There\u2019s nothing more English than nostalgia. Few would question Blake\u2019s preference for green and pleasant lands over dark Satanic mills, nor Sam and Frodo\u2019s war upon all that \u201cfrowning and dirty ugliness\u201d which they find in their once-idyllic Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings. England, home of the Industrial Revolution, yearns for its rustic innocence: thatched cottages, stone churches, weeping willows, the village green. This is how we like to imagine the world we have lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett\u2019s great work: The World We Have Lost, published in 1965. Nostalgic only to a point: Laslett tells us at the outset that the world we lost with the arrival of industrialisation was \u201cno paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness\u201d. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: \u201cdrawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy.\u201d Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that \u201cwas there already\u201d.<\/p>\n
The majority was illiterate, and therefore excluded from political and intellectual life. What is worse, early-modern parish records, which Laslett and others had pored over relentlessly, revealed plenty of parents who had themselves signed the marriage register, but whose children were unable to do so: there was no guarantee of linear improvement across the generations. True, pre-industrial life left a greater role for the family, but this should not elicit any pangs of nostalgia either: the family was not only a \u201ccircle of affection\u201d but also the \u201cscene of hatred\u201d.<\/p>\n
Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been \u201chalf-remembered\u201d in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: \u201cthe British go on awarding the symbolic titles\u201d, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called<\/a> it \u201cslipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly\u201d. Marxists especially despised his effort to \u201centomb\u201d the very idea of a 17th-century \u201cEnglish Revolution\u201d: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion<\/a>, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which \u201chas of course come from France\u201d. The World We Have Lost was a defence of this foreign science from its many detractors, complementing its new major English centre which Laslett helped found, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Laslett himself seems a figure from a world we have lost. At one point, on the fraught question of whether people used to, or even could, have sex in private, he says: \u201cthose with experience of living within severe spatial restrictions, such as a man who served as I happen to have done in a grossly overmanned naval vessel, will know that privacy is not entirely a physical affair.\u201d He had an eclectic career of the sort that feels impossible today. During the Second World War, he mastered Japanese at Soas, after which he worked at Bletchley Park, decoding Japanese intelligence.\u00a0<\/p>\n As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation \u2014 here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost \u2014 Laslett had one foot in academia and one in the BBC. His broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme were an important part of his academic strategy; it was there that he issued his call to arms to Britain\u2019s antiquarians to dive into their wealth of local source material, and thereby to construct a vivid picture of the social structure of early-modern England. The French demographer Louis Henry called<\/a> Laslett\u2019s amateur army \u201cle secret weapon anglais\u201d. Many chapters of The World We Have Lost were initially written as radio broadcasts. Later editions are full of gratitude, and well-earned nostalgia, for the BBC at the height of its Reithian powers.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labour will endure, and what will fast become redundant.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cWe\u201d in Laslett\u2019s title refers to the English. Although he emphasises the contrasts between our world today and the one we have lost, he dwells on the few points of common ground. We know what a culture is by observing its habits and customs; we know what English habits and customs are by testing their consistency over time. One defining characteristic of Englishness is the small, nuclear family. This, Laslett was adamant, was not an invention of industrialisation, of modernity; in fact in England \u201cthere was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation\u201d.<\/p>\n Laslett\u2019s later involvement<\/a> in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the \u201cnull hypothesis\u201d, that family organisation in England was \u201calways and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven\u201d. He disliked the suggestion that \u201clonely old people\u201d ought to be \u201crestored to the family, where they belong\u201d, because this was no real \u201crestoration\u2026 in the sense of returning to the historical past\u201d: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.<\/p>\n Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet \u201chath not seen the change of fourteen years\u201d, he was indulging in his imagination and nothing more. Laslett even broaches the possibility that late marriage proved the key to English prosperity, without which the \u201ccoming of industrialisation\u2026 might never have occurred\u201d. The book, and others like it<\/a>, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.<\/p>\n With the rise of generative AI, one often hears that we are on the cusp of something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. As the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labour will endure, and what will fast become redundant. Since so much is downstream of labour, we must consider what changes the coming decades herald for things as basic to us as our households, our families, our social structure.<\/p>\n Already, even without AI, there have been some profound shifts. One of the characteristics of pre-industrial society, as Laslett says, is that the household was the primary locus of economic production; and so it was, thanks to Zoom and furlough, during the coronavirus lockdown. ChatGPT, some say, threatens literacy, or at least makes literacy less essential for social functioning, and Laslett paints a vivid picture of what the illiterate world of our past looked like. Laslett shows us just how much things can change, and how lost our lost world really is. But he also shows us those features of English life which have remained more or less constant for the last thousand years, and which we thus have reason to expect will stay with us. Nostalgia is not usually subject to reason; reading Laslett will hardly cure us of all our dreams of simple, old-fashioned living. But trying to imagine the world we have lost, as it actually was, will temper that nostalgia, and make us appreciate the world we have now.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s nothing more English than nostalgia. 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