Victorian Labour History

Orthodox historical accounts of popular experience in mid-Victorian Britain suggest certain homogenous and seemingly clear stable social and political orders. Host re-examines the historical debate and challenges conventional interpretations

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First Published in 2004. In Victorian Labour History: Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation, John Host addresses liberal, Marxist and postmodernist historiography on Victorian working people to question the special status of historical knowledge. The central focus of this study is a debate about mid-Victorian social stability, a condition conventionally equated with popular acceptance of the social order. Host does not join the debate but takes it as his object of analysis, deconstructing the notion of stability and the analyses that purport to explain it. In particular, he takes issue with historical evidence, noting the different possibilities for meaning that it allows and the speculative character of the narratives to which it is adduced. Host examines an extensive range of archival material to illustrate the ambiguity of the historical field, the rhetorical strategies through which the illusion of its unity is created, and the ultimately fictive quality of historical narrative. He then explores the political contingency of the works he addresses and the political consequences of representing them as true.