SOURCE: A review of Saving and Spending, in English Historical Review, Vol. CIII, No. 409, October, 1988, p. 1083.

In the following review, Offer concludes that Saving and Spending is “a first-class contribution to working-class history.”

With their low and fluctuating incomes, how did workers and their families make ends meet? That is the subject of Paul Johnson's Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939. At some times the difficulty was to meet regular needs out of erratic incomes, at others an unforeseen crisis mopped up the regular trickle of wages. Different expedients and habits were adapted to the different time-horizons in working-class life: from the weekly problem of rent on Monday, through the seasonal one of coal for winter and the annual one of saving up for a few days’ holiday; from recurrent problems posed by the arrival of children, by illness, and by unemployment, to the terminal ones...