population as recorded in the 1951 Census, in respect to

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gender, age, family status, regional origin and social class. They show their relatively close match with the larger population of post-war British migrants, as indicated by the 1959 study, and discuss deviations. The most notable is the higher proportion of women in their project. They explain this, in part, in terms of ‘a combination of female longevity and the propensity for women to come forward more readily for life history projects’.40 This willingness of women to record their life histories is noted by other twentieth-century historians, and contrasts with the relative absence of nineteenth-century autobiographical material by women, reviewed above. It arguably coincides with cultural shifts in the twentieth century that encouraged women, in particular, to be personal and confessional in public as well as in private.41 The full explanation of the female ‘bias’ of Hammerton and Thomson’s sample, however, also involves the problematic relationship of class and gender. A table showing the social class profile of their interviewees shows striking deviations from both the 1959 sample and the UK home population as recorded in the 1951 Census, in terms of the high proportion of ‘semi-professionals’ amongst the interviewees. As the authors point out, the 1959 study and the Census recorded only the social class and occupation of ‘males aged 15 years and over’ and not those of females of the same age, whereas their own statistics include numerous single women migrants: ‘the significant number of nurses and teachers amongst single women workers explains the higher proportion of “semi-professionals” amongst our interviewees’.42 They conclude, simply, that, once this bias in the sources of data with which they compared their sample is taken into account, ‘for the most part’ their interviewees ‘match the characteristics of the postwar British migrants’.43 Hammerton and Thomson’s purpose is not to redraw the map of class for the benefit of future analysis, but the significance of their finding should not be overlooked: the inclusion of women in the conceptualisation of social class divisions alters the received view of the shape of the class structure itself.44 It is a reminder, alongside many others, that methods of collecting, classifying and representing population data are themselves the cultural products of the periods in which they were undertaken; they bristle with the social assumptions of the time; and they frequently misrepresent the complex realities they claim to capture.

Cultural criteria of selection Personal narratives are, of course, not the bearers of ‘facts’ alone. As we have seen, they are a source of attitudes, values, beliefs, and emotions, they offer narratives of personal and social interactions, they tell stories that interpret crisis and change as well as stasis and continuity, and they operate at both conscious and unconscious levels. Some historians have responded to this rich subjective content by seeking to select samples based on cultural criteria. This applies particularly to oral historians, who are in a different position to historians who work with letters, diaries and memoirs. The use of written genres of personal narrative is, as Amanda Vickery emphasises, largely contingent on what has been archived. Oral historians, in

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contrast, recruit interviewees, and so, like Hammerton and Thomson, they are able not only to target their searches but also to select those who fit their criteria, including cultural criteria.45 An example of a study that combines demographic and cultural criteria in its selection of interviewees is Sex Before the Sexual Revolution by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, discussed in Chapter 5. 46 In this oral-history-based exploration of sexual attitudes and practices in marriage in the period 1918–1963, Szreter and Fisher use a sampling frame drawn from fertility studies rather than one designed specifically for a study of sexual behaviour. The reason is that their project originated as an attempt to find out more about declining marital fertility and the use of birth control in England, and only later became focused on sexuality.47 Historical demographers have observed that class, occupational, and regional variations were significant in the changes in fertility that took place in the twentieth century, particularly in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. Szreter and Fisher therefore sought a sample of respondents from the working and middle classes, and from the north and south of England, who were born between c. 1905 and 1924 and who married in the period 1920 to 1960.48 On representativeness, they state that ‘two small sets of interviewees can only claim to be representative of their generation in a general sense’, but they demonstrate that ‘they are not clearly unrepresentative in their fertility behaviour’.49 It is not fertility, however, that is the subject of the book, but sexual behaviour and attitudes. Social class is important in Szreter and Fisher’s selection of interviewees, and in their analysis. Gender, however, complicates class in ways the authors do not fully address. ‘Class’ appears as class of origin in chapters where childhood is relevant, and class of destination where adult behaviour is under discussion, and is flagged almost every time an interviewee is mentioned, something that inadvertently indicates the fluidity of class boundaries and the effects of social mobility over time. Thus the same respondent appears as ‘Angela (1924) born in Preston, the daughter of an iron moulder’; ‘a typist originally from Preston’; ‘a working-class informant interviewed in Hertfordshire’; and part of an ‘upwardly mobile, lower-middle-class couple’.50 The authors explain in an Appendix that they adapted the RegistrarGeneral’s social classification of male occupations to give every male respondent a social class affiliation. We have seen the problem of the omission of single women’s occupational class position from such classifications, in the case of women migrants to Australia. Assigning married women a class position is yet more complicated, and is a well-known analytic problem: sociologists have debated whether or when to use father’s occupation, mother’s occupation, husband’s occupation, or the wife’s own occupation if she has, or ever had, one other than housewife.51 In Szreter and Fisher’s analysis, however, male occupation determines class identity and ‘wife’s occupation’ is an additional criterion considered ‘at the margins’.52 They do not wrestle with the women-and-class issue, but use male-based classifications in their analysis, ignoring their poor fit for women. This is important because class and gender intersections inform the analysis and the book’s conclusions. It is not clear where, for example, ‘Angela (1924) born in Preston’, whose class position evidently changed over time, fits within them.

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It becomes apparent that Szreter and Fisher did not only select respondents according to socio-economic, geographical and generational criteria; they also used cultural criteria relating to attitudes to sexuality. In order to do so, they make assumptions about the cultural values of their respondents, linked to the age cohorts that they set out to recruit. They assume that those born between 1905 and 1924, who married between 1920 and 1960, were exposed to a distinct set of values concerning sexual behaviour. They are quite clear about this in terms of representativeness, stating that their interviewees ‘… represent a group who grew up in specific and formative historical circumstances, born too early for their values to have been formed by the cultural changes of the 1960s (or even by those of the 1950s), but too late to be Victorians, or even Edwardians’.53 The claim that it is possible to detach respondents from a cultural inheritance derived from an earlier period is relatively unusual among oral historians: arguably, such influences could have been perpetuated in local familial circles, even if not to the same extent in national and public ones.54 However any effect of Victorian sexual values is dismissed in the authors’ analysis. On the other hand, the relationship of the cultural constructions of the 1960s, and later, to their respondents’ memories of earlier times strongly shapes the project. Szreter and Fisher argue that their respondents were fully aware of the changing sexual values of the 1960s and that they defended their own earlier sexual practices against them using the conceptualisations of sex and desire specific to the mid-twentieth-century period in which they had come of age. Further, it transpires that Szreter and Fisher selected people who fitted their ideas about sexual values before the 1960s. They explicitly state that they wanted to avoid attracting people who were ‘prepared to talk openly about sex’, and thus avoided the recruitment methods used by many historians, including Steve Humphries, who advertised in the press and other media for people to come forward to talk about sex for his book and television series, and who recorded numerous frank and explicit accounts of sexual experiences in the period 1900 to 1950.55 They regard his respondents as a ‘select minority’ and ‘not broadly typical of their generation’, basing their assertion about typicality on historical work on sexual ignorance.56 On the other hand, they reject the approach of oral historians such as Valerie Yow, who assumed, in the 1990s, that ‘the subject of sex within marriage is too sensitive for such study’.57 Szreter and Fisher’s project is informed by the idea that, in spite of the inhibitions of ‘typical’ men and women born between 1905 and 1924, such people could be persuaded to talk about sex.58 To find the group they wanted, they worked with local authorities to gain access to elderly people’s day centres and social groups, where they gave presentations about their research, talked with potential interviewees, and signed up volunteers.59 It is not clear that they rejected anyone who was keen to talk explicitly about sex, nor that they particularly sought out those who were reluctant. Both types of responses appear in the book, as in a couple who stopped talking when the interviewer asked the wife ‘were you happy for Horace to touch all parts of your body?’ and a man who spoke frankly about ejaculating in his underpants

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when aroused by a kiss and a cuddle with his girlfriend.60 All respondents said that they grew up in a ‘public culture of secrecy about sex’, however. 61 The findings that Szreter and Fisher present are positioned against a body of historical work based on the premise that the twentieth century saw ‘progress’ from Victorian sexual repression to 1960s liberation. Instead, the authors claim that, for members of both genders and both social classes who came of age between 1918 and 1963, ‘notions of duty, natural desire, spontaneity and privacy were central to their achievement of marital pleasure and fulfillment. The idea that sex was a private matter was for many linked to erotic satisfaction, dynamism and tenderness born of the secret and personal knowledge of each other.’62 The result is a historical recuperation of pre-1960s sexual ignorance, innocence and inhibition in terms of desire, care and pleasure, which, they argue, would have been impossible without oral history. This is a compelling conclusion emerging from interviews that defy the convention that it is impossible to ask about sex, and that probe the most intimate aspects of married life. It is clear, however, that Szreter and Fisher went into the research with assumptions about the typicality of inhibition, as well as the longevity of sexual attitudes and behaviour, that profoundly shaped the project. Some oral historians use cultural criteria of selection more explicitly. Lynn Abrams, in an oral history project focused on the historical processes of secularisation, recruited respondents within a specific age cohort who signed up to a particular view of their role as agents of historical change. She explains that her interviewees (who, she says, were all white, middle-class, British women) were ‘born between 1939 and 1948 – the generation which, demographically speaking, is at the centre of the debate about secularization in Britain’.63 She also says that ‘the agenda conveyed by the information provided to respondents contained the hypothesis that the postwar era was characterised by a shift from the moral conservatism of the late 1940s and 50s towards the emancipatory discourses of the late 1960s and early 70s, and that these women were the standard bearers of that change’. 64 Given such encouragement to ‘standard bearers’ of change to come forward, it was to be expected that the women who volunteered expressed a sharp sense of the generational difference between their own religiosity and that of their mothers. Abrams explores these women’s rejection of their mothers’ values, specifically of a conservative discourse of social duty, respectability, self-sacrifice and service. This was allied to Christianity, and was promoted by churches and associated organisations, to which their mothers adhered even when they were no longer Christian believers themselves.65 The concept of the self used by the daughters, argues Abrams, was based on the idea of individual choice, fulfillment of potential, and commitment to self-development, rather than what she sees as the stunting limitations of the discourses that had shaped their mothers’ lives. For the daughters, in contrast to their mothers, ‘religion ceased to provide a framework for the way one chose to live a life’.66 These daughters had, argues Abrams, ‘uncoupled’ themselves from the conventional Christian view of women to which their mothers adhered,

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in pursuit of a solution to the major dilemma for women in the second half of the twentieth century, of combining careers and personal fulfillment with marriage and family.67 Abrams offers a plausible account of the logic of women’s involvement in the process of secularisation. Occasionally she over-reaches in terms of generalisation, as in ‘for the postwar generation of women the religious narrative as a way to make sense of life was no longer relevant’.68 But on the whole her culturally targeted respondents, the ‘standard bearers’ of change, represent only themselves. However, the inclusion of at least one other group would have enriched the study. The respondents told stories that were mostly negative about their mothers, as they had experienced and perceived them, and these critical constructions figure as key components of their own subjectivity. The mothers themselves would, presumably, have given rather different accounts both of their daughters’ life choices, and about how religious discourse impacted their own self-construction over time, but they do not have a voice. A different set of methodological problems arises from attempts to collect socially and culturally diverse sets of personal narratives that are frustrated by the discovery that the only available respondents are culturally self-selected. This has affected oral historians in particular, although it is possible that the obstructive effects of the prevailing cultural climate, that such researchers report, have also operated in relation to the archiving of written personal narratives. Most oral historians find enough interviewees with the desired characteristics for the purposes of their research, whether they use public advertisements or visits to old people’s clubs, and even if they have to supplement such methods with personal contacts, serendipitous encounters, and special efforts to contact particular groups, such as members of ethnic minorities. An example of this kind of targeting is my own quest to find women from the West Indies (Caribbean) who served in the British women’s auxiliary forces during the Second World War. I contacted Colin Douglas, co-author of West Indian Women at War, which uses oral history interviews, for advice. He kindly passed on contact details enabling me to interview three West Indian women for Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, one of whom was Estelle Armitage with whose life story this book opens.69 Notable exceptions to the pattern of eventually finding suitable interviewees include historians wishing to interview people in socially stigmatised categories, such as those living outside heterosexual norms. Rebecca Jennings, author of Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, discussed in Chapter 5, was unable to find lesbians to interview for her study herself, and so used twenty-three interviews stored in the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive at the British Library. She explains that this archive, created in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of the gay rights movement, taps a particular type of lesbian experience. The women interviewed were mostly middle class, London-focused, and were committed campaigners. Jennings is conscious that such a group is not inclusive of all lesbian experience of the period, and that, as the narratives of activists, their accounts are informed by specific discourses and a particular version of history.70

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Emma Vickers likewise had difficulty finding oral history respondents, in her case men and women who had experienced same-sex desire in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War. Vickers describes her frustrating struggle to attract respondents through advertisements. She contacted 440 local newspapers, only twenty-two of which featured her appeal on their letters pages, producing no interviewees. She posted messages on internet forums and appealed to over 100 veterans’ organisations in the UK, as well as working with the charity Age Concern and contacting 156 care homes. All these efforts produced no responses, and some of them led to abusive and homophobic correspondence vilifying Vickers and her research. Vickers also targeted the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) press and associated internet forums. While some LGBT papers did not publish her appeal, one of them produced five interviewees, a number which eventually rose to ten.71 Vickers interprets this sad story as indicative of homophobia and cultural resistance to the kind of research she was undertaking in Britain in the 2000s, a climate that, in itself, she argues, made it difficult for people to come forward to speak to her. There was another methodological possibility, which she considered. In view of problems of definition and terminology, and the evidence collected by, for instance, Mass Observation in 1949 that one in five of the population experienced same-sex attraction without necessarily defining themselves as homosexual, she considered ‘making a generic appeal for [ex-]servicemen and women to come forward and discuss their experiences of love, sex and romance’ in wartime.72 However she rejected this option on the grounds that it would take too long to select her target group of relatively long-term and committed homosexuals from this larger population. Szreter and Fisher’s sample perhaps bears her out: it contains no-one who speaks of same-sex attraction, let alone any self-declared gays or lesbians. However, it must be noted that Szreter and Fisher did not ask people about this dimension of their sexuality.73 Vickers declares that her ten interviewees could not be ‘representative’ in any statistical or strategic sense because of the small number and the immense difficulties of finding anything out about the larger population.74 She writes that the ten men she interviewed were also special in that it became clear to her that they had at least four specific motivations for participation in her project. They wanted to ‘render themselves visible, thereby exposing the hypocrisy of the armed forces following the end of the war’; they were keen to justify their presence as effective soldiers in the wartime services; they were seeking a genealogy of famous homosexual military figures with whom they could claim allegiance; and they had a strong sense of the difference between present-day sexual openness and past repression, on which they reflected in the interviews.75 Like the contributors to the Hall Carpenter Archive whose testimony Jennings uses, those who came forward had their own cultural and political agendas. I have so far considered several types of response, on the part of historians who have taken the personal turn, to the challenges of ‘representativeness’. The first is to seek to demonstrate that the people whose narratives a historian uses are

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representative of the socio-economic structure of the larger population in which they are interested. The idea is that if the profile of the sub-population whose testimonies are available conforms to that of the population as a whole, in as far as it is known, it is possible to generalise from the sub-population to the whole population. Heroic though efforts to use this methodology may be, there are difficulties with both sides of it. Data about the larger population is often sketchy and has been collected and presented according to the cultural assumptions of the time with respect to, for instance, occupation, class and gender. The comparison of the profile of the ‘sample’ whose personal narratives are available with the larger population may be hampered by omissions (for example of women). And, although the coincidence of the demographic features of the ‘sample’ with those of the larger population may be possible to demonstrate, the ‘typicality’ of subjective aspects such as values and attitudes cannot be assumed. A second response is to add cultural criteria to selection procedures, based on the claim, or assumption, that a set of known cultural values characterised a population in the past. However, evidence-based knowledge of the feelings, attitudes, values and behaviours that were ‘typical’ in the past, which could be used as a guide for recruitment, is rare indeed, if not unobtainable. An alternative is to seek adherents to a specific cultural configuration of the past, by making that construction explicit in announcements of a project, and inviting respondents to select themselves in relation to it. On the other hand, researchers who aim to collect testimony from a target population that they believe to be culturally and socially diverse sometimes find that recruitment of a range of respondents proves to be impossible: the only available participants are advocates of specific interpretations of the past in question. In both cases, those who do not share such cultural values are excluded from the analysis.

