ABSTRACT
Unemployment has been an outstanding problem of modern Britain, and, at times, the overwhelming concern of domestic policy, overshadowing all other economic and social issues. Not surprisingly, many economists have attempted to analyse and explain its causes, and many politicians, past and present, have offered remedies for one of the most disturbing features of the modern state. No historian, however, has written a history of unemployment which focuses on the experience of people without work. That is the present aim – not to propose further explanations or social policies, but to recover, so far as possible from direct evidence, the impact of unemployment on ordinary lives. Familiarity has led to treating unemployment almost as a ‘numbers game’; whether the current rate is two, three or four million becomes a statistical exercise, sanitized and dehumanized, though with powerful political overtones. The concern of this book is the reverse of that – to ask how unemployment happened to individual people, how they and their families reacted to and coped with it, what steps they took to find work and what remedies were available to them if they failed. And, because life is not only about physical survival, what was it like to be without work, and what did one feel about it? ‘The real, central theme of History’, wrote G. M. Young, ‘is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening’. Inner lives, thoughts and emotions may be particularly difficult to recreate, but that, too, is part of the aim of this book.
