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Class and political action in nineteenth-century England: Theoretical and comparative perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Krishan Kumar
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Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

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Research Article
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European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , May 1983 , pp. 3 - 43
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Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1983

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References

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(5) Thompson, E. P., Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture, Journal of Social History, VII (1974) 4, p. 388Google Scholar. And for this general view of class and class action in eighteenth-century England, see Also Thompson, Eighteenth-century English society, loc. cit.; Thompson, E. P., The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, Past and Present, No. 50 (1971), 76–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sutherland, The city of London in eiehteenth-century politics, loc. cit.; Rudé, George, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Rudé, , The Crowd in History 1730–1848 (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1964)Google Scholar; Rudé, , Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London, Collins, 1970)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Primitive Rebels (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, ch. VII, ‘The City Mob’. Adam Smith expressed a typically eighteenth-century view of the workers' capa- city for political action which still squares remarkably well with the current view of the eighteenth-century plebs: Though the interest of the labourer is strictly connected with that of society, he is incapable either of comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connection with his own. His condition leaves him no time to receive thenecessary information, and his education and habits commonly such as to render him unfit to judge even though he was fully informed. In the public deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard and less regarded, except upon some particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on and supported by his employers, not for his, particular pulses. The Wealth of Nations (London, Everyman edition, 1910)Google Scholar, Book I, ch. VIII.

(6) Perkin, , Origins of Modern English Society, p. 209Google Scholar. The classic statement of this view is Briggs, Asa, The language of ‘class’ in early nineteenth-century England, in Briggs, Asa and Saville, John (eds.), Essays in Labour History (London, Macmillan, 1960), pp. 43–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Briggs, , Middle-class consciousness in English politics, Past and Present, No. 9 (1956), 65–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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(8) Morris, speaking of ‘the Whiggish dimension’ to these histories, says that in them class was recounted as ‘a series of key events’: the publication of Paine's Rights of Man, the Nore mutiny, the Luddites, Blanketeers, Peterloo, and so on to the end of the century. ‘The events listed here appear like the battle honours of the working-class movement […] Each event raised the level of working-class consciousness, driving the working class towards an institutionalised, constitutionalised, and powerful place in British society’. Morris, R. J., Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution 1780–1850, (London, Macmillan, 1979), p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An important renewal of the Fabian tradition—but from the perspective of Parsonian functionalism—is Smelser, N., Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959)Google Scholar. And see also Roberts, B. C., On the origins and resolution of English working-class protest, in Graham, H. D. and Guhr, T. R. (eds), Violence in America: historical and comparative perspectives (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), pp. 197–220Google Scholar.

(9) For one of the earliest and fullest statements, see Anderson, P., Origins of the present crisis, New Left Review, No. 23 (01–02 1964), 26–53Google Scholar. Reprinted in P. Anderson and R. Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism (London, Fontana, 1965), pp. 11–52. And cf. Tom Nairn's lament ‘The great English working class, this titanic social force which seemed to be unchained by the rapid development of English capitalism in the first half of the century, did not finally emerge to dominate and remake English society. It could not break the mould and fashion another. Instead, after the 1840's it quickly turned into an apparently docile class. It embraced one species of moderate reformism after another, became a consciously subordinate part of bourgeois society, and has remained wedded to the narrowest and greyest of bourgeois ideologies in its principal movements’. Nairn, T., The English working class, in Blackburn, R. (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (London, Fontana, 1972), p. 188Google Scholar.

(10) Few are rash enough to take all these on board in a general treatment, although Anderson and Nairn (note 9, above) cover most of the ground between them. For a comprehensive view of the nineteenth century, see Hearn, F., Domination, Legitimation and Resistance: the incorporation of the nineteenth-century English working class (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Greenwood Press, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Young, N., Prometheans or Troglodytes? The English working class and the dialectics of incorporation, Berkeley Journal o Sociology, XII (1967), 1–43Google Scholar; Lazonick, William, The subjection of Labour to Capital: the rise of the capitalist system', Review of Radical Political Economics, X (1978), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kynaston, D., King Labour: the British working class 1850–1914 (London, Allen and Unwin, 1976)Google Scholar. For particular periods and episodes, see Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: early industrial Capitalism in three English towns (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, G. Stedman, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976)Google Scholar; Holton, B., British Syndicalism 1900–1914 (London, Pluto Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Hinton, J., The First Shop Stewards' Movement (London, Allen and Unwin, 1973)Google Scholar. Many of the guidelines for later new-left historiography were set by Hobsbawm, E., Labouring Men: studies in the history of labour (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964)Google Scholar, and Harrison, R., Before the Socialists (London, Routledge and Regan Paul, 1965)Google Scholar. The lack collec of a systematic historical treatment of the English working class in the twentieth problemcentury is notable, and interesting.

