Social History books

If you enjoyed the road to Wigan pier have a go at Wigan pier revisited by Beatrix Campbell. It is all about women in the same place but in the 80s under thatcher. Very interesting

A Ragged Schooling by Robert Roberts. Highly recommended. It’s a memoir. He also wrote about the area he grew up in (Salford) in The Classic Slum, also recommended.

For more recent social history (60s to 80s)- along with political and economic history, Dominic Sandbrooks’ books are great.

I agree re Call The Midwife too. They are not just about mothers and babies but cover district nursing too - there are some harrowing stories about people who survived the workhouses.

The call the midwife books are brilliant for this.

Any of the Mass Observation books. Simon Garfield has written books using the sources but giving the writers pseudonyms. One of them was really named Jean Lucey Pratt and her journals were published as A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt and were edited by Simon Garfield. She wrote them from 1925 until her death in 1986z

I also always bang on about recommend on here Can Any Mother Help Me? Compiled by Jenna Bailey. It's an extraordinary non fiction book. Most if the women are middle class who were educated but were now married and constrained by the times to look after husbands and children and home. Stemming from a small ad in a magazine asking for help with feelings of isolation and loneliness. the women formed a private magazine telling other members about their frustrations of early 20th century domestic life..

I've seen it described as a sort of Mumsnet of its day.

I love that.

Judith Flanders’ The Victorian House is wonderful — it goes around the rooms of a Victorian middle-class house and talks about the activities in each, and what the furniture, contents, fashions in decoration etc tell us us about its inhabitants (sex, sickroom activities, death and mourning in the bedroom, calling cards and visiting rituals in the morning room, food, cooking, servants’’ lives in the kitchen etc) making it a very good social history of women, servants, children etc.

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.

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

Ooh now that is a good book!

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.

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.

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.

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

How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.