The luminosity of the single case This review, so far, has discussed ways in which historians who work with personal narratives have addressed the issue of representativeness and has underlined the difficulties that each method presents. An underlying anxiety that general claims are untenable unless underpinned by a demonstration of ‘typicality’ informs much of this work. Some historians, however, dispense with the language of representativeness and typicality altogether. Dena Goodman, for example, whose book on women and letter-writing in eighteenth-century France we met in Chapter 2, argues robustly against the pursuit of what was ‘typical’. ‘Typicality’ she writes, ‘depends on an artificial construct of womanhood against which individual women are measured … to look for the typical is to lose the individual’.76 Numerous historians, influenced by the cultural turn, chart their movement away from the quest for typicality, though few dismiss it with such panache, and attach themselves so firmly to ‘the individual’, as Goodman. The question of how individual narrators relate to the wider society and culture remains important to most of them.

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Daniel James, in Doña María’s Story, discussed in Chapter 5, writes explicitly about one woman, but he declares that he is using María Roldán’s life as a vehicle through which to explore the characteristics and contradictions of working-class women’s lives in the Argentinian meat packing community more generally. He therefore persists in asserting that Doña María is in some ways representative. His argument is partially related to her place within the changing social structure of the town where she lived and worked, but rather than elaborating on her ‘fit’ within such social and demographic patterns, James emphasises another way in which she may be seen as representing not only herself but also her community. He argues that her story belongs within a collective narrative: ‘Although it is one woman’s story, it is not a story that stands on its own. Her narrative must be read as one thread within the web of narratives that form Berisso’s story.’77 James does not, in practice, elaborate on the other ‘threads’ within this story, although he contextualises what Doña María told him in relation to the political and cultural as well as the social and economic history of the town. James’s approach leads him to treat his subject as the source of two different kinds of understanding of the past, which are of importance even though Doña María was not (or even because she was not) a ‘typical’ woman worker. As the first female shop steward in the meat packing plant, she was clearly exceptional compared with other women in the community. Yet her testimony, writes James, adds to knowledge of many aspects of working life in Berisso. These include, for example, the difficulties of unionisation in the plant in the 1940s in the context of poverty and suspicion among the immigrant workers as well as the hostility of the bosses; and the experience of the introduction of the production line, which intensified the work while simultaneously relieving the workers of some of its heaviest aspects.78 Doña María may have been atypical, but, argues James, her detailed accounts of such issues, arising from her direct experience as a worker, union organiser and political activist, ‘add considerably to our objective knowledge’ of the history of the meat packing industry.79 James explains that, in addition, he came to value even more the creative interpretations and insights that Doña María wove into her personal accounts of the wider society in which she lived and worked. She generated her own selective narrative of her life as a member of the community that James was researching. He found in this story not only details about what happened, but also an elaboration of the relationship of an individual with the dominant ideologies, myths and public discourses circulating in her community for the past fifty years. In the give and take of the interviews he experienced the power of the life story as a vehicle of historical subjectivity.80 James’s book stands at the junction between social history based on ‘objective knowledge’ and cultural history that seeks enlightenment about the past in individuals’ constructions of a sense of self. It is also an example of shared authority – between subject and author – in historical practice.81 James Hinton, in Nine Wartime Lives, a discussion of Second World War experiences in Britain based on diaries kept by nine individuals, is more forceful than Daniel James in his rejection of traditional social historical methodologies.

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Hinton states that the concept of representativeness, premised on the idea of typicality, is inappropriate for historical practice that uses personal narratives. How could we know if the way an individual thought and felt in the past was ‘typical’ in the absence of a huge number of diaries written by people in similar circumstances? Large data sets of any sort of personal testimony are rare. The survival of diaries and letters is chancy, just as relatively few people have written memoirs or participated in oral history interviews. In any case, argues Hinton, the more you know about an individual, the less possible it is to use him or her to illustrate generalised experience.82 As we saw in Chapter 3, the diaries that Hinton used survived in an archive because of their special provenance. They were elicited by the social research organisation Mass Observation (MO), founded in 1937 to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. MO recruited a ‘panel’ of hundreds of volunteers to whom it sent questions (‘directives’) at regular intervals, and from whom it requested monthly diaries during the Second World War.83 Allegations of ‘bias’ in the research strategy of this organisation have been made from its origins in 1937 to the present day, mainly on the lines that it recruited a preponderance of middle-class volunteers located in South-East England whose politics leaned to the left.84 In wartime there was a majority of young men among the panelists. The MO Project, a revival in 1981 of the original idea of sending directives to a panel of volunteers, recruited a majority of middle-aged women. One defence of the ‘biased’ composition of the MO panel has been that, although it is not ‘statistically representative of the British population as a whole in terms of class, geography or sex’, the panel is sufficiently large for it to be possible for historians to extract from it a social cross section of responses.85 Hinton does not take this approach, as his rejection of the concept of typicality would suggest. The six female and three male MO diarists about whom he writes were all literate and middle class or aspiring to be middle class, and thus, if the ‘mass’ in Mass Observation is understood to refer to ‘the majority of the people’ (who were, in 1939, working class), they are, indeed, not representative. 86 Hinton explains, however, that he selected these diarists not to represent ‘everyman’s war’, but because their exceptionality gives him access to important themes concerning the Second World War. 87 Other historians who use MO make a similar case. Lucy Noakes, for example, in a study of gender and national identity in the Second World War, stresses the importance of leaving behind anxieties about ‘the sample’ and focusing on the meaning of writing for MO as a social practice. Those who volunteered, she argues, were ‘a group of people who, in the 1930s, felt that they had little voice in British politics’.88 They did not necessarily share the same outlook, but were united by an impulse to express their views in a cultural climate in which they felt that the media and the state were misrepresenting or ignoring them. Noakes, and other historians including Alistair Thomson and Tony Kushner, claim this as an advantage for projects using MO. The panelists were and are ‘not a representative sample of the population’ but a self-selected and diverse group of critical observers of society, politics and the self.89

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Hinton concurs with such an approach and, in addition, emphasises that the nine diarists he selected were exceptional in the way they combined an unusual degree of participation in the public sphere with a particularly disciplined, in-depth, and reflective habit of recording their everyday experiences in their diaries. He explains that, initially, he wanted to know what made people into active citizens participating in the war effort, and how their private lives affected their public activities and vice versa. He writes that reading the diaries led him beyond these questions, to confront the issue of whether the war expanded possibilities for fulfilling selfhood in terms, particularly for women, of increased personal autonomy.90 Through the diaries, he engaged with the history of individual subjectivities in dynamic interaction with social, cultural and material contexts. He claims that the individual diarists enable the historian to tease out, from their unique stories, ‘insights into more general historical processes’ of active citizenship, democratisation, and the search for autonomy, which he regards as aspects of modernity. ‘As exceptionally self-reflective people,’ he writes, ‘they can provide us with access to a cultural world that others inhabited with less self-awareness.’91 The documentation in the MO Archive lends itself to such an approach. Using directives from the post-81 MO Project (MOP), Claire Langhamer analyses the status and meanings of heterosexual love in post-war England.92 Like Hinton, she does not feel it necessary to discuss the representativeness of the MOP responses, since it is their subjectivity, in all its complexity, that is valuable to her project. She writes, ‘these sets of data facilitate an examination of the manner in which stories about love are woven into retrospective narratives of the self. They also offer access to individual understandings of temporality: of the ways in which past and present intersect within individual emotional landscapes.’93 Her concern is to trace the cultural circuits between public representations of love, expressed particularly in the quasi-dialogues of the problem pages of women’s magazines, and retrospective personal narratives written at various points in the last two decades. Her account, constructed from directive replies, is one of her subjects’ increasing difficulties over time: of validating choices based on ‘love-at-first-sight’; of distinguishing ‘true’ love from infatuation; and of the contradictions of ‘an everyday matrimonial model based upon the transformative power of love’.94 Such research would not be possible without the reflective responses to a succession of MOP directives from 1990 to 2008. As Tony Kushner puts it with regard to his own use of early and later MO to study the history of racism and anti-semitism, ‘as a window into the formation of racial attitudes in Britain the material is invaluable and its “typicality” or otherwise in this respect not critical’.95 To Hinton, Noakes, Langhamer and Kushner, the value of MO writing, from the original as well as the contemporary MO projects, is that it enables historians ‘to take seriously how ordinary people formulate and express their ideas on what are complex and difficult matters’, and to track changes in such subjectivities over time.96 These justifications for selecting life writing that enables a focus on subjectivity have parallels in work beyond twentieth-century Britain. Jochen Hellbeck, in Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, which we met in Chapter 3, says

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of the ‘representativeness’ of the Soviet diarists he studied: ‘These actors do not speak for the whole of Soviet society, but the language of self that they share helps explain what life was like under Stalin’s rule.’97 Rather than seeing their selected narrators as social representatives, these historians regard them as cultural informants and observers of both the self and society. They are less concerned than many earlier historians with the accuracy and completeness of diarists’ portrayal of the wider society, or with the ‘bias’ arising from their social class position. They value the diaries and directive replies for the evidence they offer of, in Hinton’s words, ‘the ways in which individuals sought to construct a coherent sense of their own identities’ in the context of their times.98 The uses made by these historians of individual personal narratives to illuminate social and cultural processes in the past speaks to the idea of ‘the luminosity of single cases’ proposed by the sociologist Michael Rustin, referred to in Chapter 1. 99 Hinton develops the idea of luminosity in another study that draws on MO respondents, this time seven of those who volunteered to reply to MOP directives from 1981 onwards. ‘Close study of individual life stories,’ he writes, ‘can often alert us to experiences overlooked or marginalized by existing accounts of the larger history, forcing us to revise or re-think.’100 Several historians working in different periods with other types of narrative have selected individual cases for the specific purpose of challenging generally accepted historical accounts. Carolyn Steedman, in her book Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, uses the journals of a clergyman, the Reverend John Murgatroyd, to write about a case which flies in the face of most historians’ assumptions about class, gender and the Anglican faith in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From 1783 to 1806, Murgatroyd, in retirement at Slaithwaite in Yorkshire, kept a diary. In it he wrote of his servant Phoebe Beatson, who at the age of thirty-eight in 1802, abandoned by her lover, George Thorp, bore an illegitimate child in Murgatroyd’s house. Steedman argues that present-day readers’ received view of the early nineteenth century, informed by ‘the narrative of the fallen woman’ coupled with assumptions that Anglicanism was based on a code of strict morality, would lead them to expect that Murgatroyd threw Phoebe out. The history inscribed in his diary, however, took a different course. ‘He did not, as far as one can tell from the pages of his journal, ever blame her or condemn her. He let her have the baby in his house; he baptised, and loved, and gave houseroom to the little bastard girl; he noted her development in his diary. At his death in 1806, he provided a happy ending for mother and child.’101 Steedman does not claim that John Murgatroyd and Phoebe Beatson were typical or representative of their respective social classes and the region where they lived. On the contrary, she argues that they were ‘unusual’, at least in the sense that they are largely absent from ‘the twentieth-century social histories we have of others like them’.102 She suggests that they are interesting and worthy of study precisely because they did things and displayed attitudes ‘that lie at the outer, faintdrawn ends of the bell-curve of “normally” and “usually”’.103 At the same time, Steedman uses them to make a general point about historical change, in terms of

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ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Drawing on Murgatroyd’s diary and other writings she argues that ‘new forms of feeling came into the world’ during the years of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Napoleonic Wars. They included new understandings of God within the Church of England, which, she argues, enabled men and women to think of themselves as social beings with responsibilities to others in ways that were distinctively ‘modern’.104 Nevertheless, Steedman’s purpose in writing this history is not so much to offer new generalisations, as to challenge old ones. She suggests that histories of the making of the English working class after 1750 that overlook these developments within Anglicanism, as well as omitting the domestic servant from the story of the emergence of that class, are ‘at least partial, and probably misleading’.105 Her overall argument is that the engagement of the people in her book with the social and philosophical upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not unique or entirely idiosyncratic but illuminates previously neglected aspects of class formation, changing ideas of love, and the surprisingly heterodox character of Protestant culture in the early nineteenth century. In a similar vein, Catherine Feely draws on the diaries of a young working-class man in the 1930s to challenge historiographically based assumptions about selfeducation and membership of left-wing political groups among working-class men at this time. Frank Forster, born in 1910 and living near Chester, worked as a builder’s labourer. Feely argues that he used the diaries he kept from 1935 to 1944 for at least two purposes. One was to develop himself as a ‘thinking man’ by honing his writing skills and recording his reading.106 Another was to document his engagement with the work of the German philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, a contemporary of Marx and Engels who, like them, wrote about dialectical materialism, but, unlike them, related this theory to personal, psychological development. Feely emphasises three aspects of Forster’s diaries that challenge the historiography. She reminds us that ‘diaries written by working-class, rather than middleclass, political activists are rare’, but that Forster’s journals show that they exist, and that some working-class people in Britain in the inter-war years sought intellectual self-development.107 Second, she emphasises the importance of using the diaries to reconstruct Forster’s life as a whole. She places his account of himself as a reader in the broader context of his employment and unemployment, residence at home with his parents, membership of an array of left-wing political and educational groups, cinema-going and dancing. In Feely’s hands, Forster’s diaries become the means to understand the importance of reading, writing and reflection in the making of the working-class self in the 1930s. Her third challenge concerns Forster’s communism. The diaries which he wrote in the 1930s and in wartime were preserved, and found their way in to archives, because of his left-wing affiliations.108 Feely uses them to question the portrait of the ‘totalising’ effect of such political involvement, in particular the all-absorbing culture of the Communist Party that has been emphasised by other historians, notably Raphael Samuel.109 Communism did not dominate Forster’s life: the CPGB was one of several interlocking

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organisations in which his participation waxed and waned according to the relative strength of his interests in politics, cinema, dancing and women. Feely raises the question of whether Forster was a ‘typical communist’ and states that she doubts that such a figure ever existed. On the basis of Frank Forster’s diaries, however, she claims a place for the ‘relatively short-term activist who was never to rise to prominence’ in the historiography of the movement.110 Feely and Steedman have in common a determination to push out the boundaries of social history by expanding our knowledge of the complexities of class and gender in the social contexts and individual lives of the diarists they use. They critique prevailing historical approaches, on the basis of a single diary in each case. Steedman’s argument is that while the gender and social class relations, and cultural formations, that she explores have been discussed before, her sources suggest that they have been partially and thus misleadingly interpreted. Feely argues that although the social impact of left-wing political culture in the mid-twentieth century has received historical attention, a single, general account has been offered that leaves little room for diversity within such experience. These historians treat an individual’s diary both as a record of the events of everyday life and as a document in which the self is shaped through the practice of writing and reflection. The implication of their work is, at its strongest, that a single case demonstrates that the interpretations of previous historians need correction. However, they temper their critiques. Rather than claiming to overturn previous historical perspectives, they suggest that earlier historians have over-generalised on the basis of historical evidence that is relatively distant from lived experience and the emotions associated with it. They urge that the intimate narratives of individual protagonists provide alternative stories that demand attention. Some historians justify a focus on a single case on the grounds of the poverty of the archive: an individual testimony, or a small group of narratives, is all we have, and therefore the historian must make the most of them. Andrew Barshay, for example, justifies his use of ‘the Gulag Memoirs’ of Takasugi Ichiro, a Japanese soldier interned by the Soviets at the end of the Second World War in this way. Takasugi’s memoir, ‘In the Shadow of the Northern Lights’, was one of just five such memoirs published in Japan between 1946 and 1958. Barshay states that Takasugi did not claim to be speaking for anyone other than himself, but he argues that since the majority of his contemporaries were silent, for reasons of self-protection, trauma and shame, ‘Takasugi’s gulag memoir must stand in, involuntarily, so to speak, for them as well’.111 Rather than pursuing the issue of representativeness, Barshay concentrates on the significance of this particular memoir: it was the first Japanese memoir about Siberian internment, and Takasugi’s special characteristics as a leftwing humanist informed his reflexive writing about this difficult aspect of Japanese collective memory.112 At its heart was the ‘democracy movement’ in which prisoners were compelled by the Soviets to participate. This was the ‘core experience of many thousands of internees’.113 However, public discussion in postwar Japan was stifled by suspicion of returning internees, who had not only surrendered at the end of the war but had been exposed to Soviet influences. Barshay

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argues that Takasugi’s memoir gives access to both the details and the multifaceted meanings of the Japanese experience of internment and the Soviet ‘democracy movement’. In effect he is arguing not only that a historian must use material because it is all we have, but also (like other historians discussed in this section) that one individual, however unique his or her own personal history and cultural make up, can illuminate the historical experience of many.