(11) Thompson, , Making of the English Working Class, p. 295Google Scholar. Answering Thompson's critics, Donnelly has argued that, imporqualitatively and quantitatively, ‘Thompson's concentration on the craftsmen, artisans and domestic outworkers is entirely justified: they are the groups crucial to the emergence of the class movement of the 1830s. Quite so—but that is precisely what makes their relationship to the later movements of factory workers so problemcentury atic. See Donnelly, F. K., Ideology and early English working-class history: Edward Thompson and his critics, Social History, II (1976), 211–38Google Scholar. For the imporqualitatively tance of handloom weavers in Chartism, see Read, Donald, The English Provinces, c. 1769–1960 (London, Edward Arnold, 1964), pp. 124–5Google Scholar; Hearn, , Domination, Legitimation and Resistance, pp. 184–85Google Scholar.

(12) Thompson, , Making of the English Working Class, p. 645Google Scholar. For the low significance of factory workers in the workingclass political movements of this period, see Pehkin, , The Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 178–9Google Scholar. The prominence of handicraft workers in Chartism must make us especially careful of the inferences we draw from the frequent assertion that ‘Chartism was the first independent movement of the British working class’. Rudé, , The Crowd in History, p. 179Google Scholar.

(13) Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England. Translated and edited by Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1958), pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

(14) The position is even more complicated than this. Raphael Samuel has shown how the British pattern of industrial development in the nineteenth century not only remained dependent on many kinds of traditional handicraft workers, but actually stimulated the creation of a vast number of new types and grades of handiment craftsmen. Handicraft work was not merely a vestigial, pre-industrial hangover into the nineteenth century, but a structural requirement of the industrial revolution, and so continued to flourish until late in the century. ‘Steam power and hand technology […] were two sides of the same coin […] The industrial revolution rested on a broad handicraft basis, which was at once a condition of its development and a restraint on its further growth’. Samuel, R., Workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain, History Workshop, no. 3 (Spring 1977), pp. 6–72 at pp. 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have discussed the implication of this persistence for the Marxist concept of a revolutionary proletariat in Kumar, K., Can the workers be revolutionary? European Journal of Political Research, VI (1978), 357–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(15) Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, passim. Three good reviews containing detailed historical as well as theoretical criticisms are Musson, A. E., Class struggle and the labour aristocracy 1830–60, Social History, I, (1976) 3, 335–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saville, J., Class struggle and the industrial revolution, in Miliband, R. and Saville, J. (eds), The Socialist Register 1974 (London, The Merlin Press, 1974), pp. 226–40Google Scholar; and Jones, G. Stedman, Class struggle and the industrial revolution, New Left Review, LXXXX (1975), 35–69Google Scholar.

(16) In 1835, adult male workers of all kinds accounted for 27 per cent of all cotton workers, the rest being women, juveniles, and children. Male spinners accounted for 15 per cent of cotton workers—by 1886 this had declined to 5 per cent. Pehkin, , Origins of Modern English Society, p. 144Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, , Labouring Men, p. 282Google Scholar.

(17) On this see especially Lazonick, William, Industrial relations and technical change: the case of the self-acting mule, Cambridge Journal of Economics, III (1979), 231–262Google Scholar; see also Jones, Stedman, Class struggle and the industrial revolution, p. 51Google Scholar. On the long persistence of customary work norms based on craft practice, see Hobsbawm, , Custom, wages, and workload in nineteenth-century industry, in his Labouring Men, pp. 344–70Google Scholar. There is an interesting comparison with the American cotton industry, where spinners were not able to establish craft control on the British pattern, in W. Lazonick, Industrial relations, work organization, and technical change: U.S. and British cotton spinning, paper given at the Cliometrics Conference, University of Chicago, May 15–17, 1980.

