This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art.
1. Introduction; Part I. Power and the People: Politics and the Social Order: 2. The languages of popular politics: from radicalism to Liberalism; 3. Class, populism and socialism: Liberalism and after; Part II. Moralising the Market: Work and the Social Order: 4. Civilising capital: class and the moral discources of labour; 5. Buiding the union: 'the gospel of absolute and perfect organisation'; Part III. Custom, History, Language: Popular Culture and the Social Order; 6. Custom and the symbolic structure of the social order; 7. The sense of the past; 8. The people's English; Part IV. Kingdoms of the Mind: The Imaginary Constitution of the Social Order: 9. Investigating popular art; 10. The broadside ballad; 11. The voice of the people? The character and development of dialect literature; 12. Dialect and the making of social identity; 13. Stages of class: popular theatre and the geography of belonging; 14. Summary and conclusion: the making of the English working class before 1914; Appendices.