The ‘exceptional normal’ The groups in which some historians are interested are even more elusive. There are few archival traces of, for example, medieval peasants, eighteenth or nineteenth century slaves, nineteenth or twentieth century colonial subjects, or the very poor in almost any context. Basing research on a ‘representative sample’ of any such group is not an option. Rather, any appearance of such individuals in surviving documents must be optimised, even when such appearances occur due to special circumstances. Clare Anderson, whose work on the Indian Ocean in the colonial period we encountered in Chapter 1, found that it was extremely rare for those incarcerated in penal colonies to be named and described, let alone for their voices to be recorded, in colonial records. Unless, for example, there was a riot or other disturbance, or the person in question committed a further crime, reappeared in court, or was re-transported, the archives were silent about the experiences of individual convicts. Anderson insists that, while the typicality of the lives of those who appear for such reasons is impossible to demonstrate, the faint traces produced by exceptional circumstances enable a reading of social history that would otherwise be closed to the historical researcher.114 The concept of ‘the exceptional normal’ is a useful way of perceiving the transient appearance of such people in an archive.115 Marginal individuals emerge in the records because of some sort of dramatic upheaval that generates extraordinary documentation, or because of their own special efforts to plead for change; then they disappear. A further example comes from Sarah Pearsall’s work on letters that criss-crossed the Atlantic between family members separated by migration, war and empirebuilding between 1760 and 1815. As in the case of the eighteenth-century Scottish families that Katie Barclay researches, discussed in Chapter 2, the ‘Atlantic’ correspondence that has been archived was generated by members of the upper echelons of society, specifically, in Pearsall’s case, an educated, Anglo-American elite largely composed of merchant and planter families.116 Pearsall argues that their letters constitute a valuable source that ‘demonstrate[s] how an educated elite maintained itself and defined itself against other groups’.117 At the same time she laments the difficulty, as well as the desirability, of finding letters from members of other segments of society, notably from slaves. The forced separations of slaves from home, she argues, underpinned the connected world of Anglophone Atlantic families, and slaves’ lack of access to letters, letter writing and postal systems was a symptom of their powerlessness.118 However, some letters from slaves to their masters and

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mistresses have survived within collections of otherwise elite letters. They usually petition for the slaves’ freedom or for that of their children. Pearsall uses such ‘exceptional normal’ cases of correspondence not to represent the ‘typical’ experience of a slave, but to throw light on cultural processes. She draws on them to show how changing languages of deference and sensibility in the period were deployed not only by the elite, but also by their subordinates.119 Other historians celebrate the exceptionality of the people whose personal narratives they use while still making claims concerning their relationship to the wider society and culture. For Michael Roper, Lyndall Urwick’s extraordinary and obsessive return to his First World War experiences in six memoirs composed over sixty years is what makes him worthy of attention. Roper states that Urwick himself claimed that his war experiences were ‘unremarkable’: he served for a few months as a junior officer in the trenches, was invalided out, and, once he had recovered, served behind the lines for the rest of the war. It is not this story, shared by many, but Urwick’s reiterations of it, that are the focus of Roper’s study. As we saw in Chapter 4, Roper analyses Urwick’s changing accounts in relation to his life course and the shifting masculinities associated with it, from young soldier, through middle age and the height of a career as a management expert, to old age and disappointment.120 He reconstructs from the memoirs not the history of First World War experience, but the history of the changing ways in which that experience was remembered, recorded and interpreted by one of those involved, from the point of view of inner psychic processes and their interaction with socially constructed ideas of masculinity, in specific historical contexts. Roper’s argument is that remembering war is a psychological process that does not have a single logic or trajectory leading to ‘normality’. The Urwick case study demonstrates ‘the unconscious conflicts which find expression in individual memory’.121 A similar commitment to the idea that a single set of personal narratives contributes to and is the product of social, cultural and psychic processes, characterises Matt Houlbrook’s work on the correspondence between Edith Thompson and her lover, Freddy Bywaters, discussed in Chapter 2. The specificity and uniqueness of Thompson’s letters are central to the analysis, but at the same time Houlbrook sees Thompson’s situation and her interactions with her social and cultural context as indicative of more than simply one individual’s lived experience in 1920s Britain. The excitement that her letters provoked in court and in newspaper coverage, following the grisly end of her affair in the murder of her husband by her lover, points to wider public anxieties about gender, literacy and popular culture. Thompson’s working life and leisure pursuits, her rebellion against an oppressive marriage, and the reading and writing practices evident in the letters, appeared, in 1922, to show the public the dangers of popular film, romantic literature, and feminine independence. At the same time, Houlbrook argues, they demonstrate an active feminine endeavour to find solutions to the personal and social problems of the time, in the world of imagination and emotion.122 Houlbrook’s generalisation is not based on a representative sample of letters by working women about their reading and cinema-going: archives of such letters do not exist. Rather, he

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generalises on the basis of the interpretation of a single and indisputably atypical case. The ‘exceptional normal’ dimensions of one woman’s lived experience of a cultural imaginary available to many, illuminates the broader history of gendered interactions with popular fiction and mass entertainment in the turbulent 1920s. Frank Mort, in his work on correspondence about the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, also discussed in Chapter 2, builds explicitly on Houlbrook’s methodology.123 Mort uses three large collections of letters written to public figures, including the King himself. The nature of these single missives does not permit indepth analysis of any particular individual. Mort reflects, however, on the provenance and literary style of the letters. He raises the question of whether there were ‘typical correspondents’, but shifts the emphasis from social composition to the cultural framework within which members of the public wrote, asking whether there was a characteristic way of writing such letters. He highlights ‘a distinctive type of emotionally expressive letter written by middle-class women who were often from suburban or provincial backgrounds’.124 Mort does not address head-on the proportion of such writers in the letter collections as a whole, and emphasises that he is not making a claim about the ‘typicality’ or consistency of the views expressed. (On the contrary, the writers ‘frequently disagreed about the King’s behaviour’.)125 Rather, he draws attention to a type of letter which he regards as representative of ‘a particular version of middlebrow culture that shaped feminine responses to this crisis in monarchy’.126 His argument is that it is this culture that is represented in these letters, rather than the letter writers who are ‘representative’ of a wider population. Mort’s conclusion is that, in 1930s Britain, the letter-writing practices of a specific section of society relied on, and prompted the development of, a distinct genre of life-writing characterised by an interchange between feminine fantasy and self-affirmation.127 The idea of the ‘exceptional normal’ is useful for historians working on individual cases who distance themselves from claims of ‘representativeness’ but nevertheless connect the lone subject with wider worlds.128 One way of forging those links is to demonstrate that the special qualities of the testimony of one person shed light on the experiences and responses of many, especially in circumstances of archival sparseness. Another is to use unique narratives to address psychic and cultural processes more generally at work in society. The discussions reviewed here, of, respectively, the formulations of slaves seeking their freedom, the reworking of traumatic wartime experience, the configuration of threatening feminine subjectivity, and the projection of an imagined relationship onto a public figure, have in common their attention to language, subjectivity and emotion as important dimensions of the study of the past to which personal testimony gives access.

Conclusion The issue of the representativeness of personal narratives has not gone away. Historians do not pluck the authors of the testimonies they use from their wider context without discussion of the collectivities to which they belong. They do not

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consider individual histories of the self in isolation. They seek to locate them, socially, culturally and politically, in past societies, and to claim that the study of the relationships of these historical subjects with the wider world facilitates new historical perspectives. Yet, as we have seen, the methods that historians use to attain these ends vary greatly. Statistical sampling of past populations with the intention of generalising from the sample to the population as a whole is challenging. Many historians are not in a position to sample from the living because of the historical period they study, and even oral historians working on the recent past find this difficult. Dependent on the survival of personal narratives in the archives, or the voluntary participation of living subjects in their projects, historians address the question of ‘representativeness’ in a variety of ways. Comparison with the profile of past populations drawn from records compiled at the time is one possibility. But the problems include, first, that such records are patchy. Second, the classifications used are the cultural products of societies that defined people and included or excluded them from the record according to the perceptions and preoccupations of the time, often ignoring social realities such as women’s work. Third, even if the fit between the sample and the wider population appears to be good, the extent to which the subjective dimensions of personal testimony were shared cannot be assumed. Seeking samples of people with particular attitudes, values and beliefs runs into the problem of the absence of comprehensive and reliable information about the prevalence of such cultural phenomena in society in the past, from which to judge the ‘typicality’ of the sample. Specific sub-groups, on the other hand, especially those championing a cause and seeking a place within the historiography, may be more readily available than more amorphous collectivities, but may not be what the historian was hoping to find. In any case, it is characteristic of personal testimony to be so suggestive, so overflowing with constructions of self and society as well as the details of everyday life, as to take researchers by surprise and throw them off balance. Numerous historians write of starting a project with one set of research questions, and changing them after exposure to personal narratives. As we have seen in the work of Jane Humphries, Szreter and Fisher, Daniel James and James Hinton, the memoirs, oral history interviews, and diaries that they used suggested new lines of enquiry and new research questions. Humphries states that working-class autobiographies ‘oozed information but not of the kind or in the form initially sought’.129 She extracted the factual details that she wanted in as far as she could, but the memoirs led her ‘by the hand’ into the affective, relational and emotional worlds of their authors, in ways that she had not anticipated.130 Her use of this wide diversity of moving stories about boys’ experiences of family, school, work and poverty, in the context of the processes of industrialisation that she delineates, has a profoundly humanising effect on quantitative economic history, even if this was not her intention when she began the research. Szreter and Fisher started a project informed by demographic questions about the birth rate, and realised that oral history interviewees could tell them, in the most intimate detail, about changes in

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sexual attitudes, practices and behaviours in the twentieth century, tapping a dimension of history that no-one had dared approach previously. Daniel James looked for ‘objective knowledge’ about work and politics in the Argentinian meat packing industry in oral history interviews, and discovered that his principal interviewee was offering him insights into the interactions of self and society, narrative and discourse, memory and ‘the moment of now’ that constituted her subjectivity. James Hinton approached MO diaries to determine what prompted active citizenship during the Second World War, and found in them narratives of no less than the making of the modern self in the middle years of the twentieth century. The power of personal narratives to reshape the historical agenda has demanded new ways of thinking about ‘representativeness’ and ‘typicality’. Many historians who have taken the personal turn use the language of ‘access’ when explaining their practice. They write that letters, diaries, memoirs and oral histories, or even the faint traces of histories of the self in records in which the ‘exceptional normal’ individual makes a fleeting appearance, ‘give access’ to a world which is otherwise closed to them, and which challenges received views of the past. Exceptionality, rather than ‘typicality’, is celebrated. Not everyone records their life histories in diaries and memoirs, or even letters and oral testimonies, and self-awareness and reflexivity in those that have survived are relatively rare qualities. Personal narratives and their authors are by definition unusual and are valued by many historians for precisely this reason. Such historians communicate the excitement of the quest in metaphors of light: testimonies ‘illuminate’; they possess ‘luminosity’; and they constitute ‘pencils of light’ shining into the darkness of the unknown. Whether what historians find there is ‘typical’ of all who remain in obscurity becomes an irrelevant question. Truth claims and generalisations move into a different register, one in which the testimony of the single individual is read as an indicator of experiences, relationships, emotions and cultural constructions which are not, and cannot be, the final truth about everyone in the past, but which tell us about processes that have been ignored in historical practice that is more remote from lived experience.

Notes 1 ‘Positivism’ is, in brief, the intellectual commitment to deriving generalisable knowledge from empirical data, for example by generating or testing hypotheses by quantification. 2 Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 5. 3 Abrams, Oral History Theory, p. 5. The main publication arising from the project was Paul Thompson, The Edwardians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975). 4 Abrams, Oral History Theory, pp. 5–6. See also Lynn Abrams, ‘Revisiting Akenfield: Forty Years of an Iconic Text’, Oral History, 37:1, 2009, pp. 33–42. 5 Sociologists of science have pointed out that in practice natural science researchers do not necessarily obey this logic, often formulating hypotheses on the basis of intuition (hunch) or by other creative means. 6 The examples are from Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Weidenfeld and

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7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32

Nicolson, 1972), p. 37, and Michael Roper, The Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 188. Michael Rustin, ‘Reflections on the Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences’, in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengraf (eds.), The Turn to Biographical Methods in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 33–52, here p. 49. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 45–49; Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 1–9. Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. xi. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. xii, 5. She explains that about 80 per cent of the autobiographies were published privately or commercially and 20 per cent remain in manuscript form in family hands or in local studies collections in libraries. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 22. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 23, 21. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 23. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 23. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 313. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 313 and Table 10.1. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 322. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 84. See also S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives: Families’ Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 52, 1992, pp. 849–880. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 66. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 67. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 81, 120, 125, 366, 368, 369. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 7. David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 7. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 8. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 4. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 6. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. x. Hannah Barker, Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 10. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 6. Humphries’ publications include, among others, ‘Women and Paid Work’, in J. Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 85–106; ‘Female-headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: The Vanguard of the Proletariat?’ Labour History Review 63, 1998, pp. 31–65; ‘“Because They Are to Menny …” Children, Mothers, and Fertility Decline: The Evidence from Working-class Autobiographies of the C18 and C19’, in A. Janssens (ed.), Gendering the Fertility Decline in the Western World (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 113–150. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 21. Malin Nilson, Review, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 59:3, 2011, pp. 296–298, here p. 296. In particular, as another reviewer points out, it omits the experiences of girls in the occupations that were, in fact, dependent on their labour, such as domestic service, straw plaiting, and lace making. Pamela Horn, Review, History of Education, 41:3, 2012, pp. 429–431, here p. 430. See Caroline Daley’s analysis of gender differences in memories of childhood discussed in Chapter 5. The same point applies to recovering the history of colonial subjects from the testimony of colonisers.

