Here is yet another handsome addition to Pickering & Chatto's multivolume documentary source series, this time focusing on the making of the urban working class in Britain and ably assembled under the tutelage of Professor Andrew August of Penn State University. The production values are very high, as we have come to expect from this publisher. The books are printed on fine cream paper, in a clear font with wide margins and sturdily bound in a tan library buckram that goes much of the way to justify a purchase price of £87.50 a volume. They are a pleasure to handle. Just how useful such a set is to scholars and libraries in the internet age will vex many potential purchasers. Opinions will differ, but in the hands of a sufficiently able editor a compilation like this can be indispensable to students and scholars alike: that is, I believe, the case here.

The editorial apparatus is relatively unobtrusive. A general introduction to the series surveys the shifting trends and fashions in social history, its steep rise in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, its undermining from without and within in the 1980s and 1990s, with something like a reappraisal of the significance of class in history-writing taking place over the past 15 years or so. The materials assembled here would not have been too out of place in a compilation constructed for a previous generation of historians, but now we look at these sources with fresh eyes and a more nuanced and critical gaze than was the case 30 or 40 years ago. ‘Class’ has become deconstructed by gender, race, locality and a far more sophisticated approach to language than was the case then. But it is a mark of something approaching a rebuilding of social history that this introduction to the ‘urban working class in Britain’ during its formative years is once again considered both desirable and marketable. The bibliography that accompanies the general introduction is a useful guide to students seeking to negotiate these troubled waters of ‘social history’, though inevitably it is far from comprehensive.

Each volume then has its own introduction to the subject under review. These draw heavily on the original material that follows, while setting regions and industries in context, frequently using quantitative statistical evidence from census returns and secondary sources, and bringing in where appropriate findings from modern scholarship. It is all done with a light touch that many students will appreciate as a helpful introduction to a giant subject. Each entry is then preceded by a brief – sometimes just a paragraph – headnote giving biographical and bibliographical information about the article or essay that follows. Here the editorial touch is a little too light: so, for instance, the very first contribution to vol. I, an anonymous article on factory production in the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge for 1837 gives a few lines on the publication but nothing on the Society itself or on Charles Knight, the Magazine's important publisher and editor, though there is a single reference for follow-up reading in the Victorian Periodicals Review. Similarly, introducing excerpts from a little-known work on ‘Asiatics and Africans’ in London in the 1890s, we are told that the author (Joseph Salter) was a missionary for the London City Mission but nothing about when that important organization was founded or what it did. These editorial interventions are barely adequate and in general are a lost opportunity to introduce some little-known writers and the journals they published in to a wider audience. The editorial endnotes, not numbered within the text, confine themselves to explaining unusual words, foreign phrases and biographical or historical references that would otherwise remain obscure for many readers. Though brief, they are clearly the result of much labour and they serve the reader well.

The index, however, is totally and deplorably inadequate. This is, after all, a compilation that introduces students to the British urban working class. Place, its peculiarities and differences, is crucial to the project and Andrew August's selection roams appropriately widely across the British Isles. Yet, the index contains no place names, so that London, Glasgow and Bristol, for instance, only appear when attached to the name of an organization or publication and Sheffield, Bradford, Cardiff, Belfast and Liverpool, for instance again, are not listed at all, despite having contributions related directly to them. Clearly, this has been a matter of deliberate choice, but one of studied stupidity. The omission is so bizarre that I kept returning to vol. IV to check that I had not missed a separate topographical index, but unfortunately there is nothing at all. Nor can what remains in the index be relied upon, for – to give just one example – ‘London City Mission’ is only indexed in vol. III, while appearing frequently elsewhere. Perhaps the index was taken out of Professor August's hands, but the result has been seriously to dent the usefulness of what in most other ways is an elegant and worthwhile project.

What is most valuable here resides in the selections making up each volume. This is the set's strong point. Andrew August has rigorously eschewed the obvious when making his choices for inclusion. In doing so, he has offered up a cornucopia of surprises that will intrigue many who know this area well and will open out endless avenues of enquiry for those coming to it afresh.

The stress then is on rarity and usefulness in equal measure. Vol. I, Home and Community, is divided into sections on ‘Forming the Urban Working Class’, with a primary focus on migration; on ‘Housing and Health’, the longest with 16 contributions, and ‘The Working-Class Family’, some 35 essays and excerpts all told. Although some texts will be familiar to scholars – George Haw's ‘No Room to Live’: The Plaint of Overcrowded London (1899) is a frequently cited source – most are not. An obvious choice on the housing question might have been Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) but instead we are given excerpts from that author's sequel of two years later, Light and Shade: Pictures of London Life, far less well known and rarely cited; similarly, the famous Royal Statistical Society enquiry into overcrowding in St Giles’ in the 1840s is rejected in favour of an investigation into two Westminster parishes, with further contributions from Manchester and Bristol. The Mearns book, like several others, is available in a print-on-demand format, and many of the articles from periodicals like the Journal of the Statistical Society of London can also be accessed online. But the value here is to offer us texts that we might not otherwise have discovered, frequently in publications that would repay a more extensive search. In this important regard, the collections on offer here are constantly stimulating.

