3 The Nineteenth Century: A Viable Hierarchical Society

1. J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993); P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984); J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York, 1994); M.W. Steinberg, ‘Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons between Post-Structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective’, SH, xi (1996), pp. 193–214; D. Wahrman, ‘The New Political History: AReview Essay’, SH, xxi (1996), pp. 342–54.

2. This is a (very simplified) summary of the views put forward in many books and articles. For the most influential accounts, see E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolutions, 1789–1848 (London, 1962); H.J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969); A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 1959); idem, ‘Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846’, P&P, no. 9 (1956), pp. 65–74; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968); J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, 1974); D. Thompson, The Early Chartists (London, 1971). For a different argument, which nevertheless shares the same class-based paradigm, see R.S. Neale, ‘Class and Class Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Three Classes or Five?’, in idem, Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), pp. 15–40.

3. A. Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Nineteenth-Century England’, in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974), pp. 154–77.

4. A. Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (Harmondsworth, 1965); W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London, 1964); E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975); Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 340–47.

5. For two particularly powerful pieces of sceptical scholarship, see C. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1982); D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995).

6. See Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 35: ‘The French Revolution explicitly politicised social class.’ What he really means is that it explicitly politicised social description. Lord Liverpool, in 1819, certainly thought that ‘the events of the French Revolution had directed the attention of the lower orders of the community, and those immediately above them, to political considerations’: P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990), p. 98.

7. E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Change and Chance: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988); M. Berg and P. Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xlv (1992), pp. 24–50; J. Hoppitt, ‘Counting the Industrial Revolution’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xliii (1990), pp. 173–93; P.K. O'Brien, ‘Modern Conceptions of the Industrial Revolution’, in P.K. O'Brien and R. Quinault (eds), The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–30; C. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (London, 1995). For a survey of the historiography, see D. Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980’, P&P, no. 103 (1984), pp. 159–67.

8. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, pp. 154–77. Here are three famous examples of contemporary observers writing in the language of class: Thomas Gisborne, Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher Rank and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain (London, 1795); J. Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (London, 1833); F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London, 1845).

9. J. Seed, ‘From “Middling Sort” to “Middle Class” in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’ in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp.114–35, rather over-estimates the extent and inevitability of this development. John Wade used ‘middle classes’, ‘middle orders’ and ‘middle ranks’ interchangeably in his writings. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 356, n. 59.

10. G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), pp. 288–304; G. Crossick, ‘From Gentlemen to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain’, in P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 150–61. When the Home Office described the Luddites as belonging to ‘the very lowest orders of the people’, they were not only not using the ‘language of class’: they also implied, correctly, that workmen better off and higher up the social scale were not involved. See M.I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, 1970), p. 111.

11 Burke's belief that a divinely sanctioned and aristocracy-dominated social and political hierarchy was the best of all possible worlds did not prevent him taking a low view of certain individual peers, most famously the duke of Bedford, the recipient in 1796 of his Letter to a Noble Lord: see J.A. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage in eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 167–8.

12. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), p. 306; I.R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984), p. 169. J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 80, 93–9, 247–58. D. Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, 1979), pp. 30, 187; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), pp. 252–3; M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London, 1981), p. 19.

13. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 100–101. My italics.

14. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 98; Clark, English Society, pp. 324–30; J.A. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 119.

15. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 26–7, 120; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 97.

16. Christie, Stress and Stability, p. 57; Clark, English Society, p. 87.

17. Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 23; Clark, English Society, p. 91.

18. R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1990 edn), pp. 298–9, 340–43, 354–5; D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 15–21. For another example, see these comments by the earl of Radnor in 1793: ‘With respect to difference of rank, all the inhabitants of this kingdom are interested in the maintenance of it, for it is essential and fundamental to our form of government, and it remains to be proved that any government in the world is, or ever was, comparable to ours’ (A. Cobban (ed.), The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (2nd edn, London, 1960), pp. 399–400).

19. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 292, 303; Clark, English Society, p. 234; Thompson, English Working Class, p. 442. For a general discussion of bishops’ views on revolution and subordination, see R.A. Solway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London, 1969), pp. 19–84.

20. Roberts, Paternalism, p. 30; Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 282; Clark, English Society, pp. 268–70, 350–52; Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 36, 57–65; C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), p. 194. Southey's attachment to hierarchy is discussed in D. Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, EHR, civ (1989), pp. 308–31.

21. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p.159; A. Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792–93’, HJ, iv (1961), pp. 56–68; D.E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist Association Movement’, HJ, ix (1966), pp. 179–90; Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 30–31, 195.

22. Eastwood, Governing Rural England, p. 20; Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 20–25, 49–50; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 165; Colley, Britons, pp. 146 – 93; D. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (London, 1994), pp. 25–33.

23. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, p. 196; J.R. Hill, ‘National Festivals, the State and Protes- Ascendancy in Ireland, 1790–1829’ Irish Historical Studies, xxiv (1984), pp. 30–51; Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 26–8.

24. M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 234–67 investigates the celebrations of peace with France (1801), the coronation of George IV (1821), and the coronation of William IV (1831) as staged in Bristol, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester. See also L. Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820’, P&P, no. 102 (1984), pp. 94–129; idem, Britons, pp. 194 – 236.