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33 Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Gender and Narrative Form in French and German Working-Class Autobiographies’, in Personal Narratives Group (ed.), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 104. 34 Maynes, ‘Gender and Narrative’, p. 104. 35 Maynes, ‘Gender and Narrative’, pp. 111–112. 36 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 8–9. 37 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 9–10. 38 James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 15–16. 39 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten Pound Poms, p. 19. 40 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten Pound Poms, p. 359. 41 James Hinton, in Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), confirms this approach. He argues that diary writing was particularly important for women seeking personal autonomy in the specific social and cultural climate of the mid-twentieth century, because it offered much-needed opportunities for ‘self-inspection’ (p. 7). The recent phenomenon of more women than men responding to requests to provide personal narratives is noted in relation to oral history by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 388–389 (discussed below) and, with reference to Mass Observation’s revival of the practice of recruiting panelists in 1981, by Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Using the Mass-observation Archive as a Source for Women’s Studies’, Women’s History Review, 3:1, 1994, pp. 101–113. 42 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten Pound Poms, p. 362. 43 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten Pound Poms, p. 19. 44 This point was made by feminist sociologists in the 1980s. See for example Christine Delphy, ‘Women in Stratification Studies’, in Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 114–128. 45 Historians who use writing projects, such as the Mass Observation Project (MOP) started in 1981, are, in a similar way to oral historians, able to recruit respondents. On the MOP, see Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography’, Sociology, 27, 1993, pp. 27–40. 46 Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution. 47 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 59. Fertility trends were the subject of their previous studies. 48 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 388–389. They interviewed fifty-seven married women and thirty-one married men. They selected Blackburn as a ‘representative mill town’ in Northern England, and Harpenden just north of London as a ‘thoroughly middle-class community’, recruiting fifty and thirty-eight respondents from them respectively. 49 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 389. 50 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 12, 16, 22 and 84. 51 See Roberts, Doing Feminist Research, pp. xvi–xvii. 52 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 393. 53 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 19. 54 For discussion of historians’ explorations of the interactions of public discourses in the present with those of the past in autobiographical writing and in oral history see Chapters 4 and 5. 55 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 3. Steve Humphries, A Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit: The British Experience, 1900–1950 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988). 56 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 3, 64–67. 57 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 3, citing among others Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 128–129.

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58 For a contrasting study, see Grey Osterud, ‘Speaking About the Silence Surrounding Sex’, Frontiers, 35:1, 2014, pp. 43–72. Osterud acknowledges the difficulties of talking about sex with women born between the 1880s and the 1930s, but discusses the kinds of conversations that were possible with the women she interviewed in rural New York State, bringing out the shifts in the ways in which the women spoke about sex and birth control in relation to changes in their sexual knowledge over the life course. 59 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 4. 60 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 15 and 155 61 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 110. 62 Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 58. 63 Lynn Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the “Good Woman” in 1950s and 1960s Britain’, in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (eds.), The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945– 2000 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 60–83, here p. 64. 64 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, p. 65. 65 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, p. 67. 66 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, p. 80. 67 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, p. 80. 68 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, p. 79. 69 Ben Bousquet and Colin Douglas, West Indian Women at War: British Racism in Wolrd War II (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991); Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). An example of a ‘serendipitous encounter’ is Juliette Pattinson’s meeting with Nancy Wake, a wartime secret agent, in the bar of the Special Forces Club in London. Wake had not replied to Pattinson’s letter requesting an interview. Pattinson went to the Club to interview another woman. When she met Wake there by chance, Wake told her that she had ‘hesitated’ on receipt of the letter because she did not want to be associated with ‘women’s libbers’. However, she became friendly and forthcoming over drinks when she evidently discovered that Pattinson was not the stereotypical ‘man-hating feminist’ she had imagined, opening the way to a succession of meetings. See Juliette Pattinson, ‘“The Thing that Made Me Hesitate …”: Re-examining Gendered Intersubjectivities in Interviews with British Secret War Veterans’, Women’s History Review, 20:2, 2011, pp. 254–255. 70 Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-war Britain, 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 9–13. 71 Emma Vickers, Queen and Country: Same-sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 7–11. 72 Vickers, Queen and Country, pp. 3–4. 73 See Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, p. 53, where they state that their research ‘was designed as a study of sex in marriage; it is not a study of the unmarried, the separated, the divorced, lesbians or male homosexuals’. The only references in the book to homosexuality as a topic of conversation in an interview are to a couple’s discussion of a possibly gay neighbour, quoted to illustrate the husband’s view of his wife as ‘innocent’ and in need of protection. Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 16–17. 74 Vickers, Queen and Country, pp. 7–11. 75 Vickers, Queen and Country, p. 14. 76 Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 7. 77 Berisso is the Argentine town where James did his research. Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 31. 78 James, Doña María’s Story, p. 120; also pp. 45–52; pp. 48–50; p. 84. 79 James, Doña María’s Story, p. 121.

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80 James, Doña María’s Story, pp. 123–125. 81 For further discussion of ‘shared authority’, see Chapter 7. 82 James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 17. 83 On the history of MO, see James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). 84 Early critiques include Margaret Bunn, ‘Mass-Observation: A Comment on People in Production’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 13:1, 1944, pp. 24–37; Mark Abrams, Social Surveys and Social Action (London: Heinemann, 1951). 85 Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’ and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004), pp. 112–113. 86 On usages of the term ‘mass’ see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988), pp. 192–197. 87 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 17. 88 Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), p. 77. 89 Noakes, War and the British, p. 80. See also (discussing the post-1981 panel) Kushner, We Europeans, p. 256; Alistair Thomson, ‘Writing about Learning: Using MassObservation Educational Life-histories to Explore Learning through Life’, in Julia Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), pp. 163–174. 90 James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, pp. 1, 7. This marked a departure for Hinton from writing mainly about social class in institutional and ideological settings, the concerns of his previous books such as Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867–1974 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983) and Women, Social Leadership, and the Second World War: Continuities of Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 91 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 17. 92 Claire Langhamer, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post-War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 9:2, 2012, pp. 277–297. See also Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 93 Langhamer, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity’, p. 279. 94 Langhamer, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity’, p. 293. 95 Kushner, We Europeans, pp. 112–113. 96 Kushner, We Europeans, p. 5. 97 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Harvard University Press, 2006), p. xi. 98 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 17. 99 Rustin, ‘Reflections on the Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences’, p. 49. 100 James Hinton, Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 6. 101 Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2. 102 Steedman, Master and Servant, p. 2. 103 Steedman, Master and Servant, p. 2. 104 Steedman, Master and Servant, p. 3. 105 Steedman, Master and Servant, p. 4. 106 Catherine Feely, ‘From Dialectics to Dancing: Reading, Writing and the Experience of Everyday Life in the Diaries of Frank P. Forster’, History Workshop Journal, 69, 2010, pp. 91–110. Forster had a sense of audience. He wrote of his diaries as a form of legacy which would provide evidence of the sort of man he was: ‘when I am gone some one may come and read through them and see that I at least was capable of thinking of somethings that are removed from that which stinks on one nostrils’ (as in original), p. 95.

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107 For an elaboration of this theme, see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 108 Feely explains that Forster’s 1930s (political) diaries were bought by the Modern Record Centre, Warwick University, from an old-newspaper dealer in Colwyn Bay in 1995. Forster’s 1939–1944 diaries, recording his war work at engineering companies in Chester and activities as a shop steward in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, were (at an unknown date) deposited in the Imperial War Museum. 109 Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London: Verso, 2006). 110 Feely, ‘From Dialectics to Dancing’, p. 104. 111 Andrew E. Barshay, ‘Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The Gulag Memoirs of a Japanese Humanist, 1945–49’, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 36:2, 2010, pp. 255–288, here p. 288. See also Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). 112 Barshay, ‘Knowledge Painfully Acquired’, p. 256. 113 Barshay, ‘Knowledge Painfully Acquired’, p. 261. 114 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 6. 115 It is sometimes attributed to Carlo Ginsberg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) and was certainly used within Italian microhistory, in particular by Edoardo Grendi, ‘Microanalisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici, 35, 1977, pp. 506–520, here p. 512. See Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is there a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’ Californian Italian Studies, 2:1, 2011, pp. 1–24, here p. 4. 116 Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 117 Pearsall, Atlantic Families, p. 18. 118 Pearsall, Atlantic Families, p. 42. 119 Pearsall, Atlantic Families, pp. 106–107 (the letters of Nathaniel and Helen Pierce); p. 107 (Caesar Brown); pp. 94–96 (Ignatius Sancho). 120 Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 50, 2000, p. 185. 121 Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero’, p. 199. 122 Matt Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”, Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in Edith Thompson’s Letters, 1921–1922’, Past and Present, 207, 2010, pp. 215–249, here p. 249. 123 Frank Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate: Letters, Public Opinion and Monarchy in the 1936 Abdication Crisis’, Twentieth Century British History, 25:1, 2014, pp. 30–62. Mort aligns his approach with that of Houlbrook on p. 41. 124 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 39. 125 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 39. 126 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 39. 127 Mort, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, p. 41. 128 Among many other examples, see Hannah Barker, ‘A Grocer’s Tale: Gender, Family and Class in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, Gender and History, 21:2 (2009), pp. 340–57, discussed in Chapter 3. 129 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 13. 130 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. xi.

7 CONCLUSION

Historians who use a single type of personal narrative frequently make a double claim about the specific genre on which they focus: it is not only the best one to use, but it has been unfairly sidelined by other historical researchers. Vincent prefaces his use of working-class autobiographies (in 1981) by declaring his intention to introduce historians to ‘a form of source material which has been unjustly neglected’.1 Oral history, he implies, was more popular: indeed he complains that it had, by the 1980s, ‘become a major industry’, and he lists its defects, as he sees them, compared with autobiography.2 James Hinton writes (in 2010) that there are not a lot of sources for histories of the self, but ‘many of those which exist’, including autobiography and oral history, ‘may do as much to obscure as to reveal the processes shaping an individual life’.3 ‘It is the diary,’ he asserts, ‘by its nature free from teleology, that provides the privileged source for the historical investigation of selfhood.’4 Hester Vaizey asserts that letters have been dismissed by recent scholars as ‘discursively constructed texts’, but, she says, they convey direct expressions of emotion in contrast to the ‘second hand’ emotions in oral histories.5 Oral historians, on the other hand, advocate the possibilities of live interaction with their sources: ‘the advantage of an interview is precisely that it is not a written memoir and that the informant can be questioned on issues which they have not volunteered in memoirs, nor for that matter, confided to their diary, [or] expressed in letters,’ writes Trevor Lummis.6 The implicit defensiveness that characterises these positions is perhaps related to recurrent attacks on historians’ growing attention to the self and subjectivity since the 1970s. Detractors argue that the turn to the personal has substituted biographical accounts for systemic analyses of global processes, and that its focus is inherently conservative.7 The preceding chapters constitute a rebuttal of such a critique. The historical research reviewed here challenges gendered, classed, raced and colonial power relations in the past, through histories of the self, and opens up

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new ways of understanding global processes. However, the criticisms may well have contributed to the seemingly entrenched requirement that historians justify their use of subjective and personal sources to an extent that is not required of other types of source. Underpinning the rivalries over the merits of various genres of personal narrative is the issue of authenticity. At stake seems to be the question of the capacity of different types of personal testimony to answer questions about what people ‘really’ did in the past, and how they ‘really’ felt about it. In the first part of this chapter I analyse the concept of authenticity and discuss how historians of the self have engaged with it. The antagonistic and defensive tone of the comments quoted above (resentment at neglect, assertion of superiority) is relatively superficial. The expression of rivalry between genres is at best a rhetorical crust over the more serious endeavour of identifying the specific features of each genre compared with others and clarifying the topics and research questions that they enable historians to pursue. One type of personal testimony may be more suitable than another for the task in hand, but, as we have seen, they all present their own challenges. In practice, many historians use a combination of genres. The second section of the chapter discusses work that draws on multiple types of personal narratives, through case studies in which authors explicitly compare different genres and their potential for both raising and answering questions about the past.8 This book has focused on four well-established and widely used types of personal testimony. But some historians are experimenting with other ways in which histories of the self have been fashioned over time. The final section considers some recent adventures with unusual genres, and the new kinds of history that they make possible.

Authenticity The historian Richard Holmes argues that the diaries and letters of First World War soldiers give the historian an especially intimate view of people in the past: ‘the closer we get to events the better our chance of finding out how people really felt.’9 Holmes’s claim concerning ‘finding out how people really felt’ haunts the uses that historians make of personal testimony. The issue is one of understandings and perceptions of authenticity, and historians who use personal narratives think about authenticity in a number of different ways. It is possible to divide them into three categories: accuracy, authorship and provenance. The factual reliability and validity of personal testimony were considered particularly important by early practitioners of oral history. Trevor Lummis’s 1987 book Listening to History, sub-titled ‘the authenticity of oral evidence’, expounds the notion of ‘authenticity’ as reliability and validity. Lummis describes and explains the best ways to collect ‘historical information … effectively and accurately’ through the oral history interview, and how to validate and analyse it.10 While insisting that many documentary sources, such as newspaper reports, contain inaccuracies and

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biases, he argues that documentary and oral sources are mutually complementary. He suggests that a more complete picture of what is documented is often obtained by oral interviewing, and that it is useful to check material in an oral history interview against documentation, including newspaper reports and Census data, in order to substantiate and contextualise it, in a process known as ‘triangulation’.11 In other words, for Lummis and numerous other oral historians, the capacity to check the factual accuracy of oral testimony against other types of source is an important part of a methodology that enables historians to gain new knowledge. An example comes from work by the oral historian Lynn Abrams. She uses the concept of authenticity in this factual way in relation to a story that is part of the oral tradition in the Shetland Islands. The story was recorded by a Scottish oral historian in the 1980s and Abrams listened to it in an archive. It was told by an elderly Shetland woman, to whom it had been handed down, and it concerned the perilous journey that her mother took, as a young girl, to obtain a bottle of medicine with magical healing powers from a wise woman living alone in a distant part of the Shetland archipelago. Abrams subjects the ‘empirical story’ to checks for veracity using Census, demographic and geographical data. She identifies the teller’s mother, locates and names the wise woman, validates the place names and the route taken, and relates specific details in the story to both material realities and contemporary beliefs concerning cures and wise women, in order to ‘authenticate the story’.12 She argues, however, that there is more to this narrative than ‘the facts’. She regards the story as a ‘meaning-making device’ that requires narrative analysis, and she devotes most of her discussion to the significance of the narrative structure and strategies of the story, and to its importance as an example of women’s place in Shetland’s ‘oral tradition’. Authentication in this case is just a starting point. A second meaning of authenticity in the hands of historians who have taken the personal turn concerns the question of authorship. As we saw in Chapter 4, the idea of the ‘autobiographical pact’, proposed by Philippe Lejeune, is that readers expect a memoir to be ‘true’, in other words to be an ‘authentic’ account of the experiences of the author to whom it is ascribed. This means that it is possible for an autobiographer, but not for a novelist or the author of a short story, to ‘lie’, leading guardians of ‘truth’, such as scholars and journalists, to critique such writing in order to distinguish fact from fiction, myth from reality. The strength of Lejeune’s ‘pact’ is indicated by recurrent scandals accompanying revelations that celebrated ‘autobiographies’ set in the Holocaust are, in fact, invented. Two examples are Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood published in English in 1996, and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, composed in the 1990s and scheduled for publication in 2009.13 Wilkomirski’s book was published and won prizes for non-fiction before it was exposed as ‘fraudulent’ by journalists and academics. Rosenblat’s was withdrawn from publication at the last minute, when he confessed to having made it up, but he had already won a love story contest, hosted by television presenter Oprah Winfrey, in 1996, and the film rights had been sold in 2003. Echoing the concept of the

