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Read more: “The bombs and the fires changed and destroyed a way of life”
Children waving flags on VE Day, 8 May 1945. ‘In bomb scarred Battersea, the little Londoners celebrated V E Day among the ruins of their homes’. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images) Eighty years ago today, Britain celebrated a hard-won victory against Nazi regime following six long years of…
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Read more: Happy Hoisters? Shoplifting in Memoirs
Shoplifting: woman stealing a tube of toothpaste, 1962 (Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images) I recently wrote an article for The Conversation on the history of shoplifting, which has been a research interest of mine for some time now. In the article, I drew on was the memoirs written by women who had been…
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Read more: ‘What an adventure this was’: Cities of the Sea
Ships and shipping brought glamour, excitement and opportunity to port cities, but experiences of travelling and emigration did not always live up to expectations. I have been thinking a lot about the experiences of emigration recently, partly because of the release of my new co-authored book on child emigration from the North-West of England to…
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Read more: “No more silly stuff?” Domestic Abuse, Poverty, and Family Life
Content note – this article contains material relating to domestic violence, sexual abuse and childhood trauma. Image: Woman’s Wrongs, 1874 by Joseph Swain. Image via Getty Images. Domestic violence was not always taken seriously by the police or the state and was viewed as an almost inevitable aspect of working-class life. Sadly, the experience of…
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Read more: Home
Salford Housing, 1970: Image via Getty Images One of the key aspects of my research is about the meaning of home. Homes are often idealised spaces: in 1933, for example, the Charity Organisation Quarterly declared that home was ‘the place where humankind can be shy, sensitive, reserved, proud.’[1] This ideal can be seen through the…
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Read more: ‘The worst thing you could do’: Illicit Sexuality
A couple talking under a railway arch in the Elephant and Castle district of south London, January 1949. Image via Getty Images Please be aware that this post concerns some discussions of sex and violence How do memoirs help us understand attitudes and experiences relating to sexuality in the past? On the one hand memoirs…
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Read more: ‘To hell with Christmas’
A family group admire the lit Christmas Tree in Church Street after a fresh fall of snow circa December 1954. Photo by Liverpool Post and Echo Archive/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images We are perhaps used to seeing idealised images of Christmases past, as the tradition of decorating trees, exchanging cards and gifts was popularised in Britain…
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Read more: Policing and the Post-War City
My current research project looks at the role of non-violent crimes, such as the buying and selling of stolen goods, within working-class homes and family life. Working-class memoirs and forms of life writing are a rich and revealing source for this project and have helped me think differently about the role of offending within urban…
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Read more: A city ‘which seemed to be slowly dying.’
Helen Forrester: Tuppence to Cross the Mersey and Liverpool Miss. Helen Forrester (1919-2011) is one of the best-known memoirists to chart working-class life in twentieth century Britain. In some ways she is atypical, having suffered a dramatic fall into poverty after being born into a relatively prosperous (if profligate) upper-middle class family. However, I will…
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Read more: Working-Class Memoirs and Life-Writing
Welcome to my website on working-class memoirs and life-writing, which is part of my AHRC-funded project at the University of Manchester, on crime, homes and family life in northern England and Northern Ireland, 1918-1979. My research draws on memoirs and autobiographical writings by working-class authors, alongside crime records and other archival sources, to explore how…
Living on Poverty Street: Working-Class Memoirs and Life-Writing in Britain, 1918-1979 