So is the geographical spread. London is not allowed to dominate as it so often does in the historiography. We have essays that survey urban districts nationwide and more detailed studies of Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Merthyr Tydfil, Edinburgh, Bradford, Oxford and elsewhere, with several also on the metropolis, in whole or part. The subject matter ranges equally widely across the pressing social questions of the day: migration to towns from the countryside and migrations of the post-Famine Irish, of Jews and of black people (generally these minorities appear here only in London studies); the decline in the birth rate (Sidney Webb); poverty and family budgets; the collection and analysis of social statistics, both countrywide and in the localities; housing deprivation; and crime.

The selections in all these volumes are drawn from what we might call the golden age of social reportage as journalists and social scientists struggled to understand the quickly changing world around them and its wholly new working-class formations in the great towns and cities. Inevitably, the views given us here of the British urban working class are more often than not from the outside. They are generally sympathetic views, at least in vol. I, where the plight of families struggling with poverty, slum housing and overcrowding are accompanied by urgent calls for remedial action by philanthropists and law-makers. On the other hand, the voices of the workers, whether artisan, day-labourer or working housewife, are almost entirely silent. Only Thomas Wright in vol. I, writing here as ‘The Riverside Visitor’, can be described as a worker, though by this time he had left the engineer's bench far behind him.

Professor August has recognized this deficiency and suggests in his General Introduction that it can be made good if the reader turns to the classic compilations from working-class autobiographies that John Burnett made in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure (1974 and 1982). But those volumes made no pretence to comprehensiveness, are now 30 or 40 years old and more material has come to light since. There was greater opportunity to correct this in vol. II, Work, and to a large extent it has been taken. So we are given in the narratives on ‘Working Conditions’ a view from ‘A Manchester Operative’ (James Leach) and from Francis Place ‘the radical tailor of Charing Cross’; on ‘Skill, Gender and Age Distinctions’ from George Howell the bricklayers’ leader; and on ‘Worker Organisation’ are pieces from ‘A Journeyman Bootmaker’, from John Burnett of the engineers, George Potter of the joiners and George Howell again. This offers a welcome diversity of voice, but here too the urban worker is seen generally through the telescope's lens as wielded by journalists, economists and sociologists.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in vol. II will be the omission of any contribution from Henry Mayhew. Now Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor in its various editions, and his work for the Morning Chronicle, are pretty readily available elsewhere. But Mayhew does give us the voice of the London worker in a way that no other observer attempted to do. It is a mediated voice, taken down in shorthand it seems but then arranged on the page no doubt with some artistry, yet his voices are as authentic as we are likely to get of the London worker at the middle of the nineteenth century. And if Mayhew's unique contribution was considered just too well known, then how about something not readily found elsewhere like his speech on the ‘Sweating, or Domestic System’, delivered at St Martin's Hall in Covent Garden in October 1850, so full of workers’ experiences of exploitation in the metropolitan tailoring trades, or some other contribution from this extraordinary man similarly rarely come across in the historiography?

The absence of Mayhew leads to another silence. The working experience offered us in vol. II follows traditional lines from the labour process through skill and other divisions to the workers’ self-organization in trade unions. But Mayhew offers us another reality, important in working-class life then and since, of an escape from poverty and economic dependence through individualism, via penny capitalism for instance or the potential allure of rising to be a master on one's own account, as we might recall had been the case with Francis Place. The work of Mayhew might have offered one further ‘distinction’ to put alongside skill, age and gender.

Vol. III gives us Culture, with selections assembled under ‘Traditional Popular Culture’, ‘Working-class Leisure and its Critics’ and ‘Associational Life’. The outsider's view remains very much in evidence in this volume but with a marked change of tone. The sympathetic enquiries into the circumstances of workers forced upon them through the travails of hard work or inadequate housing accommodation here generally do not extend to the choices workers make about how to spend the little leisuretime left to them. Many contributions take a distinctly condemnatory approach to the pleasures under review, with few ceasing to attract some sort of moral censure, either because the activity itself is offensive in some way or because, though relatively harmless, it represents leisuretime ill-spent or ‘wasted’. The tone extends to those contributions that come from within the working class itself, with the virtues of water-drinking extolled over ‘liquor’, and reading over the music hall, by protagonists of rational entertainment like John Teare, a Liverpool toolmaker, writing in 1849. Indeed, it is the terrors of drink, whether too freely partaken in country wakes, feasts and fairs, visited as a continuing fond memory by the newly urbanized workers, or in the public houses, gin palaces and music halls of the great towns and cities, that beat a familiar gloomy tattoo through many of the 40 pieces assembled here.