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autobiographical pact, historian Stefan Maechler writes of Fragments, ‘Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch.’14 Such a judgement could not have been made if the book had been presented to the public as fiction rather than autobiography. The anger about both cases was, in part, generated by fears that these inventions would cast doubt on the truth of the history of the Holocaust, but it attests more generally to the importance of authorial authenticity in the public reception of autobiography. The third use of the concept of authenticity by historians, in relation to personal narratives, connects it to the provenance, or origin, of the source. The idea of historical subjects speaking for themselves, as opposed to others speaking for them, has been particularly important to feminist, labour and post-colonial historians. As Sue Bruley writes, ‘the publication of authentic women’s testimony’ was a major commitment among feminist historians in the last quarter of the twentieth century.15 Their ambition to get beyond commentaries on women produced by men, which were often derogatory and belittling, and to find women’s ‘honest voices’, inspired searches for female letters, diaries, and memoirs from across the centuries, and prompted numerous oral history projects.16 In a similar way, labour historians sought out working-class autobiography and undertook oral history projects to hear the voices of workers directly, rather than through the filter of records kept by employers or government commissions. Equally, working-class autobiographers were sometimes motivated by the desire to put ‘authentic’ experience on record. Keith Gildart writes that B. L. Coombes, a miner who suffered falling wages and unemployment in South Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, composed his coalfield memoir with a ‘burning desire to tell his truth, about the lives of miners and their families’.17 Coombes himself asserted that the history of the miners ought to be written by a working miner: ‘the dust should still be in his throat as he was writing … then it would be authentic’.18 The authenticity endowed by provenance is not, of course, straightforward. Catherine Merridale, author of Ivan’s War, a history of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War, writes that she ‘set out to write this book with the aim of reaching beyond the myths in search of “true war stories”’.19 She and her associate interviewed 200 veterans, but she found that ‘the myths’ were so strong among former soldiers themselves that she had to engage with the ‘competing master narratives of war’ in Russia. The ‘Soviet hero myth’ celebrating strength, health, fearlessness and optimism was still dominant, inscribed on war memorials and favoured even by the post-communist authorities, and it left little space for ‘panic, failure, or doubt … swearing, smoking, stench or guts’ in the stories of wartime service.20 Merridale remained committed to finding ‘the true Ivan’ but came to recognise that his story was not independent of the cultural, political and psychological world that he inhabited: commemoration was comforting, secrecy was a habit, and silence could be meaningful.21 An important aspect of the claim for the authenticity of the personal narrative has been the idea that the place where personal testimony originates is an

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‘autonomous domain’, from which any subordinate historical figure, be they a colonial subject, a woman, a worker, or all three, could speak independently.22 However, Gajendra Singh’s research on the lives of sipahi, Indian soldiers recruited by the British to fight in the First World War, that we met in Chapter 2, suggests that the concept of the autonomous domain is deeply problematic. Singh argues that his search for the ‘narrative voice of the sipahi’ in letters, court depositions and interrogation transcripts indicates that any attempt to treat the provenance of their narratives as such a domain ‘is doomed to failure’.23 Sipahis’ letters home, for example, were read out loud, often in the presence of the letter writer, by a translator, to the British officer responsible for censorship. Singh argues that the voice of the sipahi is deeply interwoven with that which conditioned and censored it, and he raises the issue of whether such personal narratives are so infused with colonial ideology as to be useless for the historian seeking to find out how the sipahi thought and felt. He argues, however, that these sources are ‘contested rather than compromised’.24 The process of producing testimony itself provided opportunities for contestation of the imperial ideologies and practices that shaped it. Thus in letters home sipahis questioned their terms of service; in the courtroom they endeavoured to thwart the prosecution of their peers; and in the interrogation chamber they showed that they did not consider themselves subject to the rigours of British military discipline. I discussed whether there could ever be a ‘clear space out of which voices can speak’ in my book about British women’s experiences of the Second World War, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, and concluded that such an idea is an illusion. The use of language itself involves the deployment of cultural constructions, and as a result ‘no-one’s personal testimony represents a truth which is independent of discourse’.25 The meanings of experience, as it happened as well as in the ways it is recalled, occur within a discursive domain that, generated by social and cultural processes, cannot be autonomous. In Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives and in Contesting Home Defence, I suggested that memory is always mediated. Experience, the material and temporal contexts in which it takes place, and the numerous cultural forms (and, I would add, the psychic conditions) through which it is lived, remembered and voiced, cannot be separated from each other. The entangled relationship between them complicates but does not undermine the endeavour of working with personal sources: on the contrary, it enlarges and enriches the arena of historical study. Post-colonial historians, and historians of slavery, confront, particularly acutely, the tension between the importance of the search for the ‘authentic’ voices of their subjects, and the understanding that such voices are mediated. Sharon Musher evaluates a huge collection of interviews with former slaves undertaken as part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration, later Work Projects Administration) in the USA, one of many experimental ‘New Deal’ programmes designed to create employment during the Great Depression of the 1930s. About 4,000 narratives were collected from ex-slaves, most of whom were born about eighty years before the project started in 1936. Musher writes, ‘Not surprisingly, problems of

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authenticity, memory, and candor haunt the accounts.’26 Not only did the climate of race relations and the rules of racial etiquette make an impact on the inter-subjective exchanges between former slaves and the white, southern, unemployed writers, librarians and clerks employed as ‘federal writers’ to interview them, in addition, the interviews went through several versions before they were archived or published. Musher explains that the federal writers took notes which they delivered to typists who, having deciphered their hand writing, passed the typescripts to state editors who sent their reworked versions to scholars and folklorists at the national headquarters of the WPA in Washington DC, for selection, reorganisation, further editing and publication. Interventions included, for example, state editors in Mississippi and Texas altering narratives to downplay masters’ abuse of slaves and the persistence of racial violence after Emancipation in 1863. Musher writes that the slave narratives should thus be regarded as third- or fourth-hand accounts. Such an extensive process of intervention might be thought to invalidate the testimony, but Musher argues that much can be salvaged. The early typescripts enable historians ‘to glimpse more genuine sentiments’ than the final versions, and the preservation of documentation concerning the multiple authorship of the narratives facilitates understanding of the interventions and mediations, themselves part of the history of these narratives.27 She argues that, in spite of the compromised ‘authenticity’ of the collection, it enables historians to reconstruct the cultural and material world that slaves created apart from their masters, as well as documenting the many ways in which they both resisted and accepted white domination. It also facilitates the study of the social, political, ideological and cultural processes at work in the memorialisation of slavery itself. The enduring pressures of racist colonial cultures and totalitarian ideologies on the mental universe of their subjects, and their shaping effects on histories of the self, are particularly striking. But, as we have seen in the foregoing chapters, ideological and cultural influences, and the effects of social convention, are evident in personal narratives of all sorts, produced in any society. By working with, rather than against them, historians enlarge the scope of their enquiries and the meaning of history itself. Personal testimony of all sorts is mediated: a personal narrative cannot be simplistically regarded as an ‘authentic’ reproduction of reality but, whether written or oral, comprises a text that requires interpretation.

Multiple genres As we saw in Chapter 2, Michael Roper’s history of emotional experience on the battlefields of the First World War focuses on letters. He comments, however, that the undigested sensations inscribed by soldiers in their letters home, in the immediate aftermath of battle, can be hard to comprehend and that, in comparison, memoirs are more accessible. He writes, ‘retrospective accounts are generally more reflective about the emotional experience of war than the letter or diary’, because the passage of time enables a coherent narrative to be composed.28 Roper therefore

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combines the use of letters (his main source) with that of memoirs. He draws on the composed accounts of emotional responses to the war in memoirs to contextualise and enlarge on raw experience barely articulated, at the time, in letters. A comment by the author of an unpublished memoir, written in the 1950s, speaks to these issues. The memoirist, after re-reading the wartime letters his mother had kept, wrote that he was struck by ‘the memories which they revive of the things I did not say’.29 It is a reflection that throws further light on the relationship of serving soldiers to their families and underlines the self-censorship practiced by letter-writers. Difficult though they may be to interpret, however, letters rather than memoirs are the focus of Roper’s enquiry. This is not just because more of them exist than memoirs, but also because their written contents, including their ellipses and confusions, as well as responses to the letter as a material object, are key constituents of the emotional battle that he is exploring. Although the use of a mixture of sources is quite common practice, historians rarely make the specific contribution of each genre to their research explicit. I have selected two studies for scrutiny in which differentiation between, and comparison of, genres is a deliberate part of the authors’ historical practice. One of them focuses on women’s emigration to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. The other concerns the history of the disclosure of child sexual abuse. In his book about women migrants to Australia, some of whom reversed their migration, returning to live in Britain before the end of the century, Alistair Thomson uses letters alongside memoirs and oral histories. He writes, ‘Letters, unlike retrospective memoirs, are present-centred fragments in which the future is unknown and through which the [letter writer] records and responds to life – and its myriad features – as he or she meets it.’30 For his research he gained access to some particularly full sets of emigrants’ letters: their continuity across time, combined with their fluency and clarity, counters the usually fragmentary nature of letter writing. There is a reason for the completeness of these collections, which is itself integral to the history he is studying. The letter writers regarded their Australian emigration as an adventure and a special period in their lives, wanted to communicate it clearly, and asked their addressees (who were family members) to keep what they sent.31 The continuous runs of letters (for all that there are gaps) are thus similar to diaries: indeed two of the women intended to keep journals, and one even started a diary on the voyage out, but in the event all the women chose to spend their limited writing time communicating with home by letter, rather than keeping a journal with a less immediate audience. Thomson compares the accounts in the letters written in the 1960s and 1970s with the narratives he elicited from their authors in oral history interviews in the 2000s. The letters are marked by their dialogic and public character. Like the eighteenth-century and wartime letters discussed in Chapter 2, they were written in the knowledge that they would be read not only by the addressee but by others, and they were sometimes composed collectively too.32 In contrast, the oral history interviews, like the memoirs that Roper used, reveal that the letters home contained ‘part-truths and concealment’.33 Dorothy Wright’s letters, for instance, were

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detailed, chatty, funny and upbeat, even when describing the long sea voyage, the challenges of caring for her small children, and her married life after her husband’s appointment to a new job in Australia. In contrast, Dorothy spoke in her interview of her prolonged and agonising seasickness during the voyage, her frustrations with motherhood, and her alienation from her husband after his promotion to a stressful and time-consuming post. She also described a dark journey into what she now understood to have been post-natal depression, following the birth of her second child. The personal history that took shape in the confessional and introspective context of the interviews included dimensions that did not feature in Dorothy’s public-facing letters home. Oral history interviews commonly stimulate life review, that is, a process of reflection on the meaning and value of a life as a whole, particularly as it moves into old age. Thomson suggests that, in such a review, not every episode is recalled and considered in the same way. He argues that the early years of migration stand out as periods of youthful energy, and his interviewees drew on positive scripts in which to recall these years. Affirmative ways of telling their stories were not hard to find, since emigration was presented at the time, and has been understood since (at least for white ‘economic’ migrants as opposed to those seeking escape from war, famine, poverty and oppression) as an exciting and life-changing opportunity. Even though Dorothy confessed in her interview to a range of doubts and difficulties, she still summed up the experience of emigration as ‘a highlight of my life, not always a happy time but a great learning experience … In a way the experience liberated me.’34 The oral history interviews also captured accounts of periods in these women’s lives that they remembered in less detail and with less composure, and which did not feature at all in the letters. Thomson writes of his interview with Joan Pickett, for example, that her memories of migration were ‘detailed and vivid’ and had the character of ‘often-told stories’, enhancing but not contradicting the evidence of her letters that this was, as she put it, ‘the time of my life’.35 In stark contrast, Joan’s oral recollection of her reluctant return to Manchester in 1968, triggered by her father’s death, eight years after she had set out for Australia, was vague and lacked detail and drive. Thomson suggests that Joan’s discomposed recall of her return was due to the shock of her father’s death, her grief, and her suppressed discontent at having to give up the life that she was enjoying so much. Furthermore, suggests Thomson, ‘there is usually no shared script for return migration’.36 I found a similar contrast in the account of a woman whom I interviewed about her experiences in the Second World War and afterwards. She related her story of insisting on a mechanical job, exceptional for women even in wartime, in the Women’s Royal Naval Service with vigour, drama and humour. Compared with this ‘heroic’ story of getting ‘as close to the front line as you could get’, her account of giving up university after the war due to marriage and pregnancy, and spending ten years at home with two small children from 1949 to 1959, followed by an attempt to resume a career, was hesitant and self-doubting.37 There was a strong public narrative in Britain in the Second World War about the need for

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women to contribute actively to the war effort in exceptional roles, on which Ann Tomlinson drew confidently. In contrast, in recalling the 1950s she found herself negotiating conflicting discourses concerning the propriety of full-time motherhood versus opportunities for women’s education and employment, and the desirability of women home-makers as against the accessibility of the new consumerism to those who did paid work. The result was a discomposed account full of unanswered questions about the life choices she had made. Thomson makes comparisons between testimony found not only in oral history and letters, but also in memoir. At the start of his project he invited volunteers to contribute short autobiographies about their experiences of emigration. These elicited memoirs were, he acknowledges, affected by the volunteers’ perceptions of who they were writing for. Thomson and his collaborators provided some ideas about what they were interested in, such as family background, reasons for emigration, and initial impressions of Australia, while stressing that contributors should feel free to write their stories as they wanted. The volunteers were responsive to these hints and committed to writing a ‘good story’, but they were relatively reserved on family dynamics and the reasons for return, reluctant, as Thomson puts it, ‘to share family intimacies with an unknown audience’.38 In contrast, as oral history interviewees, prompted by Thomson’s questions and comments, and relaxed by the growing trust between interviewer and interviewee, the women engaged in a ‘more spontaneous and open-ended dialogue’ in which their narratives became less tightly controlled and composed.39 In Thomson’s study, letters conjured a vivid picture of the life of a 1960s migrant to Australia and memoirs were composed and fluent. Both supplied numerous details about emigration for Thomson’s project. However, the women writing in these genres were relatively restrained on the more personal and difficult dimensions of the experience because of the audiences they were addressing. Thomson was interested in family dynamics, personal change, and the meaning not only of emigration but also of return. The oral history interviews captured these dimensions and the emotions associated with them more effectively than the letters or memoirs. The inter-subjective aspects of the interviews had, he suggests, an important influence on the outcomes. All the women took an interest in Thomson’s own personal circumstances as an Australian migrant to Britain who, at the time of the project, was contemplating a return to his country of origin: the oral history exchanges were deepened by the shared experience of inter-continental migration.40 This comparison does not mean that letters and memoirs are always restrained, or that oral histories are always revealing. It alerts us to the possibilities of variability not only between but also within genres, according to provenance and audience, and the importance of the specific enquiry for the discoveries that it is possible to make. Thomson’s work also enables us to reflect on the complications of ‘shared authority’.41 As the originator of the project and author of the resulting book, Thomson elicited documentation and conducted interviews. As memoirists the women wrote what they felt was appropriate, in response to an agenda set (albeit

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loosely) by Thomson as researcher. In oral history interviews, the women deepened and widened the histories of the self they had inscribed elsewhere, in part as a result of the exchange of subject positions that Thomson’s personal history made possible. The ‘agenda’ in the interviews was evidently neither entirely theirs nor entirely his: informed by the letters they had donated and the memoirs he had elicited, it was shaped by the open-ended processes of personal life review. While Thomson authored the book based on the project, and it is his analysis that informs it, he writes of consulting his respondents about each chapter, reflecting on their replies, and incorporating any changes they requested. He includes the names of all four women as co-authors. This is impressive sharing, for all that shared authority was not equal authority: as a history professor in a tenured position, Thomson had ultimate control of the project and the publication. Nevertheless, he did more than most historians to address the power imbalance. My second case study of the use of multiple genres of personal narrative concerns work on child sexual abuse, a particularly difficult subject for survivors to recall and narrate and for academics to research. Lucy Delap’s project on the disclosure of child sexual abuse during the twentieth century uses three principal genres of personal testimony: ‘enforced narratives’ extracted from children by the police and in court; ‘self-crafted disclosures’ in memoirs; and accounts given in oral history interviews.42 The ‘enforced narratives’ that Delap discusses come from formal hearings, some involving court cases, arising from children’s allegations of abuse in the period 1910 to 1918. They indicate the wall of disbelief confronting children in such situations, and the shame they were made to feel about their complaints. As a result of testifying to teachers, to the police and in court, some children were themselves regarded as a ‘moral danger’ to others and were locked up. Whatever happened to them, their reputation was damaged, and cases rarely led to conviction. It is unsurprising, writes Delap, that children who made allegations so often ‘opted for self-protective silence’ rather than repeat their accounts in public.43 ‘Enforced narratives’ are revealing of the power structures and belief systems to which narrators were subjected and which imposed parameters on what they could say.44 They tell us little about what their experiences meant to the narrators themselves. It might be expected that ‘self-crafted disclosures’ would be different. However, the healing effects of the passage of time that Roper observes in relation to First World War memoirs do not seem to apply to accounts of child abuse. Delap finds that allusions to abuse in autobiographies are frequently disorganised and incoherent, indicative, she suggests, of unresolved trauma. She argues that this is particularly so where men’s accounts are concerned. She draws on two memoirs, published in 1939 and 1972, to suggest that ‘long-established cultural traditions’ made it particularly hard for men to construct narratives of sexual abuse, even though they emphasised its lasting negative effects on their lives.45 Sexual abuse of boys and men has not been publicly narrativised in the same way as suffering in the trenches, for example: the terms in which it may be recalled are not well established.