(18) Lazonick, Industrial relations and technical change, loc. cit.; Samuel, , Workshop of the world, p. 19Google Scholar. The spinners' relative success would partly explain why they became among the most conservative of workers, even among the ‘labour aristocracy’, in the later nineteenth century. Smelser also sees the conflicts of these years in terms of a defence of the spinners’ traditional rights and status: Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 231–35. It is interesting that Foster notes this aspect of the spinners' struggle but does not apparently feel the need to relate it to his main interpretation: ‘more dangerous in the long run […] were attempts to dilute the labour force, cut down the number of well-paid jobs, and substitute women and children for men. This was the real threat to the spinners' position. The 1830s and early 1840s saw a protracted struggle against the attempts to introduce an “automatic spinning mule” which would do away with the need for skilled labour altogether', Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, p. 83.

(19) E.g. Foster states the theme of his study to be ‘the development and decline of a revolutionary class consciousness in the second quarter of the century’, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, p. 1; see also, pp. 74, and 125, where he states: ‘Some sort of move from trade union to class consciousness did take place in Oldham during the 1830s and early 1840s’. Foster repeats his claim that a revolutionary class-conscious proletariat developed in Oldham in his reply to Musson, in Social History, I (1976) 3, 357–66Google Scholar. An earlier essay of Foster's is even more explicit, in describing Oldham's radical leaders as a ‘coherent and stable group of social revolutionaries […] working for the overthrow of the existing pattern of ownership and production’. Foster, , Nineteenth-century towns: a class dimension, in Dyos, H. J. (ed.), The Study of Urban History (London, Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 285Google Scholar.

(20) See the tables in Foster, , Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 132, 151–2, 154–9Google Scholar, listing the radical leadership in Oldham from the 1790s to the 1840s.

(21) Jones, Stedman, Class struggle and the industrial revolution, p. 60Google Scholar.

(22) For a critical discussion of the theory, see Moorhouse, H. F., The political incorporation of the British working class: an interpretation, Sociology, VII (1973) 3, 341–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cousins, J. M. and Davis, R. L., ‘Working-class incorporation’—a historical approach with reference to the mining communities of south-east Northumberland Northumberland 1840–1890, in Parkin, F. (ed.), The Social Analysis of Class Structure (London, Tavistock, 1974), pp. 275–97Google Scholar.

(23) See Engels, F., England in 1845 and in 1885, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Articles on Britain (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 386–92Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Lenin and the ‘Aristocracy of Labour’, Marxism Today, 07 1970, pp. 207–10Google Scholar; and, for a re-statement of the Leninist conception, Nicolaus, Martin, The theory of the labour aristocracy, Monthly Review, XXI (1970), 91–101Google Scholar. The ‘neo-classic’ statement is Hobsbawm, E. J., The labour aristocracy in nineteenthcentury Britain, Labouring Men, pp. 272–315Google Scholar; see also ibid., Trends in the British Labour movement since 1850, pp. 316–43. Among those who make the concept central to their accounts are Harrison, Royden, Before the Socialists: studies in labour and politics 1861–1881 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 1–39Google Scholar; Gray, Robert Q., The labour aristocracy in the Victorian class structure, in Parkin, , (ed.), The Social Analysis of Class Structure, pp. 19–38Google Scholar; Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, ch. VII; Foster, , British imperialism and the labour aristocracy, in Skelley, J. (ed.), The General Strike 1926 (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 3–57Google Scholar. There is a detailed critical discussion of the literature in Moorhouse, H. F., The Marxist theory of the labour aristocracy, Social History, III (1978) 1, 61–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and see also the exchange between Moorhouse and Alastair Reid in Social History, III (1978) 3, 347–61Google Scholar, and IV (1979) 3, 481–90.

(24) See especially Musson, Class struggle and the labour aristocracy 1830–1860 (note 15 above).

(25) On the increasing ‘homogenization’ of the workforce after 1850 as a result of these changes, see Pelling, H., The concept of the labour aristocracy, in Pelling, , Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London, Macmillan, 1968), pp. 37–61Google Scholar.

(26) One interesting way of considering the change is to see it in ‘geopolitical’ terms: the intensely political, secular, rationalist artisan culture of London gives way, for a time, to the more inward-looking, chapel-based, Dissenting culture, of the factory workers of the northern industrial towns. See Hobsbawm, , Labour traditions, in his Labouring Men, pp. 371–84Google Scholar. A similar theme is touched on in Jones, G. Stedman, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 337 ffGoogle Scholar.

