SIMON YOUNG, The Boggart: Folklore, History, Place-Names and Dialect

Abstract

importance of the mode in Elizabeth Gaskell’s social fiction and in the protracted local debates over educational reform. He concludes by arguing that, despite challenges from the expansion of the state’s statistical efforts and new modes such as the ‘settlement’ movement, the visiting mode retained its importance as a source of knowledge about social conditions throughout the Victorian period and beyond. By this reading, the spatially situated work of Charles Booth was not some atavistic throwback, but ‘the culmination of a long-established set of practices’ (92). Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City is a fascinating and invaluable corrective to Joyce’s instrumentalism. Throughout, Hewitt emphasises the importance of lines of sight and visual impressions: hence the role of housing conditions as synecdoche for social situation. This raises a question about the status of olfactory impressions: central to debates over sanitary reform, particularly during the reign of the miasmatic theory of disease, and which remain important indicators of household functionality for modern-day social workers. It is also a curious fact, unremarked by Hewitt, that one place where statistics did have an important role for district visiting, tract distributing and other philanthropic societies, was in their own annual reports. Here committees used an ingenious variety of metrics – houses visited, blankets or tracts distributed, even potential souls saved – to demonstrate value for money to subscribers keen to see a return on their investment. This is a useful reminder that the visiting mode was an expression of the values and logic of industrial capitalism.