Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit

Originally published in 1983, this book filled a gap in the existing literature, because the effect of credit upon a family’s real income was frequently omitted in studies of living standards. The book highlights daily routines and relationships which would otherwise remain hidden, using interviews with pawnbrokers, credit personnel and their customers in the Manchester and Salford areas of the UK. These supplement unusual documentary sources such as pledge records from the inter-war years which suggest how sensitive a barometer the trade was of working-class poverty or prosperity.

The pawnshop epitomized the economic dependence of women, whose critical role in domestic management and credit organization is a key theme. Yet indebtedness became the fulfilment of a damning sexual stereotype. Insecurity of income and the physical conditions of life combined to produce a distinct set of values, of which pawning was a central part. At a time when the cost-of-living crisis is affecting the global population, and pawnbroking in the UK is on the increase, this book has an enduring relevance.

Melanie Tebbutt is Professor Emerita of History at Manchester Metropolitan University UK. She has published widely across themes in British social and cultural history, including leisure and gender, regional landscapes, personal advice columns, family memories, gossip in organisational culture, and gossip in working-class neighourhoods, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960 (Scolar Press; Ashgate, 1995). Over the past decade her research has focused on the history of childhood and youth, with publications about BBC radio programmes for adolescents before and during the Second World War, the psychological and emotional costs of the prewar borstal system in Britain, the emotional impact of movies on boys and young men in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, and young people’s relationship with cinema culture. Her books include Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years (Manchester University Press, 2012), Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain (Palgrave, 2016), and People, Places and Identities: Themes in British Social and Cultural History, 1700s–1980s (co-edited with Alan Kidd, Manchester University Press, 2017).