(27) Jones, Stedman, Class struggle and the industrial revolution, p. 65Google Scholar. He points up the relevance of this to the ‘labour aristocracy’ theory of de-radicalisation: ‘It was not so much the privileged position [of certain groups of workers] as the vulnerability of that position that changed their industrial outlook’. See also Outcast London, pp. 338–39.

(28) This division is, however, for purposes of explaining differences of political outlook, greatly exaggerated by proponents of the theory of the labour aristocracy. For the common shaping influences and links between all grades of factory workers, at work and in the life of the community as a whole, see Joyce, Patrick, The factory politics of Lancashire in the later nineteenth century, The Historical Journal, XVIII (1975) 3. 525–553CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an outrightly sceptical statement on the concept of the labour aristocracy, see Pebkin, Harold, ‘The condescension of posterity’: the recent historiography of the English working class, Social Science History, III (1978) 1, 87–101Google Scholar.

(29) There is an excellent account of this transformation of working-class life, as far as London workers are concerned, in Jones, G. Stedman, Working-class culture and working-class politics in London, 1870–1900: notes on the remaking of a working class, Journal of Social History, VII (1974), 460–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For developments among skilled workers in Oldham, see Foster, , Class struggle and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 203–50Google Scholar. On middle-class guidance and encouragement of ‘respectable’ working-class activities in this period, see Tholfsen, Trygve R., The transition to democracy in Victorian England, International Review of Social History, VI (1961), 226–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tholfsen, , The intellectual origins of mid-Victorian stability, Political Science Quarterly, LXXXVI (1971) I, 57–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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(31) Jones, Stedman, Class struggle and industrial revolution, p. 60Google Scholar.

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(33) Moore, Barrington Jr, Injustice: the social bases of obedience and revolt (London, Macmillan, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moore's subject, as the title of his book indicates, is of course wider than the study of the German working class; but the latter nevertheless is the heart of the book, and the best thing in it. Moore himself suggests that his study of German workers can be taken as a parallel enterprise to Thompson's account of the English working class: Injustice, pp. 379 n., 474 n.

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(36) Ibid. p. 272.

(37) Moore, , Injustice, p. 217Google Scholar. A review of the recent German literature on the subject generally supports Moore's conclusion: Geary, Dick, The Ruhr: from social peace to social revolution, European Studies Review, X (1980), 497–511CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the view that Moore underplays the revolutionary character of the German working class, see Wiener, Jonathan M., Working-class consciousness in Germany, 1848–1933, Marxist Perspectives, Winter 1979–1980, pp. 156–69Google Scholar.

(38) Michels, R., Political Parties [1915] (New York, Collin Books, 1962)Google Scholar.

(39) Dawson, W. H., The turn from laissez-faire, in Hamerow, T. S. (ed.), Otto von Bismarck: a historical assessment (Boston, D. C. Heath, 1962), p. 74Google Scholar.

(40) For a good discussion of these factors in German working-class life, and a comparison with other contemporary workers, see Stearns, P. N., Lives of Labour: work in a maturing society (London, Croom Helm, 1975), esp. pp. 241 ffGoogle Scholar.

(41) Hobsbawm, E. J., Labour history and ideology, Journal of Social History, VII (1974), p. 373Google Scholar.

(42) Thompson, , The Making of the English Working Class, p. 102Google Scholar.

(43) Hobsbawm, , Labour history and ideology, p. 379Google Scholar.

(44) Morris, , Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution 1780–1830, p. 42Google Scholar. Musson, Saville, and Stedman Jones (see note 15) all comment on this aspect of Foster's account.

(45) It is fair to point out that, in the final part of his book, in dealing with the ‘liberalization’ of English society after 1850, Foster's range is very much wider, and his account of the ‘re-stabilisation’ of bourgeois society, whether or not we accept it, considers many of the necessary relationships and developments at both local and national level.

(46) Foster, , Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 132 ffGoogle Scholar.

(47) Gadian, D. S., Class consciousness in Oldham and other north-west industrial towns, 1830–1850, The Historical Journal, XXI (1978) 1, 161–172Google Scholar.

