The Golden Age: Essays in British Social and Economic History, 1850-1870.

MacKay, Lynn

edited by Ian Inkster, Colin Griffin, Jeff Hill, and Judith Rowbotham. Aldershot, England, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000. xx, 284 pp. $84.95 U.S. (cloth).

This book of eighteen essays explores aspects of Britain's industrial supremacy in the so-called "golden age" between 1850 and 1870. It grew out of a series of fortnightly seminars held at Nottingham Trent University between 1997 and 1999, and not surprisingly, the essays cover many different aspects of this era. The essays are organized into five sections, each with a short introductory overview by one of the editors. The first section questions whether the golden age actually even existed, and the subsequent four deal with industry, technology, social institutions, and gender.

The book is not a celebration of this apparent golden age; rather many of the authors question the nature of this period. It becomes apparent throughout that notions of 1850-70 being a golden age are more complicated than is often supposed. Harold Perkin introduces a refrain which runs through a number of the essays: that the majority of labouring men and women did not experience prosperity or increased well-being during these decades. The next two sections of the book, however, on industry and technology, focus on the productivity of the period and come closest to affirming the era's goldenness. Even here, as Colin Griffin points out in his introduction to industry, the label hides as much as it reveals: it was undoubtedly a golden era for owners and producers, but the benefits were rarely shared by their workers, as the essays on coalmining and agriculture show. In the section on technology it is clearly shown that Britain did not experience a decline in technological inventiveness and innovation during this period, despite fears by contemporaries like Lyon Playfair and later historians like Martin Wiener. Indeed, as Ian Inkster notes in his essay on patents, the pro-technology culture with its highly developed infrastructure no doubt gave Britain a competitive advantage throughout these decades.

The last two parts of the book focus on social aspects of the golden age. The section on social institutions addresses the dualism of the period: at once an era of triumph and self-congratulation--the so-called age of equipoise--but also a time of doubt about the way British society was developing. The first three essays in this part of the book make the case that working-class people had come to accept their place in the industrial order. Focussing on the popularity of the Great Exhibition, Su Barton argues that this demonstrated the widespread acceptance of industrial ideology in the working class. Jeff Hill shows that the self-identity of a number of rapidly growing Lancashire cotton towns was based on industrial progress and a sense of well being--on the belief that they were the products and creators of a golden age.

The last two articles in this section turn to the sense of doubt about where Britain was headed. Gary Moses, for instance, explores Church of England dissatisfaction with the annual hiring fairs for farm servants. To the clergy the hiring and employment system exposed young men and women to depraved and corrupting companions, and churchmen called for the re-establishment of paternalistic social relations.

The last part of the book focuses on gender and here Judith Rowbotham points out that the golden age was clearly "a respectable, predominantly middle-class, masculine interpretation" of the era (p. 219). The prosperity of the golden age could only continue, moreover, if the rest of society could be brought to support the values and behaviour which necessarily underpinned it. Thus, Kim Stevenson argues that to be believed in sexual assault cases women had to demonstrate that they were impeccably respectable and to prove that they had resisted to the utmost of their physical ability. Catriona Parratt analyzes Lancashire dialect poetry to show that there may have been greater equality and mutuality in the notion of domesticity contained in them than has been supposed. Rowbotham explores popular biography to show how these books celebrated the values underpinning the golden age, seeming to promise success to readers who emulated the diligence, the hard work, and the perseverance of Arkwright, Crompton, or the Stephensons.

Taken together the essays in this book are often intriguing and thought-provoking. One does wonder, however, whether the truly unappealing portrait of the middle class was intentional on the part of the editors: enjoying the prosperity of the golden age, for the most part denying a share of the benefits to their workers, ignorant and unappreciative of the extent to which the working class had accepted the industrial world and consequently demanding ever greater acquiescence from them, the middle class of the golden age seems greedy, myopic, and possibly even paranoid.

More than this, the usage of the term "golden age" creates some problems since it varies throughout the book. Some authors employ it as an unproblematic label describing a prosperous period. Others insist it was the interpretation of only one group and question its appropriateness for the era. Still others use it as shorthand for a belief in a mythic golden past or for the belief in present progress. This constant slippage is disorienting for the reader and the book seems at once too short or too long. A more sustained examination of the various issues and problems raised rather than the tantalizing local and partial glimpses we are repeatedly offered would be more satisfying. Alternatively, a more narrow focus in which only the most germane papers were selected for inclusion would also have addressed the problem. This is a book that poses important questions and raises crucial concerns about our understanding of this period. One hopes the various authors will explore more fully the often-fascinating subjects they have introduced in this volume.

Lynn MacKay
Brandon University