While qualitative and quantitative approaches to history are sometimes set up as competitors, the two approaches are complementary, and historians should use both if they want to fully understand the past. Jane Humphries' book does just that, wedding these two approaches in a way that will please both historians and economists.

The basic approach of the book illustrates the adage that the plural of anecdote is data. The book is based on 617 autobiographies written by working-class men. (Unfortunately, Humphries must focus on men because too few women wrote autobiographies.) Each has his own story to tell, and together they provide data previously unavailable. Thus each chapter contains both compelling stories and reliable statistics. The narrative portion of the text is well-written, and reveals qualitative aspects of children's lives such as relationships between mothers and sons, and the nature of school discipline.

The statistics in the book have two purposes. First, Humphries uses statistics to convince the reader that her sample of autobiographies is an unbiased sample of working-class men. She shows that the number of siblings, the occupation and earnings of the father, and the probability of the mother's death are all consistent with data from other sources. Death of a father was more common than other sources suggest, but this may result from autobiographers reporting absent fathers as dead. Otherwise, the sample appears unbiased. Second, Humphries uses statistics to provide new evidence on child labor and training. Since I do not have space to discuss all the results, I will mention those that are most interesting to me and refer you to the book for the rest.

As a measure of the extent of child labor, Humphries measures the age of starting work. A decline in the age of starting work indicates that younger children were being employed, suggesting an increase in the use of child labor. Humphries records the age at which each autobiographer reports having started work, and finds that the age of starting work declined during the eighteenth century, reached a minimum in the early nineteenth century, and then rose. This pattern is consistent with the pattern of child labor found by Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries in their study of working-class family budgets (“The Exploitation of Little Children.” Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 4 (1995): 485–516). Child labor did increase during the Industrial Revolution.

Since autobiographers described their family lives, we get some indication of the labor force participation of mothers (not women in general, just mothers). This measure of women's labor force participation is inexact but still valuable. Some autobiographers did not specifically mention whether their mothers worked, and how such silence is treated affects the measured participation rate. If the autobiographer said nothing about his mother's work, should she be counted as inactive, or should we consider it as a missing value? Should we assume that being the wife of a farmer or innkeeper was a profession? Depending on the answer to such questions, the percentage of mothers who were in the labor force was between 31 and 46 percent. Humphries concludes that this is “surprisingly low” (p. 109), but whether it seems low depends on your prior expectations. Even at the low end of the range participation rates were substantially higher than in the early twentieth century, when around 10 percent of married women were in the labor force (See Hatton and Bailey, “Women's Work in Census and Survey.” Economic History Review 54, no. 1 (2001): 87–107). Horrell and Humphries (“Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family.” Economic History Review 48, no. 1 (1995): 89–117) found higher participation rates, but this is not surprising given that their sample of working-class budgets was biased towards the poorest households. While the failure of some autobiographers to mention whether their mothers worked will undoubtedly lead to some inaccuracies, this source is still arguably better than the alternative sources of women's labor force participation.

Humphries also examines the effect of apprenticeship on a boy's economic prospects. Since adult wages are not available, Humphries uses an index of occupational rank to measure whether a boy was successful. She finds that completing an apprenticeship had a positive effect on adult occupational rank, but that boys who started an apprenticeship and failed to complete it did worse than boys who were never bound. This suggests that employers interpreted a failed apprenticeship as a negative signal.

The sample of autobiographers is of course biased in terms of average educational attainment, since they were nearly all literate, but, given literacy, Humphries can still examine the effect of the quantity of schooling on adult outcomes. Humphries finds that both traditional schooling and Sunday school had positive effects on adult occupational status. She makes a valiant attempt to separate the effects of individual characteristics from the return to schooling, but the results are unconvincing. She uses as instruments measures of family background such as father's occupation or the absence of a father. These family characteristics affected the quantity of schooling, but they affected the child in other ways as well and thus had direct effects on occupational outcomes.

Combining narratives and statistics, Humphries has written a compelling book that provides us with new information on child workers and their families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book will be a standard reference for many years to come.