Of all the volumes, I wondered whether the selection here was sufficiently balanced. There is rather too much from the moralizing middle classes of kirk, chapel and pulpit and rather too little of the enjoyments to be had from the music hall, for instance, that uniquely urban variety entertainment that emerged from the public houses to build a mass entertainment following in great new palaces of pleasure by the end of the nineteenth century. And we might have been given more of the distinctive part in the workers’ associational life made by working-men's clubs, although we do get contributions on co-operation and friendly societies.

The political side of this extensive associational life is given welcome exposure in vol. IV, Power. The sections here explore ‘Radical and Party Politics’ with Chartism given a high profile, alongside liberalism and socialism (including two contributions from Keir Hardie); ‘The Working Class and the Authorities’ focuses on the New Poor Law, police and magistrates, and the opposition to vaccination; and ‘Power and Authority in Families and Communities’ offers interesting insights in particular into gender inequalities within the family, especially in relation to domestic violence.

This last is an area that did not much interest the social historians of the British working class much before the rise of feminism from the late 1970s. Yet, as the selection here shows, it concerned issues much discussed and exposed at the time as among the most worrying aspects of working-class culture as it began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. A slightly more detailed survey of these final contributions demonstrates some of the nuances of Andrew August's skilful assemblage. We have a piece largely in dialect from Ben Brierley (1886), a Lancashire handloom weaver, on masculine competitiveness, that reconstructs with what seems to be some imaginative licence a dinner-hour fight at a weaving factory, the men occasionally egged on by their womenfolk. In an entirely different mode, T.W. Saunders, a metropolitan police court magistrate, reflects (1882) on the many ways poor Londoners used the magistrates to level out inequalities within their communities – between drunken husbands and their long-suffering wives, bullying families and their aggrieved neighbours, and anyone who considered themselves exploited by a range of oppressors from landlords to stingy husbands. The particular plight of women – wives and partners – beaten by their men receives a feminist exposé from Matilda Maria Blake in the Westminster Review, who saw women's defencelessness as residing in their lack of political power without the vote that could enable them to change adverse power relations. Her evidence is gleaned not from social work in the London slums but by culling court reports from the newspapers, assembled to considerable effect, and her approach is echoed by Mabel Sharman Crawford's similar piece reprinted from the same magazine a year later in 1893. A rather different take on gender struggles within the working-class family is offered by the journalist James Greenwood from a book published late in his career in 1902 on his experiences reporting police court cases. Some of these concern men seeking the courts’ advice about how to deal with untrustworthy or violent wives, and offer some testimony to the patience and care taken by the magistrates in trying to keep marriages together where possible, but willing to grant separation and maintenance orders where not. An excerpt from Margaret Loane's The Queen's Poor of 1910 gives us a more intimate view of family relations from the perspective of a sympathetic district nurse. Loane had the time and interest to talk in detail with women about their daily concerns and family anxieties, while charting their strategies for dealing with tired and grumpy husbands, say, or making threepence do the work of a tanner. Anyone reading this will want to discover more of Loane and the many subtleties apparent in her writing, and the same can be said for many excerpts in the set. Finally, Anna Martin, a settlement worker, considers (1913) the problem of wives who do not get sufficient maintenance from husbands who earn a decent wage but withhold too much for their own needs and pleasures, their women finding inadequate succour from the poor law guardians. Although there is some superficial overlap between the excerpts here, each one offers something special and distinctive. That is a general feature of Andrew August's selections across these four volumes. And so is the geographical spread firmly in place from vol. I, and the variety of voice that begins to emerge strongly from vol. II.

So what, in sum, does this selection offer us that searching the rich variety of internet databases does not? It opens out, I think, a gateway and a guide. The several Introductions here prepare the ground for a greater understanding of the subject matter than would otherwise be available when tackling the sources direct and unannounced, as it were. It is helpful to have Professor August's overview of the shifting patterns of fashion that have lionized and then unduly denigrated social history in the historiography: his whole project is, to a certain extent, an exercise in rehabilitation, and as a social and urban historian myself I wish all power to his elbow. The Introductions to the four volumes then provide numerous pointers on how to read the material in front of us, often against the grain of the writers’ stated intentions, sometimes exploring the new fields of interest within ‘the social’ that have emerged from feminist critiques and the cultural turn. All this is of value to the student. And so, to both student and scholar alike, is the revelatory selection that Andrew August gives us, suggesting innumerable fruitful avenues for further investigation among largely forgotten writers and dusty publications. It will need to be on the shelves of every history department library in Britain and beyond.