25. Clark, English Society, p. 216; J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim (London, 1969), pp. 360–71; B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 280, n. 47; G. Martin, Bunyip Aristocracy: The New South Wales Constitution Debate of 1853 and Hereditary Institutions in the British Colonies (London, 1986), pp. 21–30. Even that self-styled ‘friend of the people’ Charles James Fox supported the introduction of aristocracy into Canada: Cannon, Aristocratic Century, p. 164. For broader discussion of empire and hierarchy in Canada, see H. Temperley, ‘Frontierism, Capital, and the American Loyalists in Canada’, Journal of American Studies, xiii (1979), pp. 11–12.

26. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 110–12, 194–216; M. Francis, Governors and Settlers: Images of Authority in the British Colonies, 1820–60 (London, 1992), esp. pp. 1–71; T.R. Metcalf, ‘Imperial Towns and Cities’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 239–40.

27. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 142–63, 220–24; R.B. Sheridan, ‘The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730–1775’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xiii (1960–61), pp. 342–56; G.C. Bolton, ‘The Idea of a Colonial Gentry’, Historical Studies, xii (1968), pp. 307–28; D. Washbrook, ‘Economic Depression and the Making of “Traditional” Society in Colonial India, 1820–1855’, TRHS, 6th ser, iii (1993), pp. 237–63.

28. P.J. Marshall, ‘Imperial Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxiii (1995), p. 385. The anti-slavery movement was also much preoccupied with the preservation of hierarchy: see D. Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), p. 377; A.D. Kriegal, ‘A Convergence of Ethics: Saints and Whigs in British Anti-slavery’, JBS, xxvi (1987), pp. 441, 449. For a discussion of European perceptions of hierarchy in the non-European world, see H. Liebersohn, ‘Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso and Romantic Travel Writing’, AHR, xcix (1994), pp. 746–66.

29. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 247–8, 240–58.

30. Thompson, English Working Class, p. 103; Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 163–5.

31. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 209, 220; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 679–80, 819, 823, 825; I. Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 71–3.

32. Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 167, 169; Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 156.

33. J. Wade, The Extraordinary Red Book (London, 1816); idem, The Extraordinary Black Book (London, 1819); W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, P&P, no. 101 (1983), pp. 55–86; Thompson, English Working Class pp. 108, 848; G. Claeys, ‘The Reaction to Political Radicalism and the Popularisation of Political Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Case of “Productive” and “Unproductive” Labour’, in T. Shinn and R. Whitley (eds), Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht, 1985), pp. 119–36; I.J. Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the Concept of the “General Strike”’, P&P, no. 63 (1974), pp. 142–3, 158–9.

34. Harrison, Crowds and History, pp. 268–88; J. Stevenson, ‘Food Riots in England,1792–1818’ in J. Stevenson and R. Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order (London, 1974), pp. 33–74; A. Booth, ‘Food Riots in the North-West of England, 1790–1801’, P&P, no. 77 (1977), pp. 84–107.

35. Prothero, ‘William Benbow’, p. 157; J.R. Dinwiddy, ‘The “Black Lamp” in York-shire, 1801 P&P, no. 64 (1974), pp. 113–23; idem, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, SH, iv (1979), pp. 33–63; D. Hay and N. Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997), pp. 179–208.

36. J. Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, SH, vi (1981), pp. 1–32; J. Epstein, ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, P&P, no.122 (1989), pp. 75–118.

37. J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993), pp. 33–4; Calhoun, Question of Class Struggle, pp. 105–15; I.J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (London, 1981), pp. 132–55; T.W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, JMH, liv (1982), pp. 417–66; A. Clark, ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820’, Representations, no. 31 (1990), pp. 47–68.

38. M. Elliott, ‘The Origin and Transformation of Early Irish Republicanism’, International Review of Social History, xxiii (1978), p. 411. Quoted in Christie, Stress and Stability, p. 16.

39. J. Smith, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (London, 1992), p. 6; G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of “Class Struggle”: Middle Class and Bourgeoisie, 1789–1850’ (unpublished paper), p. 5; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), pp. 299 –301.

40. E. Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions, 1746–1886 (London, 1982), pp. 170, 194, 198, 200, 203, 210, 215, 219, 249, 251, 264, 268–9, 273–4, 299, 303, 319, 321–2, 355; W.H. Fraser, Conflict and Class: Scottish Workers, 1700–1838 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 83, 103.

41. D.J.V. Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales, 1793–1835 (London, 1973), pp. 53, 63, 91; D.W. Howell, Patriarchs and Parasites: The Gentry of South West Wales in the Eighteenth Century (Cardiff, 1986), pp. 229–30.

42. T.M. Devine, ‘Unrest and Stability in Rural Ireland and Scotland, 1760–1840’ in R. Mitchison and P. Roebuck (eds), Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 126–39; T. Bartlett, ‘An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793', P&P, no. 99 (1983), pp. 41– 64.

43. T.M. Devine, ‘Social Responses to Agrarian “Improvement”: The Highland and Lowland Clearances in Scotland', in R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 148–68; E. Richards, ‘Patterns of Highland Discontent, 1790–1860', in Stevenson and Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order, pp. 75–114; Richards, History of the Highland Clearances, pp. 249–362; K.J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780–1815 (Edinburgh, 1979); Jones, Before Rebecca, pp. 13–94.

44. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 155; Thompson, English Working Class, p. 60; F. O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 236–7; E.A. Wasson, ‘The Great Whigs and Parliamentary Reform, 1809–1830', JBS, xxiv (1985), p. 457; idem, Whig Renaissance: Lord Althorp and the Whig Party, 1782–1845 (London, 1987), p. 80; E.A. Smith, Lord Grey, 1764–1845 (Oxford, 1990), p. 217. For Lord Holland's later (1826) fear that ‘the divisions of classes and great interests are arrayed against each other', see Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 233.

45. Clark, English Society, p. 372; Perkin, Modern English Sociey, p. 180; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 167, quoting Sydney Smith in 1819.

46. Richards, History of the Highland Clearances, pp. 66, 77, 357.

47. S.J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (New York, 1982), p. 19; K.T. Hoppen, Ireland Since1800: Conflict and Community (London,1989), pp. 10, 44, 47; Smith, Men of No Property, pp. 7–8, 25.

48. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 64, 304; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 304; Calhoun, Question of Class Struggle, pp. 3–23, 32–59.

49. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 753, 836, 838; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 228–9; Calhoun, Question of Class Struggle, pp. 95–126.

50. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 40–46; Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 160.

51. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 47–8; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 28.

52. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 158–9, 162, 197–8, 217–18.

53. Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 294; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 257–9.

54. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 166, 183; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 253–4.

55. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 162; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 254, 269.

56. L. Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of the Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford, 1995), pp. 7– 57, details the rise of ‘standard English’ during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

57. P. Lawson and J. Philips, ‘“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Albion, xvi (1984), pp. 225–41; J. Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 138–82, 201–12.

58. Raven, Judging New Wealth, pp. 221–48; P.J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965).

59. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 22, 27–9, 148–52, 227, 239–40; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution’, HJ, xxv (1982), pp. 331–49. Burke, it should now be clear, used all three modes of social analysis: the hierarchical, the triadic and the polarised, but as (by this time) a true conservative, his main concern was to defend hierarchy.

60. Girouard, Return to Camelot, p. 65; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 164–8, 200–14, 250.

61. J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550 –1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 84–112; R. Price, ‘Historiography, Narrative and the Nineteenth Century’, JBS, xxxv (1996), pp. 245–6. See also the articles in the special issue of the JBS, xxxii (1993), pp. 305–96, by Brown, Hunt and Money, devoted to eighteenth-century middle-class assertiveness and identity. There also seems less evidence than was once thought for the growth in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century middle-class wealth: see L.D. Schwartz, ‘Social Class and Social Geography: The Middle Classes in London at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, SH, vii (1982), pp. 167–85.

62. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 60–63; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 28–30. See also the remarks of T.C. Smout on the Scottish middle class in A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London, 1969), pp. 338–40.

63. Cf. S. Nenadic, ‘The Rise of the Urban Middle Class’, in T.M. Devine and R. Mitchison (eds), People and Society in Scotland, vol. i, 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 120: ‘By the 1830s, the language of class was well developed in Scotland, though the terminology of “ranks and orders” had not vanished from smaller and non-industrial towns.’ Such a formulation is not only mistaken in supposing that the language of class did drive away the language of ranks and orders: it also fails to recognise that the language of class was often used as an expression of hierarchy.

64. E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (London, 1981), pp. 245–9; E. Royle and J. Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760 –1848 (Brighton, 1982), pp. 181, 189. Cf. S. Wallech, ‘Class Versus Rank: The Transformation of Eighteenth-Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xlvii (1986), p. 431: ‘The concept of “class” had by 1821 captured the imagination of Great Britain's thinking population.’ Indeed it had long since done so, but not just in the sense, as he uses it, of collective categories.

65. M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973), p. 210.

66. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 215; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 323–7.

67. R.W. Davis, ‘The Whigs and the Idea of Electoral Deference: Some Further Thoughts on the Great Reform Act’, Durham University Journal, lxvii (1974), pp. 83, 89; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 78; Smith, Lord Grey, pp. 255, 259– 60.

68. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 216, 224.

69. Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 78; Thompson, English Working Class, p. 899.

70. Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 230, 294; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 250–52; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 306–9.

71. N. McCord, ‘Some Difficulties of Parliamentary Reform’, HF, x (1967), pp. 376–85; idem, ‘Some Limitations of the Age of Reform’, in H. Hearder and H.R. Loyn (eds), British Government and Administration: Studies Presented to S.B. Chrimes (Cardiff, 1974), pp. 186–95. For the shortcomings and limitations of the censuses from, as guides to numbers, income, occupation and rank, see: M.Drake, ‘The Census, 1801–1891’, in E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge,1972), pp. 8 –11, 32–3, 44–5; W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Use of Information About Occupation’, in ibid., pp. 192–4.

72. Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 5, 343–4, n. 3; Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, p. 29; R.W. Davis, ‘Deference and Aristocracy in the Time of the Great Reform Act’, AHR, Ixxxi (1976), p. 534; Thompson, English Working Class, p. 901.

73. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 173, n.32; D.J. Rowe, ‘Class and Political Radicalism in London, 1831–2’, HJ, xiii (1970), p. 39.

