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Ladders last a long time: Reading Raphael Samuel

Raphael Samuel​ set out his stall as a practitioner of ‘people’s history’. This was a capacious category: it...

Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned and surprising connections thereby generated … All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher. In addition to leading services and hearing confession, which earlier in the century they sometimes did in the rooms where they lived, they spent their days ‘child hunting’ for their ‘Poor Schools’, visiting the sick, defusing fistfights and domestic rows, and generally ministering to the secular as well as religious needs of their congregations. Ever alive to readers’ temporal as well as intellectual needs, Samuel also informed prospective researchers that the Bishopsgate had an ‘ excellent cafeteria’ with ‘real coffee, freshly scrubbed vegetables and old-fashioned English cooking’: ‘ham and egg tart, mashed potatoes and carrots, 48p; steamed fish, 62p; jam pudding 12p’.

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