CV

Social exploration in modern Britain

I have a number of other research interests, in particular the history of social investigation, on which I have published articles in Historical Research and History Workshop Journal. The first of these articles argues - contrary to historians who have emphasised the 'national' dimension of poverty research in the Edwardian period - that local concerns were at the forefront of the social survey movement, and that localism and civic pride was a defining feature of many surveys that were published in these years. My article 'Journeys into Poverty Kingdom' in History Workshop Journal examines the large group of social explorers who disguised themselves as tramps - or as members of other social groups - and engaged in what modern ethnographers would call 'complete participation'. I argued that these social explorers should be seen as forerunners of the modern ethnographic tradition, and that many themes familiar to modern sociologists and anthropologists can be traced in their work. Contemporaries did not necessarily reject as 'unscientific' the undercover journalistic explorations of men like 'Denis Crane' (pictured left), and saw them as as having a genuine kinship with the more quantitative and methodologically rigorous studies of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree.

With Gillian Nelson, also at the University of Glasgow, I have edited a collection of primary sources entitled Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homesless in England 1850-1910. This is published by the True Bill Press. Ten rare undercover accounts of vagrancy are included in the collection, such as J. H. Stallard, The Female Casual and Her Lodging (1866) and Everard Wyrall, The Spike (1909). There is an editors' introduction and a full index.