Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 117

This short book is designed to meet a perceived gap – to provide an introductory guide to the systematic exploitation of a familiar source for the non-specialist. In that respect, it is similar in purpose to the author’s well-known and valued guides to aspects of the Census. In attempting to provide a didactic introduction to directories for the rural historian, this does cover methodological ground not easily accessible elsewhere, and perhaps urges the agrarian historian to reflect further on their limits and possibilities as a source.

Mills first sets out to define ‘community’ as the framework for his book, where he stresses people, their interactions, their relationships in society and space, and occupation, before describing the basic characteristics of directories and their publishing history. Trade directories providing sufficient detail to be useful for the rural communities to be studied are said to appear around 1840, and to flourish for roughly a century, appearing for most counties at a rate of perhaps two or three per decade. By contrast, most previous academic work and source guides to the use of directories, such as that by Norton and by Shaw, has focused on the urban, running forward from the mid-eighteenth century. On that series of premises, Mills then sets out a series of fields, methods, and criteria for directory-based research design. Thus guided, the beginner is shown how to explore trades and crafts; population and the differences of large and small villages; the criteria for the selection of a community for study; the thorny problem of multiple occupational descriptions in directories; declining village ‘self-sufficiency’ and changing interaction of village with village and with town; and the use of directories as potential sources for comparative history of, for example, milling in Dorset.

This is useful, and there are elements of the text which are particularly valuable. The discussion of rural crafts and trades introduces basic issues of market and scale well, and the discussion of the need to record all occupational descriptors is sensible, and set well into the context of the service hierarchy of settlements. Each theme explored is supported by excellent vignettes drawn from primary research on the source, by the author or his students and from a wide range of agrarian and local historians. Thus the directory evidence for the carrier is discussed to 118 the agricultural excellent effect through Morgan’s Bristol study and the author’s own work on Lincolnshire. The caveats and methods are well covered by such microstudies, and the result is a student-friendly and open invitation to pursue this source for rural historical study.

In that, this book succeeds, but there are, of course, elements with which one might disagree. It would have been useful to see some more discussion on the complex problems of comparing directories, storing and recover-ing information, and of patching together time-series from counties where multiple sets of directories exist, or where a single publisher provenance is lacking. The conceptualization of ‘community’ is perhaps a little overstated, and it would have been helpful to explore the township more fully as a problem for those dealing with big northern parishes. The author might also have explored more fully the processes of compilation, of which we still know too little, and here perhaps Parson’s work for the classic series of Baines directories covering the six northern counties in the 1820s and 1830s would have offered a challenging case. That said, Mills has provided a very useful introduction and guide, and clearly demonstrated the potential for further methodological and empirical work using the directory as source, where the enthusiastic beginner can add significantly to our knowledge of the Victorian rural community.