Jamie L. Bronstein, The Happiness of the British Working Class (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023)

In The Happiness of the British Working Class, Jamie Bronstein asks “of what did happiness consist for working British people in the nineteenth century?” (2) What follows is a sweeping exploration of the myriad ways working people defined the joys and successes of their lives across more than a century and a half. Bronstein surveys 363 autobiographies produced by working class authors born between the years 1750 and 1870. She draws her sources from across the British Isles but notes a bias toward Scottish and male writers. Critical to her investigation is the observation that working-class people often did not mention happiness itself but rather evaluated whether their lives were well lived across several categories, presenting an understanding of happiness closer to the Greek concept eudemonia. As such, Bronstein’s definition of happiness is broad and while it includes discussions of pleasure and contentment, it is also focused on identifying the standards with which working people assessed their lives.

Bronstein’s first chapter is an extended interrogation of the promises and limitations of autobiography or memoir as a historical source. Her assessment of life-writing works in two temporal areas, as she considers both the broad cultural norms of her subjects’ time, as well as the extent to which we can see modern understandings of the psychology of happiness in these texts. Here her writing plays the double part of assessing to what degree the extensive literature on middle-class life writing is applicable to the working class, but also of integrating the findings of modern psychological studies of happiness. Near the end of the work Bronstein suggests that all autobiographies may have been given their shape by the evangelical conversion narrative, which is often structured around emotional build up and release. But there is no statement about the genre conventions that united working-class biography during this time, as Robert Darnton provided for 18th century French printers.

The bulk of the work consists of six extended case studies, each focusing on one venue for pursuing happiness, including chapters on childhood, work, social relations, nature, education and uplift, and duty. These explorations are buttressed with two contrasting chapters, one examining those who felt they had no happiness in their lives and another on negative emotions. Keeping with Bronstein’s capacious understanding of happiness, thematic chapters are subdivided by investigations of specific experiences. The chapter on work for instance, is framed around “flow,” where engaged workers disappear into challenging but rewarding manual labour. (43) Subsequent discussions of fit, creativity, autonomy, and adventure, help to reveal the complicated emotional calculus performed by workers in search of labour that could provide the satisfaction of workplace flow. Social bonds and leisure time spent in nature emerge as the dominant themes in working-class life writing, for while they are given their own chapters, they also play a critical role in other forms of happiness. For instance, nature provided a play area in childhood as well as work and resources in adulthood, in addition to being enjoyed for its own merits. Often these themes flow into one another as Bronstein finds happiness in unexpected places – such as the joy of a child entering the workforce and using their pay to help support their family. Her use of the much smaller set of female authored biographies reveals that women had far fewer avenues in which to pursue happy lives when compared to their male counterparts, largely due to limited avenues for labour and education.

Here, the work’s strength – deep reading in a large source base – may also be its weakness. Bronstein’s subjects were born over the span of a century, meaning they often lived into the early 20th century. Given that the publication dates of memoirs are not often usually included in the main text, some readers may find it jarring when subsections that begin in the early 19th century end with the reflections of a man who experienced World War I. Other methods of organization, such as a cohort analysis, may have been better suited to showing change over time.

This thematic rather than chronological organization, however, does contribute to the book’s culminating chapter. In an ambitious and challenging final chapter, Bronstein uses her findings to complicate contemporary research on happiness. With one exception (that happiness is perceived to be greater in childhood and old age, and that nostalgia may contribute to this), Bronstein’s cases studies challenge 21st century psychological studies of happiness. For instance, Bronstein interrogates the modern finding that cheerful moods, or a pre-disposition to act in a positive manner, leads to greater happiness. But early 19th century British people had a different cognitive understanding of the process of thought. They attributed thoughts and moods to the soul not the brain and as a result often looked on moods and moodiness with suspicion, as the result of a wavering soul. Ultimately, they crafted an understanding of happiness that had no relation to moods. In this way, she not only brings a longitudinal dimension to these studies but provides a glimpse of the historical conditions that undergird modern psychology.

One of the modern psychological questions that Bronstein explores is the relationship between wealth and happiness. Important to this relationship is adaptation, or the ability to adapt expectations and understandings of one’s experience to poor conditions, and in so doing still manage to find happiness. Her evidence shows that, save those in abject poverty, the British working class almost never wrote about systemic inequality or expressed frustration at class-based forms of oppression, preferring instead to express gratitude for the happiness that they did find. This raises the question of whether the emerging understanding of happiness itself functioned to forestall labour struggle. Here and throughout Bronstein is careful about contextualizing her interpretation of happiness in a changing understanding of happiness away from 16th century notions of “hap” as good fortune and toward a more capacious understanding of happiness by the 19th century as individual pleasure, contentment, and the common good. Bronstein does not address how this changing understanding of happiness, which also placed the burden of being happy on the individual, may have encouraged the adaptation she describes later and may have forestalled labour struggle. (186-188) If adaptation and personal responsibility for happiness led individuals to interpret their lives as happy despite poor circumstance it may be possible that happiness contributed to a hegemony of feeling rather than thought, which limited agitation. Bronstein never directly addresses this question of labour struggle and happiness, and the question of happiness-as-hegemony may provide a fruitful terrain for future debate.

The Happiness of the British Working Class brings new light to the experiences of working people by evaluating how they sought to bring joy to their lives and should be read by scholars interested in the intersection of labour and cultural history. Its engagement with multiple theoretical frameworks may make for productive discussions in a graduate seminar. The final chapter especially deserves to be read widely, especially by psychologists and other researchers in the social sciences.

Jared Kazik Asser

University of Georgia, Athens

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v94.0017.