Content area
Full text
British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914, by Simon Cordery; pp. xiii + 230. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, £45.00, $65.00.
Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain and most of its settled colonies, friendly societies provided a mixture of recreation, ritual, fraternity, and insurance against sickness and old age for fully half of the male working-class population. Initially restricted to small local sick clubs, often patronized by local clergymen or schoolmasters, these eminently Victorian institutions soon evolved into a bewildering array of forms. Best known, both at the time and to subsequent historians, were the huge federated orders like the Foresters and Oddfellows, each of which boasted over half a million members by 1900. These organi/.ations provided an especially public face for the movement as a whole, with annual feasts and parades, widely circulating journals, and a potent presence in Parliament. By the 188Os, though, the friendly society umbrella also encompassed temperance lodges, burial clubs, deposit or "Holloway" societies (which combined sick pay with savings accounts), centralized societies (which offered sick pay without the ritual), and collecting societies (large mutual burial insurance offices). Additionally, most trade unions provided services that closely approximated those of friendly societies, and many employers set up shop clubs to maintain a loyal workforce.
Simon Cordery provides an overview of this multifaceted movement in British friendly Societies, which the author accurately describes as a "small book . . . designed to bridge a large gap" (1). This first book-length monograph on the subject since P. H. J. H. Gosden's The Friendly Satieties in England...