Of course, Cowper, a poet and hymnodist educated at Westminster, one of England’s élite independent schools, is exactly the sort of person that does not fall under Lyons’s gaze. On the contrary, his attention is directed at the ‘scribal culture’ of people he describes variously as ‘ordinary’, ‘semi-literate’, ‘partly educated’, ‘lower-class’, ‘the poor’, and the ‘peasant masses’. To accomplish this, Lyons muses upon a massive cache of handwritten evidence located in various archives in France, Italy, and Spain. The ‘rich subterranean world of ordinary writings’, which his labours open up, is engaging, revealing, and moving. Lyons’s focus is primarily on writing generated by the experience of absence and loss: war and emigration, he argues, were the ‘decisive generators’ of scribal culture.

Lyons’s writers range impressively: from Clelia Marchi, an agricultural worker in Lombardy, to Anita Garcia, an emigrant from San Cristóbal, near Avilés, in Spain, to Santiago de Cuba. Marchi’s story is used to frame the book. Consumed by grief at the loss of her husband of forty-six years, she filled nights of anguish by inscribing a memorial of their life together on a humble bed sheet. Grazia’s loss, by contrast, is the love of her parents and the familiarity of her home. Her story is also one of the vicissitudes of an encounter with a new and alien environment and the resultant construction of a new identity expressed in letters home. At the same time, letters from her parents were treasured, lovingly kept (Lyons tells us twice) under her pillow. This use of more detailed biographical vignettes throughout adds an engaging human dimension to the discussion and serves as a reminder of the complexity of individual lives. They are a testament to Lyons’s ability to creatively weave anecdote and analysis.

Among the book’s many excellences is an outstanding chapter that deals with letters penned by French soldiers during World War I. The core of the chapter uses the experience of the poilus (itself a loaded term) in the ‘lost province’ of Alsace as a case study of the use of scribal culture to explore notions of ‘national identity from below’. This was a time, he tells us, when, notwithstanding highly individualised forms of French, sometimes inflected with persistent regionalism, almost all of the correspondence from the trenches was written in the national language. Lyons’s case study proves revealingly complicated. On the one hand it provides some evidence of a ‘patriotic consensus’ in the minds of French troops per se, but it also points to significant fractures in the nation at war. For the student of so-called ‘history wars’, Lyons offers an interesting discussion of the role of education in the construction of what he calls the fraternal myth of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. One school textbook, he notes, sold six million copies between 1877 and 1901. Not surprisingly, in the soldiers’ correspondence there was ‘no shortage of patriotic expressions incorporating the vocabulary of official rhetoric’. Nevertheless, the letters of the poilus also point to an equivocal encounter with the reality of Alsace. One soldier expressed concern that the bookshops were filled with children’s books written in German; another wrote that ‘It stinks a bit of boche and I really wonder if it’s worth busting a gut for them.’

This discussion exemplifies Lyons’s overarching claim: that scribal culture opens up a pathway to what he calls an ‘alternative’ or ‘new’ history from below. Partly what he offers here is a corrective: there are abundant archives to work with, but historians simply have not looked for them. ‘It no longer seems legitimate to assume,’ Lyons tells us, ‘that the poor and uneducated were inarticulate or that they have left few written traces of their existence with which historians can work.’ On the contrary, as his book fulsomely demonstrates, there is a ‘flourishing archipelago of specialist archives’ bursting with personal thoughts in pencil and ink.

Going beyond a simple corrective, Lyons insists that the value of these sources cannot be overestimated. In contrast to the two ‘old’ historiographical traditions of history from below – the French Annales School and the British neo-Marxists of the 1960s and 1970s – which, in different ways, regarded the ‘subordinate classes’ as ‘an anonymous mass’, the ‘new’ approach is sensitive to the individual ‘voices of the poor’. Rather than collective action, the ‘new’ history from below values the study of individualism: ‘it searches for the personal and private voices of the ordinary people, and it considers ordinary readers and writers as active agents in the shaping of their own lives and cultures.’

This is a bold claim, and the proof of the pudding is not quite in the eating. As noted earlier, Lyons consistently struggles to describe his subjects, referring to them intermittently as ‘ordinary people’, ‘semi-literate’, ‘partly-educated’ ‘lower-class’, ‘the poor’, the ‘peasant masses’, ‘subordinate classes’ and ‘western-European peasants’. It is a book mainly about peasants, he tells us, but some of them are well off and others aren’t really peasants at all. Moreover, his individuals did their writing across a significant chronology and geography (although the book is about western Europe as opposed to the promise of Europe in the title). Lyons is alive to the danger of comparing fishes and bicycles, but there is a fishy smell here and there.

Secondly, Lyons’s difficulty with collective descriptors is symptomatic of what Orwell’s biographer Robert Skidelsky called the cul-de-sac of individuality. Using individual lives for the purposes of social history is akin to walking a tightrope; on one side is abstraction and on the other is apt anecdotal illustration. Lyons insists that ‘broader questions’ do not ‘disappear in the minutiae of individuals’, but how are the broader questions to be generated? Aggregation? Head counting? Textual analysis? In all of the preceding we are surely back into the realm of studying collective discourse in which the voice of the individual is difficult to preserve.

Lyons studiously avoids anecdotal illustration, but when he addresses broader questions he is right back with E.P. Thompson in the ranks of the British social historians pondering shared experiences and values. Furthermore, in the rush to break the shackles of collectivity it is important to remember Carlyle’s injunction to ‘empty-out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it’. Surely, the ‘new’ history from below is best seen not as an alternative but as an adjunct to the study of ‘Ordinary People’ by other means.

The hallmark of an excellent scholar is the capacity to use his or her findings to engage with issues of broader significance. Despite the relative brevity of the book, Lyons manages just that. What more can you ask of a book: to be entertained, moved, engaged and provoked? It’s clearly worth the price of admission.