This article was originally published in the December 2012 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society

At our recent AGM and Annual Gathering our speaker, Michael Gandy, recommended a selection of books on social history which provide a good background for family historians.  Nearly all of them are available on Amazon, although some are out of print and being sold privately and so are rather expensive.  Perhaps the library would be worth a try. 

For Better for Worse, British Marriages, 1600 to Present,  by John Gills

A History of Shopping, by D Davis

Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914, by Alison Adburgham

Charles Booth’s London, edited by H Fried and R Elman

Albions Seed, Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer

Edwardians at Play: Sport 1870-1914, by Brian Dobbs

Lark Rise to Candleford, by Flora Thompson

The Pattern Under the Plough, by George Ewart Evans

Old Farm Implements, by Philip A Wright

The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, by Robert Roberts

Family and Kinship in East London, by Michael Young and Peter Willmott

Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell

Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts, by J Crofts

The Black Death, by Philip Ziegler

Round about a Pound a Week, by Maud Pember Reeves

The European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by H R Trevor-Roper

London Life in the Eighteenth Century, by M Dorothy George

The Age of Agony, by Guy Williams

The Wooden World, Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, by N A M Rodger

The Common Stream: Foxton, by Rowland Parker

The Fields Beneath: The History of one London Village, by Gillian Tindall

The Wheelwright’s Shop, by George Sturt

The World we have Lost, by Peter Laslet

London Labour and the London Poor: Selection, by Henry Mayhew and Victor Neuburg