74. J. Hamburger, James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven, 1963); A. Briggs, ‘The Background of the English Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities’, Cambridge Historical Journal, x (1950–52), pp. 293–317; G.A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978); F. Montgomery, ‘Glasgow and the Struggle for Parliamentary Reform, 1830–1832’ Scottish Historical Review, lxi (1982), pp. 130–45; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 888–900; G. Rudé, ‘English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830–1831 P&P, no. 37 (1967), pp. 87–102; E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing (London, 1969); Harrison, Crowds and History, pp. 289–314.

75. Thompson, English Working Class, p. 253; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 61; E.A. Smith, Reform or Revolution?: A Diary of Reform in England, 1830–2 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 70, 83–4.

76. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 261. This is also the claim made by J.C.D. Clark, namely that 1832 spelt the ‘dissolution of the social order’ of the eighteenth-century ancien régime. But now, as then, this was an excessively alarmist response. See Clark, English Society, p. 410; O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, p. 393, n. 22.

77. Smith, Reform or Revolution?, pp. 10–11, 27, 61, 72, 80.

78. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 257; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 18, 328–33.

79. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 216, 257; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 344–52; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 903, 983; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 241; A. Briggs, ‘National Bearings’, in idem, Chartist Studies (London, 1959), p. 295.

80. Smith, Reform or Revolution?, pp. 143–4; G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983) pp. 104–6, 173; P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991) pp. 13, 37.

81. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 333–43; R.J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–1850 (Manchester, 1990), p. 10.

82. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 352–66; G.K. Lewis, ‘From Aristocracy to Middle Class: Bulwer-Lytton's England and the English’, in idem, Slavery, Imperialism and Freedom: Studies in English Radical Thought (New York, 1978), pp. 81–107.

83. D. Fraser, ‘Introduction: Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective’, in idem (ed.), Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, 1982), pp. 2–3, 10–11; V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in ibid., pp. 50–51.

84. N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London, 1958), pp. 23, 115, 117, 127, 136; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 409–10.

85. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”, p. 163; Royle and Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, pp. 175–6; McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, p. 127; G.M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 141.

86. Briggs, National Bearings’, p. 298; McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, p. 215; J. Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), p.7.

87. Fraser, ‘Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective’, pp. 2–8; idem, Urban Politics in Victorian Britain: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester, 1976); E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London, 1973), pp. 183–5.

88. D. Nicholls, ‘The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of Radicalism, 1760–1886’, JBS, xxiv (1985), p. 417.

89. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”, p. 154; Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 257.

90. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, p. 104; D. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 28; J.F.C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leicester’, in Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies, p. 104.

91. J. Epstein, ‘Some Organisational and Cultural Aspects of the Chartist Movement in Nottingham’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (London, 1982), p. 244; Saville, 1848, p. 146; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 259–61.

92. Briggs, ‘Local Background of Chartism’, in idem, Chartist Studies, p. 19; D. Thompson, The Chartists (London, 1984), pp. 31, 251; J.T. Ward, The Chartists (London, 1973), p. 74; Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, p. 104.

93. D. Read, ‘Chartism in Manchester’, in Briggs, Chartist Studies, p. 35; Goodway, London Chartism, p. 120; J. Belchem, ‘1848: Fergus O'Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform’, in Epstein and Thompson, Chartist Experience, p. 273.

94. R.N. Soffer, ‘Attitudes and Allegiances in the Unskilled North, 1830–1850’, International Review of Social History, x (1965), pp. 429–54; Briggs, ‘Local Background of Chartism’, pp. 4–5; idem, ‘National Bearings’, pp. 289–92.

95. Calhoun, Question of Class Struggle, pp. 116–36; Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, pp. 25–75; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp.95–109, 112–13; J.R. Dinwiddy, Chartism (London, 1987). Recently, A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995), p. 267, reasserts that ‘in the 1830s and 1840s, Chartists expressed a distinct class antagonism’. But the evidence does not really bear this out.

96. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, pp. 90–178; Ward, The Chartists, pp. 74–5.

97. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 192–201, 279–84, 492; Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 157.

98. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 411–13; Armstrong, ‘Use of Information About Occupation’, p. 199. The key passages are in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), many of which are collected together in A. Giddens and D. Held (eds), Classes, Power and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (London, 1982), pp. 12–38.

99. R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), pp. 190–220.

100. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 492–3, 504–6.

101. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 356; Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 173; Thompson, English Working Class, p. 356; P.A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London, 1955), pp. 9–12; Morris, Class, Sect and Party, p. 38.

102. T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 389; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 435–7; Briggs, ‘Local Background of Chartism’, p. 1.

103. Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England, pp. 3, 58.

104. Blake, Disraeli, p. 179; Saville, 1848, pp. 32, 164–5.

105. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 412–13; Stedman Jones, ‘Rise and Fall of “Class Struggle”’, pp. 1–3, 13–24.

106. Armstrong, ‘Use of Information About Occupation’, p. 200.

107. Morris, Class, Sect and Party, pp. 39–56; Koditschek, Bradford, pp. 312, 377, 419; D. Ward, ‘Environs and Neighbours in the “Two Nations”: Residential Differentiation in Mid Nineteenth Century Leeds’, Journal of Historical Geography, vi (1980), pp. 133–4; R. Lawton, ‘An Age of Great Cities’, Town Planning Review, xliiii (1972), pp. 199– 221; D. Cannadine, Victorian Cities: How Different?’, SH, ii (1977), pp. 199–221; C.G. Pooley, ‘Residential Differentiation in Victorian Cities: A Reassessment’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new ser., ix (1984), pp. 131–44.

