Andrews, William

About the author

William Andrews (1848–1908) was an English antiquarian writer and historian, best remembered for his broad range of studies on local customs, traditional lore, and cultural oddities within Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Often leaning toward the quirky and lesser-examined pockets of everyday life, Andrews’ works, including At the Sign of the Barber’s Pole and Curious Epitaphs, showcase how micro-histories of mundane or eccentric subjects can illuminate broader trends in social attitudes, religious practices, and popular folklore. He possessed a knack for unearthing idiosyncratic historical anecdotes, which he artfully arranged into accessible, often entertaining narratives.

In At the Sign of the Barber’s Pole: Studies In Hirsute History, Andrews explores the evolution of hairstyles, facial hair fashions, and barbers’ shops from antiquity through modern periods. He draws attention to how beards and shaving customs served as markers of identity—signaling social class, religious affiliation, or even political alignment. Besides charting these developments, the book revels in colorful vignettes of odd lawsuits concerning barbering, superstitions regarding hair, and emblematic uses of the barber’s pole. By delving into such seemingly trivial details, Andrews captures a revealing portrait of how personal grooming connected to broader social mores.

Another notable title, Bygone Punishments, documents the harsh and often bizarre penal methods used by older generations, from stocks and pillories to more drastic punishments like witch-ducking or public whippings. Andrews inspects these practices not only through documentary evidence—like court records—but by describing particular local traditions and anecdotal cases that highlight the cultural climate of fear or cruelty shaping penal policies. While reflecting a certain macabre fascination, the text also underscores the progress made in legal reforms and growing humanitarian sentiments in Victorian Britain, indicating that retrospective curiosity about past cruelties fostered a sense of contemporary moral superiority.

Similarly, Andrews approached Curious Epitaphs as an invitation to discover how funerary inscriptions, far from being uniformly solemn, might show glimpses of humor, tragedy, family pride, or regional dialect. Throughout the volumes, he gleaned verses and engravings from churchyards across Great Britain and Ireland, organizing them thematically to comment on how commemorations reflected local wit, superstition, or sentimentality. These revelations about how people confronted mortality intersect with broader religious and cultural developments in Victorian society, where growing literacy and commercialization of burial customs changed how communities memorialized their dead.

Though his approach skews anecdotal rather than strictly academic, William Andrews’ works collectively serve as reminders that social history thrives in the mundane. From barbershops to epitaphs, he champions the overlooked minutiae that bring past eras to life. Modern scholars still consult his books for hidden gems and local references that might otherwise remain scattered in archives. In that sense, Andrews stands in a lineage of antiquarian writers whose enthusiasm for small-scale cultural artifacts broadened lay readers’ appreciation of history as not solely about kings and battles, but also the everyday practices and quirks that shaped ordinary people’s experiences.