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THE HAMMONDS: A MARRIAGE IN HISTORY. By Stewart A. Weaver. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, 1998. Pp. xi, 349. £ 30.00. On the progressive left in the early twentieth century there were a number of influential marital partnerships: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, Charles and Mary Beard. However, it is only with the appearance of Stewart Weaver's joint biography that we finally possess a sustained study of Lawrence and Barbara Hammond, whose scholarly and marital collaboration was central in the first four decades of this century to both the development of the discipline of social history and to the wider milieu of Liberal, and later Labour, politics. Their jointly written trilogy, The Village Labourer (1911), The Town Labourer (1917) and The Skilled Labourer (1919), anticipated not merely E. P. Thompson's rescue of the working class from the condescension of posterity, but also the Foucaldian themes of power, discipline, supervision and coercion which have characterized the 'new labour history'. Using a variety of manuscript sources, Weaver demonstrates the extraordinary extent of the intellectual intermeshing of their two selves-what G. M. Trevelyan described as 'one flesh and one author’­which lay at the heart of these three classic texts. Weaver also shows how their historical writing was informed by a deeply held Liberal sensibility. Their pessimistic and apocalyptic account of the Industrial Revolution, while highly influential in the popular imagination, was already being seriously questioned within the historical profession by the late 1920s. However, as Weaver points out, the Hammonds saw history not as a purely academic exercise, but as an 'education for citizenship'. For them, economic history was inevitably entangled in issues of contempor- ary public policy, the Village Labourer and the Town Labourer capturing the mood of the Edwardian progressive and wartime reconstructionist moments in which they respectively appeared. The Hammonds' con- demnation of the miseries of unregulated industrial growth and rural depopulation at the end of the eighteenth century recalled the romantic anti-modernism of Carlyle, but, as their 1923 life of Shaftesbury revealed, their alternative was collectivism and popular agitation from below rather than patrician paternalism from above. Indeed, it was the interests of the workers which became the touchstone of the Hammonds' radicalism, and Lawrence's alienation from the Liberal leadership stemmed in part from the draconian measures taken against striking workers by the Asquith administration in 1912. One of the major strengths of this book is how Weaver places the Hammonds' historical writings in the context of Lawrence's career as a political journalist for such august Liberal publications as the Speaker, the