Finshed Steedman a little while ago, and what a book it is. There's a lightness of touch about it that isn't really commonplace among social historians - Thompson was also a great writer, but more in an angry, sometimes Swiftian and sometimes Dickensian mode, sprawling and resonant, though there was amazing elegance there too. But Steedman really reads like poetry at times - I found myself reading sections aloud. Here's another beautiful passage, one of the best in the book. She's writing about the practice of radical social history, the tradition she works within:

This is what we do, or what we believe we do: we make the dead speak, we rescue the handloom-weavers of Tipton and Freshitt from the enormous indifference of the present. We have always, then, written in the mode of magical realism. In strictly formal and stylistic terms, a text of social history is very closely connected to those novels in which a girl flies, a mountain moves, the clocks run backwards, and where (this is our particular contribution) the dead walk among the living. If the Archive is a place of dreams, it permits this one, above all others, the one that Michelet dreamed first, of making the dead walk and talk.

I was thinking about it, and I've concluded that this is the first book of its kind. Not the first to reflect critically on the ways in which history is known and produced, though perhaps the most original in that mode. But the form the book takes tells us a story. It begins with a laughing but serious passage through Derrida's Archive Fever, and takes, irreverently, his musings on the archive as a starting-point for her own, which are very different. It moves deftly into an examination of industrial disease and the literal, historical meanings of 'dust' and 'archive fever', connects these up - amazing sleight-of-hand here - with Michelet and his invocation of the oppressed of the past who now lie dead. One of the more startling operations in the book is the one where she makes the deliberately metaphorical argument that Michelet breathed the dust of the dead in the archives, and as they spoke through him, they took his life. Obviously not a literal argument, but it rings true still. In between two sections on Michelet, she inserts a chapter which seems to be from her ongoing research on domestic labour, and considers the way in which the eighteenth-century English legal system, the personal testimony, and the making of historical narration were connected. We move on: a consideration of George Eliot, and a reflection on the way the structure of historical time animates Middlemarch. Then to an absolutely marvellous chapter, entitled 'What a Rag Rug Means', about the poetics of working-class space, extending and refining Bachelard in the process, and doing more - considering the way working-class domestic interiors and objects become invested with meaning. In a characteristic textual swerve, she moves from a conceptually rich and loaded examination of the poetics of space to a very concrete set of observations about the social history of these objects that animates their capacity to hold meaning further. She then works her way through an extraordinary consideration of the relation between narrative and history, from which the quote above comes, and ends with another reflection on the actual and imagined meanings of dust, the dust of the archives, dust not as rubbish but as the inextinguishable surplus left over from past times, and dust as disease.

None of this does justice to the book, nor is it meant to. What I describe here are only bookmarks, signposts along what is a very winding and twisting journey along dusty roads (pun intended). This is a book that pretends to wind cautiously, but actually dances along those roads, taking turns that seem arbitrary but produce new and rich landscapes along the path, all of which add up to - well, add up to a very fine book. (you can deal in metaphors only so long!). That the book dances is one of the first things you notice - because works of history, even when written by great prose artists, are not supposed to dance. One imagines a slow, steady clump, one can go so far as to picture a nervous, brittle series of jumps, but the flowing, dance-like intensities of Steedman's book are something that's rare. Derrida's conclusions about the archive are refused ('Archive Fever? I can tell you all about Archive Fever!', she mock-expostulates at the beginning of the book, and then goes on to do precisely that) but in a sense the book takes Derrida's invitations to playfulness more seriously than Derrida himself ever did. Because this is a book that is both very serious and very playful.

Critical theory, in various broadly post-structuralist guises, and history have been confronting each other for a while now. Theory has berated history for its 'positivism', for its 'naive' belief in the efficacy of positive truth-telling about the past. History has accused theory of not understanding the constraints of the archive, of not comprehending what it is that historians actually do. I've seen many convincing rebuttals of strong constructivist arguments by historians, but these come, overwhelmingly, as missiles in a war.

Steedman breaks out of that trap. Here is a book that does not seek to defend or recover ground, does not protect territory. The challenge of theory is taken on, but not for the purposes of rebuttal; rather, as a provocation that is both exasperating and thrilling. And then the book dances dangerously between the archival-historical and the 'theoretical', tweaking the beard of both. The passage I cited is an instance of this. What Steedman probably has in mind when she writes, laconically and startlingly, 'We have always, then, written in the mode of magical realism' is the work of Hayden White, who tried to reduce historical writing to a set of literary tropes grounded in the nineteenth century. Steedman does not react to this with outrage as so many have done, instead, she points out, calmly, that indeed historians work with tropes and genres, and these are richer and more varied - in literary terms - than White would allow. Modernist, magical-realist, surrealist - a whole new field of literary referents for history opens up. The twentieth century, in brief, opens up. And yet, through all of this, through a series of apparent concessions to Theory about the constructedness and fictive dimensions of history, Steedman manages to affirm, time and again, the irreducibility of the archival trace, and the dust that will not go away. There is no embrace of theory, there is no surrender to theory, there is no refusal of theory. It would be good if more historians wrote like this. Till they do, this book will stand alone.