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Delap suggests that there is a gender difference, implying that it is not quite so hard for women to disclose abuse, presumably because of long-standing cultural constructions of feminine vulnerability. Emma Smith’s autobiography, published in 1954, offers a more ‘polished, composed account’ of sexual abuse.46 The passage of time since the abuse occurred, Smith’s religious belief and adoption of a confessional style, her increased respectability, and the guarantee of anonymity, may have helped her to disclose her childhood abuse relatively coherently. Delap emphasises, though, that in spite of its openness, Smith’s account uses euphemism and evasion to describe what happened, and is fraught with the contradiction between seeming choices (notably, to return to live with her abuser) and declarations of innocence. In addition, editorial interventions by a mentor and the publisher shaped the writing (for example, investing it with Dickensian allusions) and also undermined some of the benefits that the author had envisaged. (Publicity and reviews did not focus on the child sexual abuse at the heart of the book, Smith felt that she had been deprived of her rightful share of the financial proceeds, and her anonymity was not protected.) She suffered a personal breakdown following publication. Delap’s discussion of this and other autobiographical accounts of child sexual abuse points to several dimensions of memoirs that we met in Chapter 4. First, autobiographical writing tells us much about how personal experience may be articulated in the present. Second, style and narrative structure are indicative of the terms in which an author can compose an account at a specific point in time, given the cultural and discursive context. Third, intended audiences have shaping effects, and the reception of a memoir tells us about prevailing public understandings and vocabularies concerning practices in the past, at the time the autobiography was produced. Fourth, with respect to the disclosure of trauma in a memoir, there may be high costs for a survivor in bringing personal experience to public notice. The third genre that Delap explores is oral history. Its place in the development of ‘history from below’ from the 1970s, argues Delap, made a difference to receptivity to accounts of abuse. Feminists encouraged oral historians to listen for muted narratives and to foster interiority and reflection in their interviewees. And, as we have seen in Chapter 5, oral historians use the method to get ‘up close and personal’ with their interviewees. Delap’s exploration of archived oral history collections, however, leads her to conclude that the disclosure of child sexual abuse has been incidental to the main purpose of oral history projects and has often remained ‘muted’. She quotes an example of an interview with a woman, conducted in 1971, in which disclosure is as elusive and indirect as that in the men’s memoirs that she cites. Possibilities must be read into an opaque narrative: a reference to buying sweets might be indicative of malign sexual intentions on the part of an assaulter; the juxtaposition of an incoherent account of a childhood experience with references to an assault on a girl sixty years later might have been a way of displacing onto someone else the story of what happened to the narrator.47 Delap quotes a contrasting example of a more ‘direct and relatively composed disclosure’ of abuse perpetrated by a grandfather, told by a woman interviewed in 1986.48 Even this account was, argues Delap, fraught with guilt and confusion, and

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the interviewee was resistant to understanding what had happened as a sexual offence, as opposed to being simply ‘rude’ and ‘dirty’.49 Delap explains these ambiguities in terms of the two-fold effects of a persistent lack of public attention to abuse within families, and a disjuncture between the terms in which abuse was discussed in public debate and the uses that survivors could make of those resources. She suggests that these phenomena have persisted, in spite of increased public recognition of child sexual abuse since the late 1980s. Delap argues however that scandals in the early twenty-first century involving high profile celebrities have made a difference to disclosure. Notably, they encouraged awareness on the part of survivors that the possibilities for speaking out had changed, and, as Delap puts it, that ‘disclosure itself had become a knowable, discussable topic’.50 Even so, the evidence she quotes does not suggest that there has been direct progression towards greater openness in oral history interviews since the 1980s. One of her own interviewees, born in 1947 and abused persistently by her father in the 1950s, did not speak about her abuse until 2010, and even then expressed a preference not to talk about it, for reasons of psychological self-protection: ‘it’s bloody awful, I don’t want it in my head.’51 Oral history does not hold a magic key for the exploration of traumatic experience: the examples that Delap presents suggest that there is an acute narrative tension between the desire to tell and the need to be silent in both interviews and written autobiographies. Research on abuse and other traumatic experiences raises ethical issues that are inherent to history that is intimate and personal, and which some historians acknowledge. The researcher’s active role in eliciting testimony, and hence in risking the reliving of trauma, is obvious in the case of oral history. But the risk is also present in enquiries that invite volunteers to submit other types of narrative to researchers, such as the memoirs for which Thomson asked, or even private collections of letters or diaries which the participant may re-read before donating. The capacity of the personal past to disturb (as well as, hopefully, in many cases, to delight) is huge. Delap concludes by expressing understandable anxiety that research on the topic of child sexual abuse is not conducted on survivors’ own terms. Her historical methodology is, as we have seen, to analyse first hand testimony in relation to changing public narratives over the past one hundred years. Her aim as a historian is to use the results to demonstrate that abuse is not a historic constant and, also, that its history challenges the idea of progressive sexual change through the twentieth century. Her goal as an activist is to use this understanding to influence public policy. For all that both these objectives may indirectly benefit survivors, their own interests in disclosure cannot be so crisply summed up. ‘Shared authority’ may not be meaningless in such cases, but they highlight its problematic dimensions. This exploration of the work of historians who use multiple genres of personal testimony suggests that such a methodology is not only conducive to a multivalent exploration of a life, but may be full of surprises. Oral history interviews may uncover darker and more painful memories than stories inscribed in diaries, letters

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and memoirs, because of the intimacy of the occasion and the unpredictability of life review. Some dimensions of personal experience may not be easy for narrators to express in fluent narratives, whether written or spoken, recorded at the time or recalled later. Others may be conducive to composure, in the sense of a wellconstructed account that is emotionally and psychologically comfortable to relate. Social interaction, whether direct (as with a publisher or an interviewer), or indirect (with an imagined readership), mediates personal narratives. Life stage, public languages that evolve over time, the specific audiences that letter writers, diarists, memoirists and oral interviewees have in mind, as well as internal psychic processes, are influential in the production of histories of the self, whatever the genre in which they appear. The challenge for the historian is to identify, contextualise and interpret these components, as part of historical practice that expands our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the self and the social.

Alternative genres and new directions Historians’ engagement with emotion, the psyche, and everyday life stretches their practices of contextualisation and interpretation. Moving between the personal and the social, the cultural and the psychological, the material and the ideological worlds of people in the past, historians who engage with the subjectivity of those they research have changed the way history can be thought about and written. These new departures extend to experiments with genres of personal testimony beyond the four on which this book focuses. Historians of the self have investigated the narrative possibilities of a diverse and colourful range of sources, including scrapbooks, songs, films, visual self-portraits, patchwork, embroidery, photograph albums and graffiti.52 In the final section of the book I explore the ways in which some of these genres have been used to push out the parameters of history. Embroidery on a bed-sheet is the personal text at the heart of a study by Sasha Handley of the emotional impact of the repression of Jacobitism.53 The embroidery, undertaken by Anna Maria, Countess of Derwentwater, in 1716, records her love for and devotion to her husband, James Radcliffe, who was beheaded for treason following his participation in the Jacobite uprising of 1715. This was a rebellion of supporters of the deposed King James II, a Stuart and a Catholic, against King George I, a Hanoverian and a Protestant. Handley subjects the twenty-one words embroidered on the sheet, as well as its material, visual and non-literate aspects, to analysis, to construct the personal history of the countess, to throw light on the violent history of armed rebellion, and to chart the memorialisation of Jacobitism. Scientific analysis enables Handley to show that the thread used consisted of human hair, probably taken from the couple’s two heads, underlining the countess’s emotional investment in the sheet and the work she did on it. Handley interprets the symbolic meanings of the motifs the countess included (a thistle, pomegranates, sunflowers, exotic flowers with stems and leaves, and a heart), suggesting that they signalled loyalty to the exiled Stuart monarchs, as well

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as grief for the loss of her husband. And she argues that the act of creating this form of personal testimony, and ensuring its long-term preservation in a Belgian convent, was a form of self-management for the countess, a method of channelling her sorrow and focusing, as a Catholic, on God and the afterlife. Handley makes the sheet work hard. In addition to interpreting its literate and visual dimensions, and its meanings in the countess’s personal life, she finds in it material evidence of survival for more public purposes, as a devotional object in the convent in the eighteenth century. Although Handley centres this micro-history on the embroidered bed-sheet, she contextualises it by using more conventional written sources. These include James Radcliffe’s letters, and the will left by Anna Maria Radcliffe. The collection of letters has its own significance in the story, in that the countess herself gathered and archived her husband’s letters to a range of correspondents, to preserve his memory for future generations. Handley also finds records of the sale of the sheet at auction that help her to place it and its story within the romanticisation of Jacobitism in the twentieth century. In short, Handley uses the embroidery of this object as a genre of personal testimony that provides her with a starting point from which to reconstruct the meanings and emotions of an eighteenth-century marriage, the biography of an otherwise obscure noblewoman, and the wider history of the repression and later revival of interest in Jacobitism. On the face of it, twenty-one words embroidered on a bed-sheet constitute a considerable challenge to a historian seeking to reconstruct individual lives and their place in larger social and political processes. The same is true of the yet more fragmentary traces of graffiti inscribed in and on buildings, furniture, rocks or trees by largely unknown hands in the past. Historians have, however, begun to explore the potential of graffiti as texts with which to personalise history.54 Katherine Reed, in work on the American Civil War of 1861–1865, acknowledges that studying the personal meanings of the war to soldiers through their letters and diaries is more straightforward than using graffiti, and that there is a large and lively historiography based on such sources.55 But she argues that the specific characteristics of graffiti add a distinctive social and visual dimension. Graffiti tap into a wide demographic, since they require little literacy and no expenditure. They also channel everyday speech. Surviving Civil War graffiti record ‘fleeting thoughts, emotions, and moments of activity’, argues Reed, and, while inscribed by individuals, they focus on ‘soldiers’ public personas and group behavior’, dimensions that barely figure in correspondence and journals.56 At the time, they marked soldiers’ passage through a place, and connected diverse groups socially (most dramatically the Union and Confederate soldiers who fought on opposing sides). These graffiti also demonstrate contradictory values: regimental loyalties on the one hand, and vandalism and provocation on the other. Reed, like Handley, sees her unusual source as augmenting studies that draw on different types of personal narrative, and she uses more traditional sources, such as letters, for the purpose of contextualisation. She finds, for example, a letter in which a soldier describes, to his wife, the army’s graffiti habits in Falls Church,

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Virginia in 1862,: ‘just for fun people … write their names on the wals mine is there [sic]’ and one in which a more literate soldier attributes such practices to a desire for immortality.57 Drawing on this contemporary interpretation, Reed considers graffiti as an informal method of commemoration. In the Civil War, soldiers frequently included messages, pictures and biographical details in their graffiti, notably name, date and regiment, committing to the walls an enduring record of themselves in the context of heavy loss of life. Reed also identifies ‘gaps and silences’ in Civil War graffiti, compared with letters, but argues that these lacunae in themselves throw light on this special type of history of the self. She suggests that the public, interactive, nature of the genre meant that ‘more personal subjects were avoided’, hence the absence of references to religion and family, and she attributes the lack of graffiti concerning death and injury to the need to maintain a tough and cheerful masculinity. On the other hand, she finds the absence of references to slavery and abolition puzzling, since these topics were much discussed by Civil War soldiers in other contexts. As this example suggests, even the few words scrawled in charcoal, or carved with a penknife, in public places can be used by historians as evidence of people’s lives and thoughts. Graffiti are a good example of the ‘exceptional normal’.58 Their survival over centuries is exceptional, but it brings partially into view some of the least recorded and most ‘ordinary’ people of the past, and enlarges the possibilities of understanding the subjective meanings of their participation in cataclysmic events. Photographs are another source of personal testimony with which historians are increasingly experimenting. Some oral historians have not only used them as prompts to memory when conducting interviews, but have also found that they tell a story in themselves.59 Maris Thompson, for example, discovered that the descendants of German immigrants whom she was interviewing about processes of Americanisation, commonly pulled photograph albums out to show her in the course of oral history conversations.60 Struck by this practice, she decided to explore variations between the narratives arising from family albums and those elicited in response to her direct questions about Americanisation. Her enquiry concerned the impact of government-sponsored programmes, as well as popular hostility towards Americans of German origin, in the first half of the twentieth century. Thompson found that the albums were vectors of proud memory stories that her interviewees wanted to tell her. They tended to follow a formula. Most began with carefully composed studio photographs of first-generation families that prompted ‘origin stories’ of the pioneering heroism of the early migrants. These gave way to photographs featuring homesteads and farm buildings, symbols of the pioneers’ success that were linked to stories of hard work and self-sufficiency. In turn, such photographs were followed by less formal images of younger generations shaped by popular discourses of home photography after the Second World War. Humble and hardworking family origins are left behind: these depictions of affluence, sociability and leisure signal the arrival of the family into ‘modern, middle-class

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behaviors and sensibilities’.61 Thompson argues that the juxtaposition of images within the albums, as well as their content, underscores the idea of the inevitability of changing family identities, and of contented and successful integration into American society. Thompson explains, however, that the oral interviews that followed the conversations conducted over the albums, took a different shape. Focused on negativity towards German identities during the two World Wars, these ‘narratives of Americanization were stories of a more troubled nature that involved the experience of being targeted and marked, as German immigrants and German speakers’.62 The interviews elicited accounts of the banning of the German language at school and in church, neighbours’ hostility, attempts to suppress German identities, and fraught efforts to acquire American citizenship. The narratives constructed in the albums underlined the importance for narrators of ‘storylines of upward mobility and successful adaptation’.63 Oral testimonies, in contrast, troubled these narratives, exposing the losses and tensions absent in the visual testimony. Thompson argues that reading the oral histories and the photograph albums against one another opens up new spaces for a more nuanced understanding of the American past. These three examples connect with many of the themes running through historical practice with the other kinds of personal narratives discussed in this book. There are omissions and silences in them all: twenty-one words on a bed-sheet, and graffiti, however elaborately inscribed, can, by definition, represent only a fraction of the history of a self, but what they include may underline the meaning of that which is omitted. Photograph albums are selectively compiled, just as photographs themselves are deliberately composed to portray the moment in particular ways. As the cultural theorists Annette Kuhn and Marianne Hirsch have insisted, photograph collections encode ambiguous messages shifting between past and present, spectator and image.64 Although constructed as representations of a coherent past, they can also be read for the ruptures and dislocations they seek to conceal. In these three cases, the production of testimony is an assertion of agency, as many historians claim it generally is in the writing of diaries, letters and memoirs, and in oral narration.65 Audience features too, and all these genres straddle the imagined public/private border. The Countess of Derwentwater embroidered the bed-sheet as a way of managing her private grief – as a ‘technology of the self’ – but also in order to commemorate her husband both within her family and more publicly through the Catholic Church. Civil war soldiers wrote on walls for themselves, for each other, and so that passing strangers would see their inscriptions in the future. Families compiled and kept photograph albums to fix their collective histories, to demonstrate to unknown spectators their successes as Americans, and, consciously or otherwise, to conceal the difficulties of the acquisition of a new national identity. In each case too, public discourses interacted with the personal production of these narratives. They are inflected by eighteenth-century discourses of marital love, Jacobitism, and Catholicism; nineteenth-century codes of masculinity and

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war; and the twentieth-century American dream. As with diaries, letters, memoirs and oral histories, while each is a distinctive genre with its own inner consistency, each also points outwards to wider histories. Historical practice that interrogates such sources for the subjectivities with which they are imbued, and contextualises them within the society and culture that shaped them, can fire our imaginations and open up new ways of understanding the past. We can observe, in the use of a widening range and combination of personal narratives, the development of greater confidence among historians in writing new sorts of history based on subjective records, from which, in spite of their profoundly individual provenance, it is possible to say something more general about social and cultural change. This is not a story of steady linear progress. Traditional notions of the importance of representative samples and the nature of reliable historical evidence are strong in some historical practice as well as in much public discussion. More nuanced and subtle understandings of the value of personal testimony are entering the public realms of school education, the media, museums and popular publications, but traditional modes of thought die hard. As we have seen in the foregoing discussion we now have fine examples of alternative understandings of the meanings of representativeness, as well as of the reliability of rigorous and imaginative analyses of a growing variety of personal narratives. The turn to the personal in history has produced work that shows that it is not only possible for historians to study the self, but absolutely essential for our historical understanding. As the historical anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote, ‘No more elegant tool exists to describe the human condition than the personal narrative. Ordinary people living ordinary and not-so-ordinary lives weave from their memories and experiences the meaning life has for them. These stories are complex, telling of worlds sometimes foreign to us, worlds that sometimes no longer exist … As we cast our net ever wider, searching for those close as well as those far away, the spectrum of voices from otherwise obscure individuals helps us learn tolerance for differences as well as for similarities.’66 The tensions, anxieties and emotions of the living people who make history both complicate and illuminate the story we can – and should – tell.