108. K.T. Hoppen, Ireland since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (London, 1989), pp. 35–8.

109. G. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, 1832–1885: A Study in the Development of Social Ideas and Practice from the Old Regime to the Modern State (London, 1973), pp. 3–23.

110. Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum’, p. 160; G. Martin and B.E. Kline, ‘British Emigration and New Identities’, in Marshall (ed.), British Empire, p. 268. Lord Durham's viceregal regime in Canada was also very authoritarian, hierarchical and ceremonial: G. Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy: A Critical Essay (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 22 – 3.

111. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 459–60, 486–8; A. Welsh, The City of Dickens (London, 1986), pp. 7–8, 31, 80–81, 145.

112. Phillips, Language and Class in Victorian England (Oxford, 1984), p. 3.

113. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, p. 9; Roberts, Paternalism, pp. 111, 151–2.

114. Roberts, Paternalism, pp. 68–72; Girouard, Return to Camelot, p. 83.

115. J.T. Ward, The Factory Movement (London, 1962), passim.

116. Edward Bulwer Lytton, King Arthur (London, 1848), vol. ii, pp. 169, 173; Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 74, 86, 87–110, 111–28; Blake, Disraeli, pp. 167 – 72.

117. Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 3; Saville, 1848, pp. 107–8; Smith, LordGrey, pp. 36 – 7, 141, 255, 259, 307, 321; D. Cecil, Melbourne (New York, 1954), p. 192; R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 27, 121–2, 219, 234–7; R. Johnson, ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, P&P, no. 49 (1970), pp. 96–119.

118. P. Ziegler, Melbourne (London, 1976), pp. 138, 349; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 134; idem, ‘Past and Future in the Later Career of Lord John Russell’, in T.C.W. Blanning and D. Cannadine (eds), History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), p. 171.

119. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 223, 341–3; D. Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987), pp. 3–4; N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832-1852 (Oxford, 1965), p. 139.

120. N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 1972), pp. xx, 96–7, 130, 235–7, 589, 608, 714; G.R. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993), pp. 39–42.

121. Ward, The Chartists, p. 203; Saville, 1848, p. 102.

122. R. Brown, Change and Continuity in British Society, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, 1987), p.168.

123. C. Fairfield, Some Account of George William Wilshere Baron Bramwell of Hever and His Opinions (London, 1898), p. 124; D. Abraham, ‘Liberty and Property: Lord Bramwell and the Political Economy of Liberal Jurisprudence, Individualism, Freedom and Liberty’, American Journal of Legal History, xxxviii (1994), p. 306.

124. M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (ed. S. Collini, Cambridge, 1993), pp. 102–25; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London, 1965), pp. 21, 27.

125. H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 3–5, 53, 122 3, 130, 210.

126. H.J. Perkin, The Age of the Railway (London, 1971), pp. 151– 75; F.M.L. Thompson, ‘English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in P. Thane, G. Crossick and R. Floud (eds), The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 195–6.

127. Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 299–301; Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, pp. 102–3; N.J. Smelser, Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1991), pp. 45–6. This was less so in Scotland, where the poor had a better chance of a good education than they did in England: see W.H. Mathew, ‘The Origins and Occupations of Glasgow University Students, 1740–1839’, P&P, no. 33 (1966), pp. 74–94.

128. Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 374; J. Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1859 –1868 (London, 1966), p. 2. See also The Economist, 28 April 1855: ‘There is a prevailing and well founded belief that our Government, since the Reform Act, has been virtually in the hands of the middle classes.’

129. Blake, Disraeli, p. 273; N. McCord, ‘Cobden and Bright in Politics, 1846–1857’ in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of Dr. G. Kitson Clark (London, 1967), p. 113; Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 177, n. 109.

130. For a helpful discussion of these contradictions, and full references to the quotations in this paragraph, see P. Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, reprinted in his English Questions (London, 1992), pp. 121–6.

131. W.L. Arnstein, ‘The Survival of the Victorian Aristocracy’, in F.C. Jaher (ed.), The Rich, the Well-Born and the Powerful (New York, 1973), pp. 203–57; idem, ‘The Myth of the Triumphant Middle Class’, The Historian, xxxvii (1975), pp. 205–21; W.D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1981); M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981); S. Nenadic, ‘Businessmen, the Urban Middle Classes and the “Dominance” of Manufacturers in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xliv (1991), pp. 66–85; G. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993).

132. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in idem, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), esp. pp. 35–56; R.Q. Gray, ‘Bourgeois Hegemony in Victorian Britain’, in J. Bloomfield (ed.), Class, Hegemony and Party (London, 1977), pp. 73–93; R.H. Trainor, ‘Urban Elites in Victorian Britain’, Urban History Yearbook, xi (1985), p. 1–17; S. Gunn, ‘The “Failure” of the Victorian Middle Class: A Critique’, in J. Wolff and J. Seed (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester, 1988), pp. 17–43; E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Example of the English Middle Class’, in J. Kocka and A. Mitchell (eds), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1993), pp. 127–50; D.S. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996).

