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Social History books | Mumsnet

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Find your new favourite book or recommend one on our Book forum.

Find your new favourite book or recommend one on our Book forum.

What we're reading

Social History books

23 replies

Solasum · 23/04/2024 13:51

I recently picked up The Road to Wigan Pier, and was very interested by the first section, which discusses real life for ordinary people, not just the upper classes that appear in many other books.

Can anyone recommend anything similar that I might enjoy? Readable Social history, basically.

Many Thanks

OP posts:

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Hartley99 · 23/04/2024 17:42

Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
Tressell: Ragged Trousered Philanthropist

More generally, Hardy and Dickens give you a pretty good feel for working-class life. Dickens covers the urban poor and Hardy the rural poor.

YYURYYUCICYYUR4ME · 23/04/2024 17:44

Round about a pound a week, by Maud Pember Reeves.

PoppingTomorrow · 23/04/2024 17:46

Hidden Lives by Margaret Forster

CrossPurposes · 23/04/2024 18:40

Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us and How Was It For You focusing on women in the forties and sixties. There is one in the fifties but I've not read that one yet.

DeanElderberry · 23/04/2024 18:47

The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart; a study of mass media and working class life in England, first published in 1957. Very readable.

DeanElderberry · 23/04/2024 18:51

Slightly different but also very good Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris looks at English life between the wars as explored and expressed by writers, artists, and film makers.

Thighdentitycrisis · 23/04/2024 18:53

Have a look at George Gissing. The Nether World and others, great depiction of life of Victorian London poor

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ItsRainingTacos79 · 23/04/2024 18:56

DS10 was reading Street Child (Berlie Doherty) for his school coursework, which I picked up one day and thoroughly enjoyed. So much so that I got the sequel Far From Home. A window into the lives of different people during the Industrial Revolution.

DeanElderberry · 23/04/2024 18:58

Anything that emerged from the Mass Observation project, first person accounts by all sorts of people, but particularly Nella Last's War and Nella Last's Peace, the diaries of a woman living in Cumbria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation

ThreeFeetTall · 23/04/2024 20:45

Not fiction:
Alan Johnson's biography, especially the first book. Him growing up in the 50s when Notting Hill was very different from the area it is today.
I really like Tony Parker's books. People of providence is my favourite but all of them are spoken history of a range of people on a certain topic.

PermanentTemporary · 23/04/2024 20:49

I know she's posh but Period Piece by Gwen Raverat gives such a vivid glimpse into the life of children in the 1880s/1890s.

DeanElderberry · 23/04/2024 20:53

oh, Molly Hughes' books about her life in London from the 1870s, there at the start of girls being properly educated and going on to earn their livings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Vivian_Hughes

Mary Vivian Hughes - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Vivian_Hughes

PermanentTemporary · 23/04/2024 20:59

Akenfield by Ronald Blythe too, and the Lark Rise to Candleford books.

Solasum · 23/04/2024 21:50

@ItsRainingTacos79 Berlie Doherty’s Children of Winter is also very powerful

Thank you all so much for these amazing suggestions, looking into them now

OP posts:

AtomicBlondeRose · 23/04/2024 21:53

Not quite the same, but extremely readable and enjoyable 20th century social history - the books of Ysenda Maxtone Graham. There’s one on life in girls boarding schools, one about experiences of the summer holidays for children and one about the working lives of women and I love them all!

Chickenrunning · 23/04/2024 21:55

How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

menopausalmare · 23/04/2024 21:55

A year of wonders is about the village of Eyam and the arrival of the plague.

Ilovemyshed · 23/04/2024 22:01

Its fiction but I really love Delderfield's observations of social history and change that weave into his writing. Try the Swann Trilogy, its wonderful.

Topbird29 · 23/04/2024 22:01

Am just reading The Five - about the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Have only read about Annie so far, but the author tells of her life story and how life and motherhood would probably have been for her, and tells about general social conditions, poor houses, doss houses etc.

A few years ago read Angela's Ashes - that was grim reality about growing up in a poor family in 1930s Ireland. Just shows proper poverty was not really that long ago - where the kids caught fleas from a bed so had to get shaved and the mattress was put outside to try and get it clean. And putting newspaper in your shoe if you had a hole in it. And the once a week meat (if lucky) was stretched into an ongoing pot of soup. Made me appreciate how lucky we are.

Ilovemyshed · 23/04/2024 22:06

Also Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, books by James Rebanks, and Parson Woodeforde's Diary of a Country Parson are great. Also Diary of a Provincial Lady.

anythinginapinch · 23/04/2024 22:29

menopausalmare · 23/04/2024 21:55

A year of wonders is about the village of Eyam and the arrival of the plague.

Ooh now that is a good book!

Riverlee · 25/04/2024 20:53

Woman in the Photograph - fictional story loosely based around modern feminism events - Greengam common, Miss world etc.

JaninaDuszejko · 28/04/2024 21:54

Twopence to Cross the Mersey by Helen Forrester is the aurobiography of the daughter of a middle class family who lost their money in the great depression and went to live in a slum in Liverpool. I adored this book and its sequels as a teenager.

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