There’s nothing more English than nostalgia. Few would question Blake’s preference for green and pleasant lands over dark Satanic mills, nor Sam and Frodo’s war upon all that “frowning and dirty ugliness” 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.
That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett’s 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 “no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness”. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: “drawing 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.” Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that “was there already”.
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 “circle of affection” but also the “scene of hatred”.
Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been “half-remembered” in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: “the British go on awarding the symbolic titles”, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries.
On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called it “slipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly”. Marxists especially despised his effort to “entomb” the very idea of a 17th-century “English Revolution”: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which “has of course come from France”. 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.
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: “those 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.” 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.
As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation — here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost — 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’s 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 Laslett’s amateur army “le secret weapon anglais”. 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.
“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.”
The “We” in Laslett’s 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 “there was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation”.
Laslett’s later involvement in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the “null hypothesis”, that family organisation in England was “always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven”. He disliked the suggestion that “lonely old people” ought to be “restored to the family, where they belong”, because this was no real “restoration… in the sense of returning to the historical past”: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.
Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, 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 “coming of industrialisation… might never have occurred”. The book, and others like it, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.
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.
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.
