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“... J.F.C. Harrison has recently told us ‘about the people who are usually left out of history’ – such people as the maid-of-all-work in 1909 whose duties kept her busy from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.* Christopher Hampton gives us, in an anonymous 15th-century poem, a lament over women’s perpetual drudgery. His extract from the early feminist Mary Astell, writing in 1721, acknowledges that by comparison with Eastern women, who ‘are born Slaves, and live Prisoners all their Lives’, Englishwomen have an easy servitude, but ‘Fetters of Gold are still Fetters ...”

“... divorce rate for manual workers is four times greater than it is for professional couples. J.F.C. Harrison, in his elegant and economical account of Late Victorian Britain, reminds us of George Hewins’s grandfather, described in Angela Hewins’s The Dillen (1981), one of Stratford-upon-Avon’s abject poor, remarking around the turn of the century, that ...”

“... is a faith that invites more seductively than most the attention of the historian, and Professor Harrison, noting some very peculiar manifestations of it in the period of the Napoleonic wars and the succeeding years, has found himself a very good subject. He speaks of himself as writing ‘popular’ history and examining the ‘structure of popular ...”

“... There are passing favourable comments on works of social history by Geoffrey Best and J.F.C. Harrison, but historians working in Taylor’s own areas of diplomatic or high-political history are almost invariably disparaged or deplored. Britain’s best-known Marxist historian is dismissed as telling ‘anecdotes rather than being a true scholar ... I can ...”

“... rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the ...”

“... be yoked with its companion volume in the Eric Hobsbawm-edited History of British Society, J.F.C. Harrison’s Early Victorian Britain, for a proper comparison with Thompson’s undertaking: the two books have both been reissued in new editions by Thompson’s publisher, with the Hobsbawm connection dropped.* But for intellectual vitality only the Best volume ...”