Book Notes: Recollections of Victorian Birmingham by Stephen Roberts

Roberts is a noted historian of Chartism, arguably the greatest of all the Nineteenth Century popular movements for social and political reform. This little book however, departs from the length, depth, style, price and purpose of his major historical works such as The Chartist Legacy.

Recollections of Victorian Birmingham, is a collection of short autobiographical vignettes, which were first published in local newspaper columns around the turn of the century, up until the First World War. 

Roberts has done a splendid job of selecting and re-publishing many of these accounts in this little volume, which give fascinating insights into life in that great Victorian city. Through these first-hand accounts, we are allowed a glimpse into political, religious, social, civil, industrial, family and leisure activities. Some accounts are told by protagonists in the great dramas they tell (election candidates, politicians, or clergymen), in others, the writer was an observer, or a child bewildered and amazed at the great Chartist gatherings of the period, for example.

While a compendium of primary sources, is not the place to look for detailed analysis of data, or synthesis of evidence into great themes and explanatory hypotheses, it nevertheless allows the reader to 'get under the skin' of the period (so to speak), and to learn not merely the raw political facts about say Joseph Chamberlain; but what he looked, and sounded like - and what it was like to hear him stir a crowd. Some historical analysis, when event or statistics driven, can become clinical and sterile. This little book is the opposite, in that while it doesn't critique or analyse the material much, it allows the human voices of the era to be heard, and is therefore a wonderfully human history.

Alongside the selection of the pieces, Roberts' other great contribution to the book is his footnotes. Without these detailed explanations, the ordinary reader would be lost, yet his carefully added notations fill in all the blanks for the uninitiated, so that they can make sense of what they are reading. Where relevant, details of who people were, or a little background to the events described, open these accounts up in a very helpful way, making this a truly fascinating and insightful little volume.