Friendly societies, which loomed so large in the lives of Britain's working population in the nineteenth century, have been surprisingly underutilized as a lens for viewing and assessing the course and character of social transformation. These collective self-help organizations, which were designed to provide their members with some measure of protection against the vicissitudes of life through mutual insurance, constituted by the end of the century the largest combination of voluntary associations in the country. Their prominence as institutions, in combination with the critical social functions they performed, made friendly societies highly germane to many of the period's key developments, including epochal changes in gender status, working-class politics, social relations, state responsibilities, living standards, professional values, and cultural ideals. Perhaps the most significant of this book's several achievements is that it makes precisely this point and does so in a sustained and wholly persuasive manner.

With this work, Simon Cordery has successfully managed the not inconsiderable task of rendering what has long been an elusive subject into a story that is essential for understanding Britain's social transition from being a collectivity of individuated, localized communities to an early twentieth-century mass society. He does so by means of posing the right questions of his material, utilizing effectively recent scholarship and a range of methodologies, and, not least, employing a lively and jargon-free writing style. As one would hope and expect, he takes care in providing the reader with an informative historical framework for the presentation of his more detailed findings. More impressive still, though, is his effectiveness in working through the multiple ways in which friendly societies functioned as key agents in shaping the age of which they were a part. This was the case even at the highest levels of social development, including the realm of state-society relations, in which the friendly societies’ abundant political activities in defense of working-class independence and, later, in opposition to public welfare provisions are particularly noteworthy. Most significant of all, of course, was the role of the societies as quintessential working-class institutions in their origin, membership, management (at least at first), and purposes.

In light of Cordery's contribution, no depiction of the nineteenth-century working-class experience can now be considered complete without prominent inclusion of these institutions in the discussion. In addition to providing large numbers of working people with rudimentary insurance against the financial consequences of sickness, injury, and death, the friendly societies, especially in the early decades of the century, were ubiquitous arenas of working-class sociability, in which initiation rites, rituals, regalia, and conviviality served to enliven daily routine and bind members together in a way quite beyond their shared interest in the societies’ insurance function. Although this latter dimension came over time wholly to monopolize the societies’ purposes at the expense of sociability, transforming them into impersonal businesses pure and simple, this did not occur before the societies had left their mark as a visible example of successful working-class organizing, which in turn offered inspiration and experience for working-class action on the broader political and trade union fronts.

Locally based and focused, the friendly societies came, through a process of affiliation, to develop extensive national networks and eventually to foster and acquire the managerial skills necessary for conducting large-scale, complex operations. Although individual societies tended to draw membership from among those with similar jobs, outlook, and resources, in the aggregate the societies encompassed a good part of the male working population, including those from well down the social scale, such as the unskilled and, to some extent, even laborers in agriculture. These institutions, then, were authentically working class in character, scope, and inclusiveness. The broad socioeconomic range of their membership represented considerable commonality of experience and perspective in the class as a whole, and such social diversity seems to have encouraged a good deal of social mixing, to an extent that is incompatible with notions of a distinctive aristocracy of labor set apart from the rest of the class. This is all the more apparent in the societies’ common political action on a range of issues that collectively define the politics of nineteenth-century voluntaryism, all of which Cordery reveals in detail and interprets with insight and intelligence.

Less satisfying are his views on the origins of the friendly societies and on the contextual changes in social structure and attitudes that constituted the forcing bed for the societies’ emergence and early growth. This is no doubt a murky, perhaps ultimately unknowable, history, but it is made no less so by Cordery's rather schematic and speculative conclusions. At one point the friendly societies are said, on notably tenuous grounds, to have evolved out of the older guild system, at another that their origin may be found in the mutual benefit societies of Huguenot refugee communities in London in the 1680s. While a certain skepticism may be warranted with regard to the last of these propositions, the former appears to have encouraged Cordery to offer the familiar story of the guilds’ decline as the social context for the friendly societies’ rise. It may very well be true that the increasing proletarianization of labor, in combination with the decline of paternal values of social reciprocity, created circumstances conducive to construction of collective self-help organizations among workers. But it does not take the argument very far when the spread of proletarianization and the demise of paternalism are attributed to the impact on society and traditional elites of “a new middle-class of manufacturers and professionals” or “a burgeoning commercial middle class” (48). Such an explanation has the disadvantage of being both too general in scope and too narrow with regard to historical causation to be of much value in understanding the birth and spread of friendly societies in their early years.

Given this book's many impressive achievements, uneasiness about its discussion of origins hardly detracts from the overall significance of the work. Cordery provides us with something more than an institutional history of friendly societies; he shows how those bodies were vital social mechanisms in Britain's “transition to democracy” in the nineteenth century. Begun as temporary, ad hoc expedients, the societies by the middle decades of the century had come to be, and were increasingly accepted as, permanent features of a new kind of social landscape. The success of the societies in attaining respectability in the eyes of government and society marked the point at which their large and wide membership acceded to, at least implicitly, the capitalist social order. This by no means constituted a simple process of ideological co-optation and working-class surrender, since the social approbation earned through respectability operated as, and was consciously designed to operate as, a defense against government intervention and middle-class meddling. The result, nonetheless, was a crucial step in the making of Britain's disciplined, rule-bound, and socially integrated working population of the early twentieth century. These are matters of great historical interest, plainly, and Cordery has opened up some valuable new ways to think about them.