1st Edition

Making Ends Meet Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit

By Melanie Tebbutt Copyright 1983
266 Pages
by Routledge

266 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

1.Making Ends Meet: The Mirror Image of Saving 2. The Housewife’s Saviour? 3. The Rights of Property 4. A ‘Necessary Evil. 5. Pawnbroking in Decline 6. New Directions in Credit.

Biography

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).

Original Review of Making Ends Meet:

‘…the first comprehensive study of the economic and social impact of pawnbroking in Britain…’ H. L. Smith, The Journal of Economic History, Volume 44, Issue 3 (1984).

‘The book is full of incident and anecdote…’ Business History.