Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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Alas her abhorrent politics continues to loom large in a Britain that is going the same way as coal has. Yet Paxman’s book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed every page enormously … A mining community, as Paxman points out, was not just a place of dirt and danger. It was a world of "allotment associations, pigeon and poultry clubs, brass bands, choirs, youth organisations, whippet racing and eagerly contested giant-vegetable competitions" . I thought the death of coal mining in the UK was a political decision, which it certainly was, steered by Thatcher and aided by Scargill, but I had never realised that the end was simply bringing forward the inevitable.

The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. Miller frequently quotes scholar critics with whom she agrees and in general displays rare generosity to recent articles and books upon which she has drawn, but like many authors who position themselves as offering a crucial new understanding that other readers have missed, Miller condescends to earlier critics, telling us, for example, about King Solomon’s Mines that “the novel’s extraction plot has for the most part not figured into critical accounts of gendered landscape, which is perhaps symptomatic of literary critics’ general neglect of the mineral substrata that undergird social relations” (127).In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner's Strike. Too often, the reverse was true: it prevented people working at their own rate and made human beings slaves to a relentless machine” (91).

It was a “place where you slept and ate, visited the doctor, fell in love, had your children and entertained yourself” … One day soon, Paxman says, we may forget it was ever there. He did give a good impression of how unpleasant working in the mines was, even at such a distance from the reality, as well as the importance of coal until the late 20th century. And in the minds of those who did think about it, the suffering was more or less a necessary evil – because, as Orwell himself put it, “the machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal”.How much has neglecting “mineral substrata” actually distorted our reading of, say, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now? Jeremy Paxman is equally good on the horrors of the work (the death toll was horrific, not just the disasters that killed hundreds in a single explosion, but the tens of thousands who died in smaller incidents), the immense wealth that came to those fortunate landowners who happened to find that they were sitting on mineral riches beyond their wildest dreams with barely any effort on their part, the technological innovation that coal powered steam stimulated, and the long-term mismanagement of the industry both before and after nationalisation in 1947.