The nature of the “March of the Intellect” continues to preoccupy historians of the nineteenth century. Broad plebeian engagement with education and the desire of a number of autodidacts to document and reflect on their self-improvement process has left us with extensive evidence about working-class intellectualism, politicization, and living standards. The analysis of this evidence has of course been contentious: while Marxist “history from below” saw working-class intellectualism as both a driver and product of the development of radicalism, revisionist approaches have highlighted instead its relation to loyalism and the production of British identity as part of a long period of stability and continuity. More recently, the close association of working-class autodidactism and autobiography with political radicalism has been challenged by arguments such as Emma Griffith's that the nineteenth century was most strongly characterized by increasing living standards and individual liberty, or Caroline Steedman's investigation of how the recording of everyday life could ignore the cataclysms of Luddism in favor of crude humor and the mundane.

Christopher Ferguson's An Artisan Intellectual largely supports the interpretation of the period as one of revolutionary change that was perceptible within a lifetime and in many respects to the detriment of the working class. Using the memoirs and the publications of a bibliophile tailor, James Carter, Ferguson outlines how this revolutionary change could be perceived by an artisan who nevertheless remained apolitical. He outlines how this apoliticism was not just an unexpressed conservatism, but could still incorporate radical thoughts and actions, and how the debates about continuity and change can be pursued through the self-writing of one individual's documentation of everyday banalities. All of this, Ferguson suggests, undermines the previous rejection of Carter and figures like him in some quarters as being unrepresentative of working-class life.

The book is therefore a micro-history of Carter's life—or more precisely, a very detailed study of his various publications—with a view to illustrating a number of much broader social, cultural, and economic shifts and trends. The study's chief merit is in the way it eludes the usual boundaries of the historiographies of autodidactism, autobiography, working-class politics, and living standards. While Carter was explicit about the impact of new forms and structures of employment amongst tailors, he departed from Chartist contemporaries or later Marxist historians by blaming unemployment on the tailors' declining moral values, rather than the role of Parliament or their employers. Nevertheless, in his works Carter allowed glimpses of a clear lack of deference towards authority. His participation in a jury became something of a scandal in his native Colchester, as did his adoption of Swedenborgianism, and at one point he returned to the town from London to avoid militia duty. Yet whereas the Chartist William Lovett did likewise from political principles and martyred himself in the process, Carter did not treat the act with much significance, and clearly undertook it simply because he did not want the inconvenience.

At times, Ferguson's approach yields clear insight. He uses Carter's anecdote about falling asleep while reading by candlelight as a means of both conveying to a twenty-first-century reader just how dangerous and expensive such a practice was and offering the more substantive point that it reveals how Carter combined premodern and modern reading habits. Carter's repeated migrations from Colchester to London affirm how important migration and urbanization were during the period but also show how for many this was a process repeated throughout a lifetime, a pattern that broke down the simple urban-rural opposition, creating a liminal space experience in the process. Such conclusions draw from Carter's writings a nuance missing from much grander narratives of the period.

At other points, however, the study suffers from common problems of such focused micro-histories. As Ferguson argues, Carter's Swedenborgianism suggests that he may have been far more radical and undeferential than he himself indicated in his writings. However, Carter did not mention his involvement in the group in his Memoirs, despite the fact that this involvement spanned at least five years. That his memoirs were written a decade after his apparent disengagement from Swedenborgianism suggests that for whatever reason that association had become embarrassing or inconvenient in the meantime. While speculating on this gap in the history might not be useful or viable, extended investigation of what the Swedenborgian community of Colchester was like would be worthwhile, not only to help contextualize Carter but also to contribute to our understanding of provincial religious radicalism.

Similarly, Ferguson follows Carter in mentioning very little about his family. While his parents appear fairly frequently, Carter's wife, Sarah, and his children do not. This of course says something about Carter, and Ferguson suggests that their absence was mainly an attempt to keep quiet about the indignity of the fact he relied upon his family for supplementary income. For Ferguson, this points towards Carter positioning himself within a masculine “imagined community” rather than a national or class-based one, and it leads him to conclude that Carter's sense of “shame” over this made him an “authentic working man”; since E. P. Thompson, the idea of financial independence has been seen as a core marker of artisan self-respect. This conflation of gender and class identity immediately invites comparison with those working-class men in the Chartist press writing much more openly and emotively about familial love and the degradations of female and child labor, and for whom such openness was a display of masculinity. In light of that context, Ferguson's belief that Carter's brief mention of a deceased baby daughter was an exceptional break with respectability and the codes of his gender seems a stretch, given that this was becoming a dominant topic of working-class affective writing. Once again, Carter provided an insight into a much larger discussion than the one offered.

Carter's lack of disclosure about topics such as these invites criticism of such focused micro-histories: too close a reading can make historians complicit in the occlusions of their subjects. Ferguson's short conclusion, in which he compares Carter with the Chartist tailor and working-class intellectual Charles Neesom, goes some way towards mitigating these problems by reaffirming the range of responses to a similar life in the same period. It also effectively underlines his main argument that there is gradation rather than sharp distinction between continuity and change during the period. What Ferguson contributes most clearly is a study of everydayness that does not posit a more authentic ulterior story, all while persuading us that even with his omissions Carter was as much a herald of modernity were as more radical figures like Neesom.