Notes 1 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 11. 2 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 4. 3 James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5. 4 Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, p. 5. 5 Hester Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in Germany, 1939–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 9, 10. 6 Trevor Lummis, Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 81. 7 For a recent complaint about the turn to the personal in imperial history, see James Vernon ‘The History of Britain is Dead; Long Live a Global History of Britain’, History

184 Conclusion

8

9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Australia, 13:1, 2016, pp. 19–34: ‘Increasingly, biographical accounts of the everyday lives of migrants and their trans-colonial careers have been substituted for systemic analyses of how the British world was made’ (p. 22). Vernon argues that this focus on the personal restores to the field a ‘reconstituted Anglosphere imperialism’ that uncritically reproduces notions of white superiority. Most of the personal narratives used by historians that are discussed in this book, were produced by adults. There is, however, a growing body of work that draws on children’s personal writing. See for example: H. Barron and C. Langhamer, ‘Children, Class, and the Search for Security: Writing the Future in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 28:3, 2017, pp. 367–389; H. Barron and C. Langhamer, ‘Feeling through Practice: Subjectivity and Emotion in Children’s Writing’, Journal of Social History, 51:1, 2017, pp. 101– 123; L. Davidoff, Thicker Than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); J. Greenhalgh, ‘“Till We Hear the Last All Clear”: Gender and the Presentation of Self in Young Girls’ Writing about the Bombing of Hull during the Second World War’, Gender & History, 26:1, 2014, pp. 167–183; A. Moore, ‘Growing Up in Nationalist China’, Modern China, 42:1, 2016, pp. 73–110; N. Stargardt, ‘German Childhoods: The Making of a Historiography’, German History, 16:1, 1998, pp. 1–15; N. Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: Pimlico, 2006); C. Steedman, The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing (London: Virago, 1982). Richard Holmes, Tommy. The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914–1918 (London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. xxiii. Trevor Lummis, Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 7. Lummis, Listening to History, pp. 79, 73. ‘Triangulation’ refers, in science and social science, to the validation of research findings through cross-verification from two or more sources, often involving the use of more than one methodology. See Penny Summerfield, ‘Oral History as a Research Method’, in G. Griffin (ed.), Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 47–66, here pp. 52– 53. Lynn Abrams, ‘Story-telling, Women’s Authority and the “Old Wife’s Tale”: “The Story of the Bottle of Medicine”’, History Workshop Journal, 73, Spring 2012, 95–117, here p. 107. See Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood (New York: Schocken, 1996); Herman Rosenblat, Angel at the Fence, scheduled for publication by Berkley Books, New York, in 2009 but never published, although some pre-publication copies survive. Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (New York: Schocken, 2001), p. 281. Sue Bruley, ‘A New Perspective on Women Workers in the Second World War: The Industrial Diary of Kathleen Church-Bliss and Elsie Whiteman’, Labour History Review, 68:2, 2003, pp. 217–234, here p. 217. Katherine Anderson and Dana C. Jack, ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses’, in S. B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 11–26, here p. 17. Keith Gildart, ‘Mining Memories: Reading Coalfield Autobiographies’, Labor History, 50:2, 2009, pp. 139–161, here p. 140. Gildart, ‘Mining Memories’, p. 140. Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Picador, 2006), p. 7. Merridale, Ivan’s War, pp. 7–8. Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 10. The idea of the ‘autonomous domain’ as a site for critical analysis originated with Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society I, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 4.

Conclusion 185

23 Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 7. 24 Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, p. 8. 25 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 11. 26 Sharon Ann Musher, ‘The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews’, in John Ernest (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 101–118, here p. 101. 27 Musher, ‘The Other Slave Narratives’, p. 106. 28 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 21. 29 Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 63 (e.i.o.). 30 Alistair Thomson, Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 228. 31 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 304. 32 This was particularly the case with the ‘audio letters’ that emigrants and their correspondents exchanged, which were recordings of family and friends speaking to their addressees on reel-to-reel or cassette tape. Thomson, Moving Stories, pp. 213–218. 33 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 224. 34 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 304. 35 Thomson, Moving Stories, pp. 300–302, 304. 36 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 301. 37 Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, in T. Cosslett et al. (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 91–106, here pp. 98–99. 38 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 310. 39 Thomson, Moving Stories, pp. 312, 319. 40 Thomson, Moving Stories, p. 318. 41 See Michael Frisch, Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York: SUNY Press, 1990). For feminist critiques, see Kristina Minister, ‘A Feminist Frame for the Oral History Interview’ and Katherine Borland, ‘“That’s Not What I Said”: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative Research’, in S. B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 27–42 and 63–76. 42 Lucy Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”: Disclosures of Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 57, 2018, pp. 79– 107. 43 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, p. 85. 44 See Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives. Stories of Another Self’, in T. Cosslett, A. Easton and P. Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 25–39. 45 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, pp. 86–87. 46 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, p. 87. The memoir is Emma Smith [pseud.], A Cornish Waif’s Story. An Autobiography (London, 1954). 47 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, pp. 96–97. 48 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, p. 97. 49 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, p. 98. 50 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, p. 104. 51 Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”’, quoting ‘Alice Mitchell’, p. 100. 52 Some use a combination of more traditional and new sources in pioneering ways. For example, Jane Hamlett explores the personal realm of domestic relationships from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century, through the material goods that middleclass families used, and the domestic spaces they inhabited, using as sources photographs,

186 Conclusion

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

diaries, memoirs, and wills, as well as sale catalogues, advice books and magazines. See Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Sasha Handley, ‘Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet’, History Workshop Journal 85:1, 2018, pp. 169–194. The study of graffiti has developed mainly within ancient history and archaeology. See, for example, J. Baird and C. Taylor (eds.), Ancient Graffiti in Context (New York: Routledge, 2011); J. Oliver and T. Neal (eds.), Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010). Katherine Reed, ‘“Charcoal Scribblings of the Most Rascally Character”: Conflict, Identity and Testimony in American Civil War Graffiti’, American Nineteenth Century History, 2015, pp. 1–17, here p. 2. Reed, ‘Charcoal Scribblings’, pp. 2–3. Reed, ‘Charcoal Scribblings’, p. 5. See Chapter 6. See, for example, Thomson, Moving Stories, Chapter 7, ‘Photo Stories’. Maris Thompson, ‘Family Photographs as Traces of Americanization’, in Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson (eds.), Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 149–168. Thompson, ‘Family Photographs’, p. 158. Thompson, ‘Family Photographs’, p. 154. Thompson, ‘Family Photographs’, p. 165. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995). The post-colonial scholar Chandra Mohanty is particularly emphatic on this point: ‘story-telling or autobiography is a discourse of oppositional consciousness and agency.’ Chandra Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’, in Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 195–219, here p. 213. However, many of the examples used in this book indicate the complexities of regarding personal narratives as sources of empowerment and opposition. While composing them may often have encouraged a sense of self, it has not always done so: in some cases, as we have seen, narration has led to contradiction, confusion and discomposure. Marjorie Shostak, ‘“What the Wind Won’t Take Away” The Genesis of Nisa – The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman’, in Personal Narratives Group (eds.), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 228–240, here p. 239.

INDEX

abortions 87, 127 Abrams, Lynn 18n9, 135, 147, 169 Acton, Carol 61 African history 128n1, 133n114 agency: personal testimony as asserting 182; women’s 34–5, 39, 65; women’s 74n18 American Civil War 42, 180–2 Americanization 182 Anderson, Clare 2, 13–14, 18n11, 20n45, 157 Anglicanism 65, 154–5 Anglophone Atlantic families 157 Anna Maria (Radcliffe), Countess of Derwentwater 179–80, 182 anti-Semitism 61, 153; see also Jews Anzacs 120–1 archives: colonial 12–13, 111; of diaries 152; of letters 23, 28, 39–41, 49n112; of memoirs 80; of oral history 148; of personal testimony 12–14, 20n38; poverty of 12–13, 137–8, 156 Argentina 112, 125, 151, 161 Armitage, Estelle 1–2, 10, 148 Arrowsmith, Pat 116 attitudes, personal testimony on 137 Auschwitz-Birkenau 119 Australia, migrants to 143, 145, 173–5 authenticity: and oral history 112–14; and personal narrative 16, 80, 84, 168–72 authority, shared 151, 175–6, 178 authorship 168–9, 172 autobiographical pact 78–9, 169–70 autobiographical writing, models of 79, 87

autobiographies, use of term 78, 100n2 autobiography and memoir: audience for 65, 80, 91–7; child abuse in 176–7; cultural context of 88–91; and diaries 50, 52; factual content of 78–86, 103n76; historians’ use of 15–16, 98–100; in humanities and social sciences 108; invented 169–70; and letters 172–3; multiple by one person 105n128; narratives in 61; scholarly literature on 100n3; social history of 142; see also communist autobiographies; working-class autobiographies autonomous domain 171, 184n22 Baldinotti, Brigida 35 Baldwin, Lucy 41 Barber, Karin 12, 45n11 Barclay, Katie 35–7, 45n11, 157 Barker, Hannah 13, 59 Barrett, James 86–9 Barshay, Andrew 156 Barton, Michael 42 BBC People’s War website 13 Beatson, Phoebe 154 Bell, Amy 62–4 benchmarking to normal standards 139–40, 143 bias: in diaries 55–6, 71; in letters 15, 24, 26–7, 29, 43; of Mass Observation 152; in sampling 135, 138, 144 biographical turn 3, 14, 165 birth control 145, 164n58

188 Index

black writing 92–3 Blodgett, Harriet 51–2, 64 Bloom, Lynn 53–7, 76n74 Blunkett, David 73n9 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith 39 breadwinner frailty 85 bricolage 28, 69, 72 British Home Guard 121–2 Browning, Christopher 118–20 Bruley, Sue 53–6, 170 Burney, Fanny 64 Burton, Antoinette 9, 12, 38–9 Bywaters, Freddy 40, 158 censorship, of letters 24, 30–1, 33, 43, 47n49, 171; see also self-censorship Chapman, Diana 116 childbirth 65–6 child labour 80–3, 138–42 child loss 65–6 children, personal writing of 184n8 child sexual abuse 173, 176–8 Christianity 35, 147 Christmas cards 31 Church-Bliss, Kathleen 53–5, 74n18 Churchill, Winston 41 Clark, Anna 19n19 clichés, in letter-writing 27, 30–1, 34, 43 CMS (Church Missionary Society) 38, 58, 75n46 colonial archives 12–13 colonialism: and diaries 57–9; and memory 162n32 communist autobiographies 79, 86–8, 95–7, 103n65 communist diaries 155–6 composure 16; and diaries 51; in oral history 109–10 comradeship 90, 122 confessional autobiographies 79 conjugality 23, 36–7, 49n126 Coombes, B. K. 170 correspondence, paradox of 38, 42, 44; see also letters CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) 155–6 CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) 95–7, 104n112 CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America) 86–7, 89, 95 Crouter, Natalie 21n47, 54–5, 74nn10,26, 75n36 crunching 42 Cullwick, Hannah 63–4 cultural categories 137

cultural circuit 122, 127, 153 cultural imaginary 10, 159 cultural models 43, 113 cultural scripts 90 cultural turn 7–8; and oral history 108, 125; and representativeness 135 cultural values 89, 99, 146, 150 culture of the self 37 Dad’s Army 121–2 Daley, Caroline 114–15, 162n32 Davidoff, Leonore 63–4, 67, 71 de Bonnard, Bernard 37 Delap, Lucy 176–8 democratic subject 56–7, 59 Dennis, Peggy 103n65 de Sévigné, Mme 12, 28, 37 Devenish, Annie 93–5 diaries: audience for 65–6; editing for publication 73n1, 74n9; historian’s use of 15–16, 71–3; as incoherent 51–2, 61–2, 72; and letters 22; as observation 53–6; as public and private 67–8; scholarly debate on 50; shared 54, 64; as technology of self 56–61; see also communist diaries; working-class diaries diary writing, officially sanctioned 68–9, 73, 75n46; see also MO Didier, Béatrice 52 Dietzgen, Joseph 155 discomposure 110, 116, 126, 174–5, 186n65 documentation, and oral history 111–12, 124, 128, 169 Earle, Rebecca 22, 24 Edward VIII 40–2, 159 ego document, use of term 4–5, 18n15 Eliot, George 39 embroidery 4, 179–80 emotional regimes 87–9 emotions, history of 23, 60, 63, 76n74, 87–9, 91 enforced autobiographies 79, 95 enforced narratives 7, 101n9, 176 English, Barbara 101n26 epistolarity 22–3, 34–6, 43–4; see also letters epistolary language see letters, language of epistolary selves see letter writers, personae of epistolary voice 19n29 Erickson, Charlotte 26–7, 42 exceptional normal 137–8, 152, 157–9, 161, 181 experience, as source of knowledge 9 explanations, in life stories 116

Index 189

family myths 125 fantasy: colonial 38; in diaries 16, 63–4, 72; in letters 15, 40–1, 44; in psychoanalysis 11 fascism 61, 122–3; see also Nazi regime fathers, in working-class families 102n50, 140 Feely, Catherine 155–6 femininity: ideal 59, 109; narratives of 9–10; and writing style 36–7 feminism 7–9; and authentic women’s testimony 170; and diaries 60; and oral history 108–9; and testimony of abuse 177 Field Service Post Card 30, 48n80 Figes, Orlando 123–6, 128 First World War: autobiography and memoir of 11, 80, 89–90, 158; letter writing in 28–30, 32, 62, 172–3; oral histories of 120–1; soldiers’ testimonies of 168 Fisher, Kate 117–18, 145–7, 149, 160, 163nn41,48, 164n77 Florence 34–5 Forbes, Edwin 20–1n45, 74n10 Forster, Frank 155–6, 165n106, 166n108 Fothergill, Robert 50, 52 Foucault, Michel 7, 56 France: war letters in 28–9, 31, 41; women’s letters in 36 Frank, Anne 76n74 Gallipoli 120–1 Gandhi, Mohandas 94–5 gender: in autobiography and memoir 16, 79, 86–7, 94–5, 100; and child sexual abuse 176–7; and diaries 51, 59–60; and letters 34–7; and oral history 112–16; and public sphere 23; and social class 137, 141–5 generalisation: of available data 138–40; legitimacy of 16, 136; of oral history 108 Gerber, David 19n22, 25, 27, 39, 44n6, 48n100 German migrants to America 181–2 Germany: the Holocaust and diaries 61–2; war letters in 30–1, 34; war letters in 47n49; see also Nazi regime Gildart, Keith 170 Ginzburg, Carlo 6, 14 Goodman, Dena 23, 36–8, 150 governmentality 8 graffiti 4, 16, 123, 179–82, 186n54 grand narratives 7 Great Depression 171

