Carolyn Steedman's work has always involved looking closely at individual lives in order to test historical narratives: the account of her own family history in Landscape for a Good Woman, her study of John Pearman, her examinations of childhood and of domestic service, and now the case studies in this new work. In An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, she explores the writings left by two men: Joseph Woolley, a stocking maker, and Sir Gervase Clifton, a magistrate. But her focus is firmly on the former, not least because he was far more prolific in terms of his writing, causing Steedman to note that “the experience of one of them (surprisingly, perhaps, that of the baronet rather than that of the framework knitter) is actually rather difficult to retrieve” (14). She explores their overlapping lives in the framework-knitting village of Clifton, just south of Nottingham at the turn of the nineteenth century, seeking simultaneously to interrogate the concepts of “experience” and “everyday life” and their usefulness to historians.

Though she notes that the length and “arbitrary detailing of the minutiae of everyday life” in his writing makes this difficult, so that she is forced to act as a “reluctant gatekeeper” of Woolley's words (3), Steedman encourages us to see the world as her main subject did. She is well versed in any number of relevant historiographical debates, which are interwoven into the text along with her descriptions of Woolley's life, but her book is organized in terms of her understanding of his preoccupations, rather than those of early twenty-first-century historians of nineteenth-century Britain. Thus chapters are presented on topics as seemingly diverse as reading, the law, money, and framework knitting, as well as sex, family and friends, drinking and fighting, and Luddism. But of course Steedman's implicit point in presenting her discussion in this way is that these subjects are not diverse and unconnected but fundamentally linked by their relevance to Joseph Woolley and his experience of his world. For the same reason, she quotes Woolley's own words frequently and at length.

The allusion in her title to E. P. Thompson's 1963 Making of the English Working Class is a pointed one. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class revisits aspects of Thompson's examination of working-class life in the early nineteenth century, but rather than seeking to identify the roots of radical protest and class formation, Steedman provides a vision of working-class life through the eyes of a worker who did not describe his life in terms of political agitation or the development of political ideas. Instead, he focused on the “ordinary” and the “everyday.” But even as she achieves this shift in emphasis toward the quotidian, Steedman manages to further challenge our preconceived notions. I am not the only historian to have written about “ordinary” men in this period centering their lives on family, religion, and work. But unlike my home-loving, pious Mancunians, Woolley did not marry, and he showed a casual disregard for religion, preferring the rougher comforts of the public house (fighting included) to the domestic and the spiritual spheres. He bucks generalizations with his stubborn particularity.

Steedman's books are so rewarding not just because they illuminate the lives of people in the past with such vivid clarity but because she makes you think about what it means to be a historian and about how we, as individual historians, could and should undertake our own investigations. Situating herself in terms of the recent “ethical turn” in historical studies, Steedman notes that historians have (again) begun to consider their responsibilities to the dead, and to ask, “Who owns history?” (3). She challenges us not just to think about our ethical responsibilities towards our subjects but also—as she always does—to consider the impact of our own stories on the histories we write, as her examination of her own life, preoccupations, and interests forces us to explore our own.