(48) Gadian, ibid. pp. 171–2. For the social basis of Birmingham's radicalism, see the articles by Briggs cited in note 56, below.

(49) Thompson, , The Making of the English Working Class, passim, esp. pp. 196–98Google Scholar.

(50) Thompson, ibid., p. 817. Thompson's view is not as novel as is sometimes made out. It was shared, among others, by historians such as G. M. Young, G. M. Trevelyan, G. D. H. Cole, R. Postgate, and W. W. Rostow—not to mention a host of frightened aristocrats at the time in question. For a selection of views, see Maehl, W. H. (ed.), The Reform Bill of 1832: why not revolution? (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar. There is a careful assessment in Thomis, M. I. and Holt, P., Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (London, The Macmillan Press, 1977), pp. 85–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(51) Rudé, G., Why was there no revolution in England in 1830 or 1848? Studien über die Revolution, zweite, durchgesehene Auflage (Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1971), p. 241Google Scholar. See also the same author's English rural and urban disturbances on the eve of the first Reform Bill, 1830–31, Past and Present (1967) No. 37, 87–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(52) Guttsman, W. L., The British Political Elite (London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), p. 35Google Scholar.

(53) The relative insulation of the political elite from outside pressure, and its ability to determine the timing and form of change, had already been recently demonstrated in the case of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Allan Silver shows that Peel and Wellington decided on Catholic Emancipation not out of concession to radical pressure or liberal opinion, but out of the exigencies of political control over Ireland. A very eighteenth-century concept of ‘reason of state’, rather than the more typically nineteenth-century ‘influ- ence of public opinion’, determined their actions throughout, and kept the debate confirmly within the confines of the ruling elite. See Silver, Allan, Social and ideological bases of British elite reactions to domestic crisis in 1829–1832, Politics and Society, I (1971) 2, 179–201, esp. 190–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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(55) Perkin, , The Origins of Modern English Society, p. 252Google Scholar; and see ibid. pp. 237–52, for a good account of the revival of the ‘aristocratic ideal’ in the 1820s and early 1830s. Perkin quotes Black-wood's Magazine (1829) for the view that ‘no change could well give them [the High Tories] a worse House of Commons than the present system gives them, and that the elective franchise could not be in more dangerous hands than those which now hold it’ (pp. 251–2).

(56) Moore, D. C., The other face of Reform, p. 21Google Scholar. For the Ultra-Tory Blandford's alliance with the Radical Attwood, see also Briggs, Asa, Attwood, Thomas and the economic background of the Birmingham Political Union, Cambridge Historical Journal, IX (1948), 190–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Briggs, , The background of the parliamentary Reform movement in three English cities, Cambridge Historical Journal, X (1952) 3, 293–317, esp., 298–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Briggs notes that Attwood's radical career ‘began by his supporting the Tory Marquis of Blandford's reform proposals’.

(57) See Guttsman, The British Political Elite, chs. II and III.

(58) Quoted Fraser, Derek, The agitation for parliamentary reform, in Ward, J. T. (ed.), Popular Movements c. 1830–1850 (London, Macmillan, 1970), p. 50Google Scholar.

(59) Silver, , Social and ideological bases of British elite reactions…, pp. 200–201Google Scholar.

(60) Burns, T., Leisure in industrial society, in Smith, M., Parker, S. and Smith, C. (eds), Leisure and Society in Britain (London, Allen Lane, 1973) p. 43Google Scholar.

(61) Marx, Karl, Inaugural address of the working men's International Association (1864), in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol. I, p. 383Google Scholar. Marx elaborates on this view in ch. x, ‘The Working Day’, of Capital, vol. I.

(62) Marx, Karl, The clergy and the struggle for the Ten Hour Day (1853), in Marx, and Engels, , Articles on Britain, p. 156Google Scholar. Here as so often in these early years of his residence in England, Marx was instructed by Engels on English politics. See Engels, , The English Ten Hours Bill (1850), in Articles on Britain, pp. 96–108Google Scholar.

(63) Driver, Cecil, Tory Radical: the life of Richard Oastler (1946Google Scholar; repr. New York, Octagon Books, 1970), p. 32.

(64) On all this see Driver, Tory Radical, passim; Ward, J. T., The Factory Movement 1830–1835 (London, Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar.

