BASKERVILLE, Peter and Eric W. SAGER, UNWILLING IDLERS: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1998, 294pp., $24.95 softcover. Unemployment has a long history. As Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle wrote of Britain in Chartism one hundred and sixty years ago (1839), (a) man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. While unemployment in Britain may well have reached the level of devastation as portrayed by Thomas Carlyle at the time of his writing, the emergence of joblessness as a social problem in Canada only became evident during the late nineteenth century, at the start of Canada's `industrial revolution'. Unwilling Idlers grew out of a massive multi-year project, led by two prominent Canadian historians Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, which involved transforming thousands of the 1891 and 1901 census questionnaires into digital data files. The study uses data from a 10% sample of households selected from six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. The study sample includes a total of 36,221 individuals from the 1891 census and 41,081 individuals from the 1901 census. The result is the most comprehensive microhistorical analysis of unemployment in urban Canada at the turn of the century. Baskerville and Sager initially set the context for analysis by tracing the origins of unemployment in Canada. By examining the responses to 'want of work' prior to the 1880s, they observe a changing vocabulary that relates to the condition of being jobless and an increased awareness of unemployment among the working-class as a condition of capitalist labour markets. According to Baskerville and Sager, unemployment, a word detached from both moral stigma and seasonal plight did not appear in the daily vocabulary until the last decade of the nineteenth century (p.40). The empirical analysis begins in chapter 3, where the authors attempt to identify individual-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics that are associated with unemployment. The key dependent variable in the 1891 census was obtained from the question, you unemployed in the week preceding the census? (p.9). The 1901 census collected more detailed information about labour force activity, including number of months worked during the year among wage-earners. The findings suggest that the incidence of unemployment occurred across all social groups, although some groups, such as the nonwhite, the illiterate, recent immigrants and older workers, were subject to greater risks than others. Chapter 4 looks at the nature of the labour market in the late nineteenth century, particularly how seasonality, technological change, and occupational structures influenced employment opportunities. Chapter 5 turns attention to homes and neighbourhoods, looking at where unemployed people lived. Chapter 6 looks at with whom they lived, and chapter 7 examines how they coped with being unemployed. …