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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Beverly Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press 2005)

IN THE LAST YEAR of his life, his health rapidly declining, his hand unsteady, William Smart continued to carefully record mundane details of earning and spending in his account ledger: "Robb. Plumpton dined with me, spt with him att Atk'son [a local hostelry] 8d." (196) Even when nearing death, this seventeenth- century moneylender could not give up on accounting. Such a religious devotion to numbers was new in the 17th century but quickly became the norm, taking hold among both men and women of different walks of life. This is the kind of fascinating detail that can be found in Beverly Lemire's new book, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, 1600–1900, a study of ordinary people's financial practices and household management.

Over the course of three centuries, Lemire charts the decline of customary, non-monetary transactions, such as the second-hand clothing trade, and their replacement with formal methods and institutions, such as double-ledger accounting and savings banks. A traditional culture of reciprocity, hospitality, and generosity gave way to calculation.

Lemire connects her work to Fernand Braudel's exploration of what he called "material civilization" and also to the new and exciting field of the history of consumer culture. The innovative aspect of the book is not so much a focus on the household, which has been studied before, but attention to women's economic interactions, which have too often been ignored by economists. Also important is Lemire's interest in the humble economic transactions of "plebeians" (ordinary people) rather than formal institutions like the East India Company.

The strongest chapters are chapters five to seven. Chapter five deals with fashion, and chapters six and seven contain Lemire's fascinating depiction of something very peculiar to nineteenthcentury English culture: an almost obsessive love of saving and accounting. Much more so than today or in previous centuries, these two activities dominated the lives of nineteenth-century middle-class households.

Lemire writes beautifully about fashion, and the chapter on it is the most enjoyable in the book. This is a subject she knows well and has written about at length in the past. Lemire argues that far from simply imitating the fashion of their betters, plebeians had their own styles and preferences. At the end of the sixteenth century the middling sort and also poorer people like servants began to adopt innovations in clothing. This caused an outcry. Traditionally one of the purposes of clothing was to let the observer see who was a gentleman and who was not. Plebeian fashion blurred these distinctions and threatened the social order. Through examples like the backlash against women wearing calicoes and servants' dislike of livery, Lemire shows how the study of fashion can provide insights into gender roles, ideas of femininity and masculinity, youth culture, and social relations.

Chapter six is about the rise and spread of savings culture in the 19th century. After 1800 savings banks proliferated, suggesting a spirit of self-denial, selfhelp, and respectability. Savings culture transcended class, gender, and age. Saving was encouraged by evangelicals and the authorities because it was understood to teach the working poor discipline and give them a stake in their country. One problem with this chapter is that Lemire implies saving was used as a means of social control (in Sunday schools, by evangelicals, by the authorities) but she does not explicitly address this issue. Her contention that the working-class bought into savings culture is not fully persuasive, because most of her examples are middle-class. It would be helpful to show what proportion of people saved and what did not: this would offer a truer representation of how pervasive this culture was.

Accounting may not seem like a riveting subject, but it becomes so in Lemire's hands. In chapter seven she explores what she calls the "new reckoning," the keeping of records of family finances by private individuals. This, she argues, came to compete with older ideas about reciprocity and hospitality. Accounting reduced real life to numbers, ignoring or downplaying non-monetary transactions and relations. In the 19th century family finances increasingly passed into the hands of women. Many women kept obsessive financial records, as is illustrated by numerous surviving gold-leafed, leather-bound ledgers containing mundane information about family expenditures. Unlike savings culture, it seems accounting was more firmly middle-class: when Fabians asked working women to keep accounts, they strongly resisted. The issue of class could have been more explicitly addressed in this chapter too. Lemire argues that as working women became more literate they too became committed to accounting, but again her examples are middle-class. It seems that accounting would be something dependent on one's wealth and the complexity of one's household (employing servants, etc.). If your income is miniscule, there are not that many ways in which you can spend it, and hence not as much need for careful record-keeping. Like savings culture, the accounting culture of the nineteenth century is familiar, yet distant. Today most of us try to keep track of our expenses, but few of us would think of recording every minute expenditure in a leather-bound book.

Despite these three strong chapters, this is an uneven book. It lacks clarity both in terms of overall structure and, for chapters one to four, in terms of writing style. Unlike chapters five to seven, the first four chapters are difficult reading. Chapter two is about the humble financial activity of pawning, which was dominated by women, and which formed a kind of counterpoint to the development of more formal financial institutions like the Bank of England in the late seventeenth century. Chapter three is about the Charitable Corporation, which was an early effort to provide credit for the poor, while chapter five is about the trade in second-hand clothes and how they were used as an alternative form of currency. These chapters are dominated by generalizations, and there is not enough detail, nor enough reference to actual human lives and experiences to arouse the reader's interest. Generalizations need to be substantiated by examples. While the subject matter is very interesting and worth studying, it is not written up in an engaging way. Lemire shows broad knowledge of economic theory, but its invocation does not always seem justified. Applying words like "credit," "finance," and "accounting" to plebeians' simple transactions is not always effective. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what Lemire means, and in some cases this kind of language tends to obscure more than it reveals.

Another problem is that the chapters are not well linked. Yes, these diverse themes can be connected, but Lemire does not do so convincingly, and it is not fully clear why all of these chapters are part of the same monograph. This is especially true of the chapter on fashion, which is excellent in itself but poorly connected to the book's other themes. The chapters seem better as stand-alone essays.

The book's overall thesis needs to be more clearly and explicitly stated in the introduction. As one reads the book, the idea of a calculating, monetary culture replacing custom, reciprocity, and hospitality emerges as a possible thesis, but this is not explicitly stated until the conclusion. The very title obscures more than it reveals: "business" can mean any kind of activity, not just financial and economic transactions, and the word "practice" is so vague it could mean anything.

In conclusion, this is a valuable book, despite the problems with the first four chapters. Lemire's discussion of fashion, saving, and accounting is excellent, and the book captures practices that are central to historians' understanding of western culture, but seldom explored in such an engaging way. Lemire's insights about these themes make us think of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England in a new way. These chapters make the book worth reading and redeem the flaws of its first half.


ROBIN GANEV University of Regina

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