Grele, Ron 108 Griffin, Emma 82–3, 88–9, 102n37 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw 92–3 Grosvenor, Ebenezer 74n11 Habermas, Jürgen 22, 37, 43 Halfin, Igal 8, 93, 95–9, 104n112, 105n122–n3 Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive 148–9 Hamlett, Jane 185–6n52 Hämmerle, Christa 28, 30–1, 33 Hammerton, James 143–5 Handley, Sasha 179–80 Hanley, Ryan 93 Hanna, Martha 28–30, 33, 45n11 Hellbeck, Jochen 61, 69–71, 153–4 hermeneutics 104n118 heterosexuality 116–18 Heywood, George 59 Hinton, James 7, 160; on diaries 54, 61, 64, 66–7, 161, 163n41; on personal narratives 167; on representativeness 151–4; and social class 165n90 historical practice, use of term 6 histories of the self 6 Hitler, Adolf 61 Hobsbawm, Eric 107 Holocaust 4, 119–20, 169–70 homosexuality 120, 127, 132n57, 149 164n73; see also lesbianism Houlbrook, Matt 40–1, 158 Humphries, Eleanor 67 Humphries, Jane 80–5, 91, 101n26, 138–42, 160 Humphries, Steve 146 Ibadan 57–8 identity, models of 79–80, 91 Indian Ocean, penal colonies in 20n45, 157 Indian soldiers 13, 33, 171 Indian women: in Britain 38–9; and Partition 108; politicians 93–5 individualism 6–7, 70, 142 Industrial Revolution 17, 80, 83, 139–40, 142 interiority 7, 64, 66–7, 177 internment diaries 21n47, 54–5, 74n10, 157 interpretive self-history 7 interracial relationships 33 intersubjective relationship 110, 113, 118 interviewing, performative aspects of 118 interviews, face-to-face 106 intimacy, in letters 24, 36 Irish diaspora 61 Italy 14, 110–11, 122–3

190 Index

Jacobitism 179–80, 182 Jamaica 1 James, Daniel 108, 111–13, 115, 125–6, 133n111, 151, 160–1, 164n77 Japanese soldiers: diaries of 53, 68–9, 71, 73; memoirs of 156 Jennings, Rebecca 116–18, 148 Jews, in the Third Reich 4, 61–2, 115, 118 Jipping Street 85–6 Jowitt, Jane 92 Joyce, Patrick 8, 56–7, 59 Kaborycha, Lisa 12, 34–5, 37 Khumalo, Vukile 22–3 Klemperer, Victor 61–2 knowledge, objective 112, 151, 161 Kouffman, Avra 65–7 Kushner, Tony 152–3 labour history, personal narratives in 19n22; see also working class Langhamer, Claire 153 Last, Nella 66–7 left-wing political culture 155–6 Lejeune, Philippe 78, 169 Leningrad, diaries from siege of 77n114 lesbianism 116–18, 148–9, 164n73 letters: audio 185n32; between migrants and families 157, 173; conventions of writing 28–31; historians’ use of 15, 23–4, 27, 42–4; individuality and generalisation 25–6; Jacobite 180; language of 34–7, 42–3; and memoirs 172–3; as polysemic 32–3; and public sphere 22–3; self-presentation in 64–5; Vaizey on 167; written to public figures 159 letter writers, personae of 25, 37, 39–41 life histories, use of term 4, 6 life narrative, use of term 4–5 life review 174, 176, 179 life story, use of term 2 life writing, use of term 4 light, metaphors of 161 Lipton, Thomas 84 literacy: in colonial Nigeria 58; spread of 14, 25; tin trunk 12; women’s 15, 35, 143; working-class 91 love: Freudian theory of 63; heterosexual 36, 153, 182; mother-child 84, 86, 88–9 Lovekin, Emanuel 83 luminosity of the single case 14–15, 137, 150, 154, 161 Lummis, Trevor 167–9

Mack, Phyllis 143 Mallon, Thomas 48n77 Martinelli, Elena 124 masculinity: and diaries 51, 59–60; military 11, 28, 90; shifting 158 materiality: of diaries 72; of letters 33–4, 40, 173 Mathers, Helen 79, 95 Maynes, Mary-Jo 19n22, 91, 142–3 McElligot, Sylvia 41 memoirs: use of term 78, 100n2; see also autobiography and memoir memory: in autobiography 79–81; of childhood 114, 162n32; dialogue with public discourse 109; enabling context of 91; false 119–20, 127; interviewers challenging 124–5; reliability of 108; of war 158 Menocchio 14 Merridale, Catherine 170 Methodism 56, 59, 93 microhistory 6, 14, 16, 137, 166n115, 180 microphones 124 migrants: letters from 25–7, 44n6, 46n34, 173–4; photographs of 181; representative sampling of 143–4 misrepresentations 81, 125, 144, 152 MO (Mass Observation), diaries for 64, 66–7, 72, 152–4, 161 Mohanty, Chandra 186n65 Moore, Aaron 68–9 MOP (MO Project) 152–4, 163n45 Mort, Frank 40–1, 159 mothers: diaries of 65–6; and war letters 31; in working-class autobiography 85–6, 88–9 Munby, Arthur 63–4 Murgatroyd, John 154–5 Musher, Sharon 171–2 myths, and oral history 109, 114, 116–17, 124–5, 128 narratives, history as 108 narrativity 108 narrators: dialogue with media discourse 109; social location of 16 natural science 136, 161n5 Nazi regime 2, 47n49, 61, 115, 118–19, 123 New Social History 6, 42 Nigeria: archiving in 12; diaries from 57–8 Nilson, Malin 85, 142 NKVD 70–1 Noakes, Lucy 152–3 Obisesan, Akinpelu 57–9 oral history: author’s experience of 2–3; child abuse in 177–8; ethics of

Index 191

interviewing 107, 124–6; examples of 129n6; historians’ use of 16, 106–7, 109–10, 126–8; inconsistency in 110–15; language of 127; and letters 173–4; representativeness of 135, 138, 143–8; silences and evasions in 109–10, 112, 122–3; in USA 128–9n1; Vincent on 167 Osterud, Grey 164n58 othering 9–10, 38 Page, Myra 87 Passerini, Luisa 122–3, 128 past populations, profiles of 137–8, 160 patriarchy 24, 35–7, 48n95, 66 patriotism 1, 10, 69, 73, 92, 121–2 Pattinson, Juliette 115–16, 164n69 Pearsall, Sarah 157–8 Peel, J. D. Y. 57 penal colonies 2, 13, 20–1n45, 157 Peri, Alexis 77n114 Peronism 112, 125–6, 133n111 the personal, turn to 6–9, 14–16, 149, 161, 169, 183–4n7 personal narratives: exceptional 154, 158–9; gendered ideology in 115; generalisability of 62; genres of 15–16, 143, 168, 172–9; historians’ use of 2–4, 14–17, 19n22, 112, 167–8; history of composing 138; large data sets of 152; on-line collections of 13; postcolonial and feminist embrace of 9–10; post-structuralist and psychoanalytical approaches 11; and public discourse 57, 182–3; and social interaction 179; use of term 5–6 personal papers, archives of 20n38 personal testimony, use of term 4–5 photographs, as personal testimony 181–2 Piatnitskaya 70–1 Pickett, Joan 174 poilus 28–30 politicians: diaries of 68; memoirs of 79, 95 popular culture: and oral narratives 16, 118–22, 127; and self-fashioning 24, 40, 43, 56 popular history 53–4 Portelli, Alessandro 109–11, 125, 131n28 positivism 135, 161n1 post-colonialism 7–9; and authentic testimony 170–1; and letters 32–3, 38, 43; and oral history 108 post-positivist approaches 108, 113 post-structuralism 7–8, 56–7, 96–7, 99, 105n122, 108 privacy: and diaries 52, 64–7; and letters 24, 31, 45n11; and the public sphere 67–73; and sexuality 117–18

Protestant memoirs 79 psychic integration 51–2 psychic space 75n35 psychoanalysis: and autobiography 87; and diaries 52, 62–4; and letters 31–2, 41, 43; and oral history 108; and the personal turn 7, 10–11 public discourses 15; and the Anzacs 120–1; in autobiography and memoir 89–91, 99; and diaries 52–3, 57, 62; and gender 9–11; and oral narratives 16, 109, 116–17; and the self 3 public language 11, 90, 179 public opinion, in letters 41, 44 public sphere 22–3, 68, 153 Quaker women 143 racism 2, 38–9, 153, 172 Radcliffe, James 179–80 recording equipment 107 recovery history 106, 108 Reddy, William 87, 89 Reed, Katherine 180–1 referentiality 3–4, 101n15 reflexivity 7, 126, 135, 161 relational personhood, documents of 5, 18n15 reliability: of autobiography and memoir 84–5; of diaries 53, 64, 69, 72; of oral history 107–9, 111–12, 126, 128; of personal testimony 168–9 Rendall, Stephen 51, 61 representativeness 3, 15–16; of personal testimonies 141–3, 145–6, 149–50, 159–61, 163n48; rejection of 152–7; and social sciences 135–6 representative samples 6, 135–8, 152, 157–8, 183 Richards, David 79, 95 Roberts, Elizabeth 106, 108, 129n3, 138 Roldán, María 111–13, 126, 133n111, 151 Roper, Michael 11; on autobiography 89–90; on letter-writing 30–4, 46n37, 62; on Urwick’s exceptionality 158; use of memoirs 172–3 Rose, Sonya 20n32 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37 Rustin, Michael 14, 137 sacrifice, military 29–30, 41 sampling: cultural criteria for 144–8, 150; and personal narratives 141, 143–4; in social sciences 16, 136–8, 160 Samuel, Raphael 155

192 Index

Savage, Sarah 65 Schindler’s List 119 schooling, and working classes 81–2, 101n26, 139–40 Scotland, letters in 35–6, 45n11 screen memory 11, 90 Second World War: diaries from 53–4, 61–3, 66, 68–9, 152, 161; letters in 30, 33–4, 47–8n77; oral histories of 1–2, 9–10, 115–16, 121–2, 148–9; social and cultural history of British servicemen 17n6; Soviet soldiers in 170; women workers in 74n18, 171, 174–5 secret agents 115, 164n69 secularisation 147–8 self-awareness 48, 153, 161 self-censorship: in letters 15, 24, 31–2, 34, 43, 173; in memoirs 99 self-construction 57, 71, 97, 148 self-crafted disclosures 176 self-expression 27, 64, 70, 143 self-fashioning: and diary writing 15, 66, 72; through letter-writing 38 self-projections 39 self-protection 94, 156, 178 self-reflection 58, 68, 70–1, 73, 153 semi-professionals 144 sense of self see subjectivity sexuality 3; and oral history 145–7, 149, 160–1, 164n58; popular narratives of 109, 117–18; and psychoanalysis 11, 63 Sheridan, Dorothy 51 Shetland Islands 169 Shimazu, Naoko 68 Shostak, Marjorie 19n22 silence, unlocking 128 Silvestre, Sophie 37 Simon-Martin, Meritxell 19n29, 39 Simpson, Wallis 41 Singh, Gajendra 12–13, 32, 34, 171 sipahis see Indian soldiers slaves: authentic voices of 171–2; autobiographies of 92–3; letters from 157–8 Smith, Emma 177 Smith, Sidonie 79, 104n120 social class: and diaries 8, 56–7, 63; and emotionality 60; Foucault on 7; and post-structuralism 7; and social sciences 136–7; see also working class social imaginaries 56 SOE (Special Operations Executive) 115–16 Sorabji, Cornelia 9, 38–9, 49n112 South Africa, letter writing in 22–3 Soviet Union: autobiographies from 8, 80, 95–8; diaries from 53, 61, 68–9, 73,

77n114, 153–4; Japanese soldiers interned in 156–7; military mythology of 170; oral histories of 123–5 Speed, Florence 63 Spence, Donald 91 Spielberg, Steven 119–20 splitting 11, 90 standard-bearers, women as 147–8 Starachowice 118–19 Steedman, Carolyn 13–14, 23, 85–6, 100n2, 101n26, 102n55, 154–6 stoicism 10, 28, 62 Stonewall Riots 116, 132n57 storytelling 113–14, 116, 133n114, 186n65 Strange, Julie-Marie 82, 86 subjectivity: in autobiography 79–86, 99; and diaries 51, 55–6, 72; and feminism 9; and history 3, 7–8, 14–16, 167–8; as interactive 5; in letters 24, 30, 39–41; and oral history 108, 116, 123; in personal narratives 5; and post-structuralism 7–8; and psychoanalysis 10; and relationality 5; selecting narratives for 153–4; socialist 70; and teaching writing 49n129 Szreter, Simon 117–18, 145–7, 149, 160, 163nn41,48, 164n73 Takasugi Ichiro 156–7 Taylor, A. J. P. 107 Tebbutt, Melanie 59–60 technology of the self 8, 15, 51, 56–7, 72–3, 182 Terni 110 testimonio 4–5 Thompson, Edith 40, 158 Thompson, Flora 101n26 Thompson, Maris 181–2 Thompson, Paul 108, 135, 138 Thomson, Alistair 108, 120–1, 143, 152, 173–6, 178 Thornton, Alice 65 Tomlinson, Ann 175 Trastulli, Luigi 110 trauma: and letters 32, 34; in memoirs 176–7; and oral narratives 119, 178 triangulation 169, 184n11 Trubina, Tamara 124 truths beyond the facts 111, 128, 130n18, 169 typicality 14, 137–8, 146–7, 150–3, 156–7, 159–61 Uganda 111 Ulbrich, Claudia 18n15 Ulianov, Anatoly 70

Index 193

unconscious inclusions 62, 72 Urwick, Lyndall 11, 89–91, 120, 158 Vaizey, Hester 30, 47n49, 167 Van Dyke, Rachel 74n11 Vickers, Emma 149 Vickery, Amanda 141, 144 Victorian era: artistic conventions of 84; and imperialism 9, 38; motherhood in 88–9; sexual attitudes in 146–7; social class in 8, 56, 63 Vincent, David 2, 80–3, 91–3, 141, 143, 167 violence: racial 172; sexual 120, 127 (see also child sexual abuse) Wake, Nancy 115, 164n69 war letters 24, 28–34, 46n47 Watson, Julia 79, 104n120 Watson, Ruth 12, 57–9 Waugh, Edwin 8, 56–7, 59 Webster, Wendy 86, 91–3 Weiner, Joyce 62–3 West Indies 148 Whiteman, Elsie 53–5 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 169–70 Willis, Justin 111 Witherington, Pearl 115 women: archives of writing by 12; authentic testimony of 170; autobiographies and memoirs of 85, 87, 93–5, 100, 142–3; as

diarists 51, 53–4, 63, 65–7; as letter writers 23–4, 26–7, 34–6, 38–41, 43; as migrants 144–5, 173–6; oral histories of 108, 115–17, 122, 144, 147–8; and typicality 150–1; working-class 63, 112, 142–3, 151 Woods, Roger 61–2 Woodward, Kathleen 85–6 Wordsworth, Dorothy and William 64 working class: occupations of 141, 145, 162n31; and oral history 106, 110–12, 122–3 working-class autobiographies 79; authenticity of 170; Burnett Archive of 20n38; Burnett’s collections of 80; and child labour 139, 160, 162n10; and collectivity 142–3; middle-class audience for 2, 91–2; motivations for writing 102n37; parenting in 84–5; subjectivity in 82–3; Vincent’s use of 167; by women 142 working class diaries 57, 59–60, 63, 67, 76n59, 155 WPA (Works Projects Administration) 171–2 Wright, Dorothy 173–4 Yoruba people 57–9 Yow, Valerie 146 ‘zibaldoni’ 12, 35