This book seeks to enrich our understanding of middle-class life in
England during the Industrial Revolution. For many years, questions
about how the middle classes earned (and failed to earn) money,
conducted their public and private lives, carried out what they took to
be their civic and religious duties, and viewed themselves in relation
to the rest of society have been largely neglected questions. These
topics have been marginalized by the rise of social history, with its
predominant focus on the political formation of the working classes, and
by continuing interest in government and high politics, with its focus
on the upper classes and landed aristocracy.
This book forms part of the recent attempt, influenced by contemporary
ideas of political culture, to reassess the role, composition, and
outlook of the middle classes. It compares and contrasts three
Lancashire milltowns and surrounding parishes in the early phase of
textile industrialization--when the urbanizing process was at its most
rapid and dysfunctional, and class relations were most fraught. The
book's range extends from the French Revolution to 1851, the year of the
Great Exhibition, which symbolized mid-century stability and prosperity.
The author argues that members of the middle class were pivotal in the
creation of this stability. He shows them creating themselves as a class
while being created as a class, putting themselves in order while being
ordered from above. The book shifts attention from the search for a
single elusive "class consciousness" to demonstrate instead how the
ideological leaders of the three milltowns negotiated their power within
the powerful forces of capitalism and state-building. It argues that, at
a time of intense labor-capital conflict, it was precisely because of
their diversity, and their efforts to build bridges to the lower orders
and upper class, that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was
maintained.
