(1) Perkin, Harold, The Origin of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 37Google Scholar.

(2) Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost² (London, Methuen, and Co., 1971), p. 24Google Scholar.

(3) Perkin, , op. cit. p. 37Google Scholar.

(4) Cf. Thompson, E. P.: ‘In general, the middle classes submitted to a client relationship […] For at least the first seven interdecades of the century we can find no industrial or professional middle class which exercises an effective curb upon the operations of predatory oligarchic power’. Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?, Social History, III (1978) 2, p. 143Google Scholar. See also Sutherland, Lucy, The City of London in eighteenth century politics, in Pares, R. and Taylor, A. J. P. (eds.), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London, Macmillan, 1956), pp. 49–74Google Scholar. Sutherland writes (p. 83): ‘The City, in the sense of its monied interdecades est, was throughout the period a broken reed for the purposes of party politics, for the good reasons that the prosperity of all its members depended on their being on terms with the Government of the day, and that, even if it might have paid them to hold out for a short time, they were much too competitive among themselves to do so’.

(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.

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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.

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

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(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.