History from below: Working-class autobiography as a source for economic historians

The paper introduces students to working-class autobiography of the 18th and 19th centuries and explores the ways in which it can be used by economic historians.  Students will consider the relative neglect of working-class memoir and the reasons why historians have been suspicious of such accounts especially when so few sources exist to provide insight into many aspects of everyday life. The strengths and weaknesses of the source will be discussed.  The transition from using proletarian memoir as a literary source to searching it for the kinds of quantitative and qualitative evidence needed by social science historians will be discussed and defended.  The course convener's book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution will be read as an example of a social science approach to the source and will be contrasted with David Vincent's Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, which represents a classic interpretation.   The ways in which working people's accounts of their own lives can be used to unlock many outstanding questions in social and economic history will be pursued. Students will be required to study several working-class autobiographies, usually reading and summarising one such document per fortnight, to develop their own ideas about how these might be used to cast light on the past as it was experienced by ordinary people, and to relate these accounts to the interpretations of key developments in mainstream economic history.