133. P. Warwick, ‘Did Britain Change? An Inquiry into the Causes of National Decline’, Journal of Contemporary History, xx (1985), pp. 115–22; P. Thane, ‘Aristocracy and Middle Classes in Victorian England: The Problem of Gentrification’, in A.M. Birke and L. Kettenacher (eds), Middle Classes, Aristocracy and Monarchy (Munich, 1989), pp. 93–107.

134. P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (London, 1980); Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, p. 211.

135. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988), p. 138; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, pp. 316, 322, 353, 378–81.

136. G. Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–75 (London, 1971), pp. 95–7; B. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), pp. 159–60.

137. See, for instance, the two inconsistent divisions of society advanced, apparently unawares, by Frederic Harrison, which are quoted in Harrison, Before the Socialists, p. 28, n. 2.

138. Burn, Age of Equipoise, pp. 255, 260; Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, pp. 245–7; Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 142–4; Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum’, pp. 163–5.

139. Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, pp. xvi, 260–63.

140. Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’, pp. 106–59.

141. For examples of British condescension to Canadian colonials, see G.W. Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837–67 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 139–42, 240, 259–61.

142. Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 174–5, 446; G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1976) pp. 12–14, 241– 70.

143. Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 227; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 281; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 245–52; P. Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (Glasgow, 1976), pp. 11–32; D. Nord, ‘The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among the Urban Poor’, in W. Sharp and L. Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 122–34.

144. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 51–88, 167–200; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 179.

145. O. Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War (London, 1967), pp. 101–18; idem, ‘The Administrative Reform Association’, in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), pp. 262–88; Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 89–125.

146. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 103–5, 131–2; Anderson, Liberal State at War, pp. 118–28.

147. Perkin, Modern English Society, p. 391.

148. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–65 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 122; Vincent, Liberal Party, pp. 169–74.

149. Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 56–65, 70–74. For broader discussion of the popular hero on the platform, articulating the politics of populism, see J. Belchem and J. Epstein, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited’, SH, xxii (1977), pp. 174–93.

150. K.O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868–1923 (3rd edn, Cardiff, 1980), pp. 22–7; M. Cragoe, ‘Conscience or Coercion? Clerical Influence at the General Election of 1868 in Wales’, P&P, no. 149 (1995), pp. 140–69; K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 464–5; Foster, Modern Ireland, pp. 390–99.

151. McCord, ‘Cobden and Bright in Politics’, pp. 107–9; D. Read, Cobden and Bright: A Victorian Political Partnership (London, 1967), pp. 158–61.

152. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 392; R.V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985), p. 40.

153. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 290–321; Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 171, quoting Essays on Reform (London, 1867), p. 74; Burn, Age of Equipoise, pp. 265–6, 286; Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, pp. 150, 158; F. Bedarida, A Social History of England, 1851–1990 (2nd edn, London, 1991), pp. 36–72.

154. Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, pp. xv–xvi; G. Watson, The English Ideology (London, 1973), pp. 174–5. For a general analysis of nineteenth-century British society which builds on this insight, see Thompson, Rise of Respectable Society, esp. pp. 152–3, 173–4, 177, 181–2, 193–6, 360–61.

155. Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 99–100; M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967), p. 8.

156. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, p. 296; Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, pp. xv–xvi, 232–8; R. Strong, The Story of Britain(London, 1996), pp. 439–40; Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, pp. 166–8; Lord Willoughby de Broke, The Passing Years (London, 1924), pp. 56–8. Here is one quotation from the eponymous character in Trollope's The Prime Minister (orig. edn, 1876; Oxford, 1983, p.24): ‘The Conservative… thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and that he may best do his duty by making the inferior man happy and contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds is by God's ordinance.’ The same view of the social order might, not unreasonably, have been attributed to many Whigs.

157. Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 5, 175.

158. Watson, English Ideology, p. 180; Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 408–9; Briggs, Victorian People, p. 106; Steele, Palmerston, p. 36; Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, p. 233. See also A.H. Halsey, Change in British Society (4th edn, Oxford, 1995), pp. 200–201, where he reproduces a passport signed by Palmerston in 1851, with its ‘confident description of social hierarchy’, extending through the social fabric from the Queen to a man- and maid-servant.

159. R. Blake, Disraeli and Gladstone (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 17, 22; idem, Disraeli, pp. 278 – 84, 762–3.

160. Vincent, Liberal Party, pp. 211–12, 224; Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874, pp. 26, 29, 34–5; R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), pp. ix, 406, 426; Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 56.

161. Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum’, p. 161; Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 57; Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 533; Steele, Palmerston, p. 177.

162. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 296–7; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 168–9; Steele, Palmerston, pp. 41–2; Vincent, Liberal Party, p. 79.

163. Vincent, Liberal Party, p. 218; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 3.

164. Briggs, ‘Language of “Class”’, p. 169, quoting The Times, 10 August 1861.

165. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 129, 224; Steele, Palmerston, pp. 128–9, 206, 229.

166. Cowling, 1867, pp. 95–6.

167. Harrison, Before the Socialists, p. 109; Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 280, 296.

168. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 139; Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 209; Harrison, Before the Socialists, p. 66.

169. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 140; McCord, ‘Difficulties of Parliamentary Reform', pp. 383–4.

170. Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 255–62, 292–303.

171. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 266; Harrison, Before the Socialists, pp. 115–16.

172. Cowling, 1867, pp. 40, 57 – 8, 188; Harrison, Before the Socialists, p. 120.

173. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics, pp. 226–7; Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 286, 302–3; F.B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966), p. 225.