(65) Smelser, , Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 231–4Google Scholar; and, generally on the Factory Movement, 225–45, 265–308. It should perhaps be said here, that one does not have to swallow the whole of Smelser's theory of working-class behaviour in nineteenth-century England, to appreciate the value of his analysis of the Factory Acts of 1833–50. Lazonick, for instance, who generally takes a ‘newleft’ view, concurs with Smelser's account of the textile workers' motivation: see The subjection of labour to capital, pp. 8–10. In a somewhat different way Humphries, Jane accepts Smelser's evidence but gives it a radical interpretation: see her Class struggle and the persistence of the working-class family, Cambridge Journal of Economics, I (1977), 241–258Google Scholar. The complexity of the Factory Movement is increased by the observation that not all manufacturersby any means were opposed to ‘shorttime’ working. Many of the smaller manufacturers in particular joined with the workers in pressing for limitations of hours, as a means of controlling over-production. For evidence in Oldham, see Foster, , Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 136, 176, 207Google Scholar; Gadian, , Class consciousness in Oldham…, pp. 166–67Google Scholar.

(66) Rose, M. E., The Anti-Poor Law Agitation, in Ward, (ed.), Popular Movements c. 1830–1850, p. 86Google Scholar. See also Driver, , Tory Radical, pp. 331 ffGoogle Scholar; Ward, , The Factory Movement, VIIGoogle Scholar; Clark, G. Kitson, Hunger and politics in 1842, Journal of Modern History, XV (1953) 4, pp. 360, 370–72Google Scholar.

(67) Rose, , The Anti-Poor Law Agitation, p. 83Google Scholar; Driver, , Tory Radical, p. 332Google Scholar.

(68) Oastler, quoted Driver, , Tory Radical, p. 282Google Scholar.

(69) In 1844 Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, admitted that eighty-five per cent of relief was still given outside, and not inside, the workhouses. David Roberts, , Paternalism in Early Victorian England (London, Croom Helm, 1979), p. 245Google Scholar.

(70) Engels, , England in 1845 and 1885, in Articles on Britain, p. 387Google Scholar.

(71) Briggs, Asa, Middle-class consciousness in British politics 1780–1846, Past and Present, (1956) No. 9, p. 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(72) Quoted Briggs, ibid. p. 65. Cobden's verdict is endorsed by the League's historian: see McCord, Norman, The Anti-Corn Law League 1838–1846 (London, Unwin University Books, 1968), pp. 213–15Google Scholar.

(73) See on this especially Kemp, Betty, Reflections on the repeal of the Corn Laws, Victorian Studies, V (1962) 3, 189–204Google Scholar.

(74) Clark, G. Kitson, The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the politics of the forties, The Economic History Review, 2nd. ser., IV (1951) I, p. 6Google Scholar.

(75) See on this D.C. Moore, The Corn Laws and high farming (see note 54).

(76) Clark, Kitson, The repeal of the Corn Laws…, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

(77) Ibid. p. 13.

(78) Although it is necessary even here to see the important part played by middleclass radicals, such as Attwood, in the early years of Chartism. See Read, , The English Provinces, pp. 113–22Google Scholar; Rowe, D. J., The London Workingmen's Association and the ‘People's Charter’, Past and Present, (1967) No. 36, 73–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neale, R. S., Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 15–40Google Scholar.

(79) See especially Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England; and the articles by D. C. Moore, note 54, above.

(80) Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 223Google Scholar. Something similar is suggested in Gareth Stedman Jones' account of the London working class, as he shows it developing a culture ‘whose prevailing tone was not one of political combativity, but of an enclosed and defensive conservatism […] The disntinctiveness of a working-class way of life was enormously accentuated. Its separateness and impermeability were now reflected in a dense and inward-looking culture, whose effect was both to emphasise the distance of the working class from the classes above it and to articulate its position within an apparently permanent social hierarchy’. Jones, Stedman, Working class culture and working class politics in London 1870–1900, pp. 462, 498Google Scholar.

(81) The whole sequence is especially marked in Foster; see also Heahn, Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance, op. cit.

* Earlier versions of this paper were given in seminars at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard. I should like to thank the participants for the many helpful comments I received.

(82) Harrison, Brian, New Statesman, 26 10 1979Google Scholar.