A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945

Stanley Rice, born in London in 1905, began his autobiography by stating that his life was ’an ordinary average life with all its ups and downs’. Stanley may have described his life as ordinary, and yet he lived through a period of rapid social change, including two world wars. Despite this, Stanley assumed that his life story would be of little interest to most readers, as he had not achieved great fame or any notable accolades. This book argues that this is exactly why historians should focus on such life stories, as there is much to be gained by focusing on memories of ’ordinary average lives’, as they can expand our knowledge of the past, often revealing firsthand experiences that have been excluded from the historical record. This book does not intend to be a general social history of the working class. Rather, it is a work of memory, drawing upon a microhistory methodology to examine how a sample of one hundred working-class autobiographers remembered and wrote about living through years that were punctuated by two worldwide conflicts and a global economic depression.

Rebecca Ball is Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.