A SOCIALIST FANTASY?

The Hammonds' reputation as the most influential social historians of their generation rests on the half dozen volumes which deal with the consequences of the economic transition between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries. The shape of this oeuvre was determined early. What became the labourer trilogy was its foundation; and this was finally completed with the publication of The Skilled Labourer (1919). The least satisfactory of the three books as a work of art, it was, no doubt in consequence, the first to be accorded recognition in the pages of the English Historical Review as a work demanding academic notice. Its structure was determined by what had been left out of its predecessors, and it is chiefly notable for its rather uneasy treatment of the Luddite movement and for its mock-heroic account of the activities of the government spy, Oliver. The Hammonds had been committed since before the war to writing their Lord Shaftesbury (1923) for a series edited by their friend Basil Williams, prior to tackling a work on the Chartists, which was where their interest really lay. ‘Do you remember’ Barbara asked Lawrence, ‘the many hundred times you have said that none cld be interested in Shafter himself & that the only way to write a readable book about him was not to mention him?’ (2 September 1923) On the whole, this is not a happy frame of mind in which to write a biography, and the Hammonds' imperfect sympathy with Shaftesbury's political and religious outlook led to some failures of historical imagination on which later writers justifiably seized.