Senses of belonging: the politics of working-class insurance in Britain, 1880-1914.

Abstract

The social history of British working people has traditionally been framed by two categories, community formation and consumerism, which are usually assumed to be either mutually exclusive or openly at odds. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class showcased a rich variety of ritual without pausing to consider the extent to which consumption patterns were interwoven into workers’ efforts to build a vibrant community. Consumerism, for him, was a process to be wished away as a bourgeois obstacle to the search for a uniquely working-class culture. And when Richard Hoggart attacked the new habits of mass consumption that he saw emerging in the 1950s, he did so by ascribing to them the erosion of a purer community marked by neighborliness and family values. His approach more directly recognized the presence of consumerism in the lives of working people, but it failed to extend that recognition to the working-class subjects who filled his pages; for these subjects, any consciousness of the commodity was doomed to be delusory.1 Successors to these pioneering contributions have added sophistication to their arguments without moving much beyond either overlooking the existence of working-class consumption or identifying it as a form of false consciousness.2 Historians have only recently started to revisit working-class spending patterns with an eye to the important sense in which consumption itself assisted in the formation of distinctive communities—in studies ranging from “co-operative culture” to male fashion, and from “the cultural meanings of food” to the invention of local variants of “populism.”3