174. Harrison, Before the Socialists, p. 124; Briggs, Victorian People, pp. 299–301.

175. D. Spring, ‘Introduction’ to J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland ([4th edn, London 1883] Leicester, 1971), pp. 8–13; D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 54–6.

176. Briggs, Victorian People, p. 262.

177. Watson, English Ideology, p. 188.

178. J. Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York, 1961 edn), p. 138; J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 224.

179. B. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), pp. 8, 119–27; I. Copland, The Princes of India and the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 17.

180. L.A. Knight, ‘The Royal Titles Act and India’, HJ, xi (1968), p. 488; B. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165–210.

4 The Twentieth Century: Social Identities and Political Identities

1. P.G.J. Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections: Parties and Voting in Great Britain (New York, 1967), p. 102; B. Waites, A Class Society at War: England, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1987), p. 2. For the general application of this view to modern Britain, see D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London, 1969), pp. 65–94.

2. For the (much debated) effects of these franchise extensions, see N. Blewett, ‘The Franchise in the United Kingdom, 1885–1918’ P&P, no. 32 (1965), pp. 27–56; B.M. Walker, ‘The Irish Electorate, 1865–1915’, Irish Historical Studies, xviii (1973), pp. 359–406; H.C.G. Matthew, R.I. McKibbin and J.A. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor and the Rise of the Labour Party’, EHR, xci (1976), pp. 723–52; M. Hart, ‘The Liberals, the War and the Franchise’, EHR, xcvii (1982), pp. 820–31; D.M. Tanner, ‘The Parliamentary Electoral System, the “Fourth” Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, lvi (1983), pp. 205–19.

3. D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–18 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 10–16, well summarises the recent literature on this. As he notes (p. 11), ‘The logic of much recent analysis is to recognise the difficulties of making connections between “social” experience and “political” responses.’

4. J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 8; D. Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, EHR, cxi (1996), p. 69. The argument that the 1880s were a major turning point was originally made by H.M. Lynd, England in the Eighteen Eighties (London, 1945). For a recent re-statement of this view, see E.J. Feuchtwanger, Democracy and Empire: Britain 1865–1914 (London, 1985), pp. 112–91; D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London, 1990), pp. 25–31. For a very different interpretation of this decade, which nevertheless sees it as pivotal, see J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).

5. J.A. Winter and D.M. Joslin (eds), R.H. Tawney's Commonplace Book (Cambridge, 1972), p. 18. For Tawney's own view of contemporary society, see J.M. Winter, ‘R.H. Tawney's Early Political Thought’, P&P, no. 47 (1970), pp. 71–96.

6. J. Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 22; R.I. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), p. vii.

7. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 57–60; R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics: A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878–1952 (London, 1976), p. 27; L.P. Curtis Jr, Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880–1892: A Study in Construtive Unionism (Princeton, 1963), pp. 239–58. This anti-landlord agitation in Ireland was accompanied by, and no doubt helped to provoke, similar outbursts in Wales and Scotland: D.W. Crowley, ‘The “Crofters Party”, 1885–1892’, Scottish Historical Review, xxxv (1956), pp. 110–26; H.J. Hanham, ‘The Problem of Highland Discontent, 1880–1885’, TRHS, 5th ser., xix (1970), pp. 21–65; K.O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922 (Cardiff, 1970), pp. 94–6; D.W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London, 1977), pp. 85–9.

8. For the most recent analysis of the Land War in these collective class terms, see S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979), esp. pp. 225–349. For one way in which it both articulated and widened the gap between ‘the landlords’ and ‘the people’, see L.P. Curtis Jr, ‘Stopping the Hunt, 1881–1882: An Aspect of the Irish Land War’, in C.H.E. Philpin(ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 349–402. For a shrewd critique, see L.P. Curtis Jr, ‘On Class and Class Conflict in the Land War’, Irish Economic and Social History, viii (1981), pp. 86–94.

9. In which regard, consider these remarks of Gladstone's friend and colleague, John Morley: ‘In my heart, I feel the [Land] League has done downright good work in raising up the tenants against their truly detestable tyrants’: Cannadine, Decline and Fall, p. 65. Here was ideological stereotyping with a vengeance.

10. P.F. Clarke, A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher (London, 1991), pp. 34–5; H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. xi, July 1883-December 1886 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 538, 560, 571, 629.

11. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 50–60; P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class,1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 56, 68–84, 245–55, 294–309; G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge,1983), p. 229; J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian England (London, 1993), pp. 296, 302.

12. P. Guedalla (ed.), The Queen and Mr Gladstone (2 vols, London, 1933), vol. ii, pp. 446–52; P. Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1954), pp. 414–22.

13. Lord Salisbury, ‘Disintegration’, reprinted in P. Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection From His Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–1883 (London, 1972), pp. 338–76; P. Marsh, The Discipline of Popular Government: Lord Salisbury's Domestic Statecraft, 1881–1902 (Hassocks, 1978), pp. 10–17; A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 153. In this regard, see also this comment by G. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, 1832–1885 (London, 1973), p. 265: ‘An era was beginning in which the old hierarchy would no longer be tolerated’. He is, of course, describing the old order in the countryside.

