A thing which does not exist and which is very much wanted is “A
Working-Man’s History of England.” I do not mean a history written
for working men (there are whole dustbins of them), I mean a history,
written by working men or from the working men’s standpoint. I wish five
generations of a fisher’s or a miner’s family could incarnate themselves
in one man and tell the story.
It is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent
a literary artist as Mr. Laurence Housman, but I do not deal here so
specially with his well known conviction about Votes for Women, as with
another idea which is, I think, rather at the back of it, if not with
him at least with others; and which concerns this matter of the true
story of England. For the true story is so entirely different from the
false official story that the official classes tell that by this time
the working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience.
Either story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage,
which, therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing
that, so long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story,
it seems to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up
with Female Suffrage or not.
Now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately
educated people have absorbed from childhood is something like this.
That we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power
and wealth were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King’s
power was broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that
this piece-meal improvement was brought about by one class after
another waking up to a sense of citizenship and demanding a place in
the national councils, frequently by riot or violence; and that in
consequence of such menacing popular action, the franchise was granted
to one class after another and used more and more to improve the social
conditions of those classes, until we practically became a democracy,
save for such exceptions as that of the women. I do not think anyone
will deny that something like that is the general idea of the educated
man who reads a newspaper and of the newspaper that he reads. That
is the view current at public schools and colleges; it is part of the
culture of all the classes that count for much in government; and there
is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end.