14. Marsh, Discipline of Popular Government, pp. 69, 99; A. Jones and M. Bentley, ‘Salisbury and Baldwin’, in M. Cowling (ed.), Conservative Essays (London, 1978), pp. 26, 28; Clarke, Question of Leadership, pp. 45, 50, 56–7; E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995), pp. 78–119; N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League’, in K.D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), pp. 234–61; W.H. Mallock, Classes and Masses (London, 1896); idem, Aristocracy and Evolution (London, 1898), pp. 42, 46, 323, 347–8, 352, 376–7; idem, Memoirs of Life and Literature (London, 1920), pp. 1–16, 21, 25–6, 106–24, 133–43, 161, 251.

15. W.C. Lubenow, ‘Irish Home Rule and the Social Basis of the Great Separation in the Liberal Party in 1886’, HJ, xxviii (1985), pp. 125–7; Green, Crisis of Conservatism, p. 86; P. Thompson, The Edwardians: The Re-Making of British Society (2nd edn, London, 1992), p. 212; Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism’, pp. 65–8.

16. Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 236; J. Grigg, Lloyd George: The People's Champion, 1902–1911 (London, 1978), pp. 224–5; B.K. Murray, The People's Budget of 1909–10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics (Oxford, 1980), p. 199.

17. Green, Crisis of Conservatism, p. 272; G.D. Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (London, 1979), p. 125; N. Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People: The General Elections of 1910 (London, 1972), p. 155; A. Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain, 1884–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 149.

18. Grigg, Lloyd George, pp. 211, 304; Murray, The People's Budget, p. 256.

19. H.M. Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party (3rd edn, London, 1968), pp. 5–6; D. Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901–14 (London, 1996), p. 102.

20. H.J. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989), pp. 111, 174–5, 178; E.H. Phelps Brown, The Growth of British Industrial Relations (London, 1965), p. 330; S. Meacham, ‘“The Sense of an Impending Clash”: English Working-Class Unrest before the First World War’, AHR, lxxvii (1972), pp. 1343–64; Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 241.

21. E.J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), p. 190; R.I. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974); Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 3–4; Powell, Edwardian Crisis, p. 108;

22. A. Wright, British Socialism (London, 1983), p. 77; D. Howell, British Workers and the ILP (Manchester, 1983), pp. 352–62; G. Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History (London, 1985), pp. 43–5; C. Tsuzuki, H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford, 1961), pp. 153–4; D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), pp. 34, 37.

23. G. Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1991), pp. 357–78; B. Webb, My Apprenticeship (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 64–5, 346–8; A.M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 63–71; P.F. Clarke, ‘The Social Democratic Theory of the Class Struggle’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 3–8.

24. Tsuzuki, Hyndman and British Socialism, pp. 46, 83–6, 97, 179; K. Willis, ‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Britain, 1850–1900’, HJ, xx (1977), pp. 417–59; M. Bevir, ‘The British Social Democratic Federation 1880 –1885: From O'Brienism to Marxism’, International Review of Social History, xxxvii (1992), pp. 207–29; J. Schneer, Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader (London, 1982), p. 133.

25. A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London, 1883); W. Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890); C.F.G. Masterman, ‘The Social Abyss’, Contemporary Review, lxxxi (1902), pp. 23–35.

26. H. George, Progress and Poverty (London, 1883), pp. 6–7; M. Bulmer, K. Bales and K. Kish Sklar, ‘The Social Survey in Historical Perspective’, in M. Bulmer, K. Bales and K. Kish Sklar (eds), The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 24; D. Epstein Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (London, 1985), p. 186.

27. P. Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England 1866 – 1943: Selections from the Social Explorers (Glasgow, 1976), pp. 24–31; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, p. 32; E.P. Hennock, ‘Poverty and Social Theory in England: The Experience of the 1880s’, SH, i (1976), p. 75.

28. Powell, Edwardian Crisis, p. 35; Mallock, Aristocracy and Evolution, p. 42.

29. Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, p. 158; Webb, My Apprenticeship, pp. 186, 191–6, 231–2. In 1895, J.A. Hobson was attacked in the National Review for preaching ‘the gospel of hatred… hatred between class and class, between master and men, between rich and poor’, another set of polarities which were not at all the same: Green, Crisis of Conservatism, p. 144.

30. R.F. Foster, ‘Introduction’, and K.T. Hoppen, ‘Landlords, Society and Electoral Politics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, both in Philpin, Nationalism and Popular Protest, pp. 9–10, 284–319; W.E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Ireland, 1848–1904 (Dundalk, 1984), pp. 13–26; E. Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions, 1746–1886 (London, 1982), pp. 7–11, 29–32; Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales, pp. 43–5, 64–5, 68–71, 85–91.

31. Foster, ‘Introduction’, and D. Jordan, ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Elite and the Irish Land War’, in Philpin, Nationalism and Popular Protest, pp. 10–12, 320–48; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth, 1989), pp. 405–15; P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 4–5, 121–6, 188–90, 220–24; A.W. Orridge, ‘Who Supported the Land War? An Aggregate-Data Analysis of Irish Agrarian Discontent, 1879–1882’ Economic and Social Review, xii (1980–81), pp. 203–33; K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. viii, 473–9; D.S. Jones, ‘The Cleavage Between Graziers and Peasants in the Land Struggle, 1890–1910’, in S. Clark and J.S. Donnelly Jr (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 374–417.

32. Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 213; Green, Crisis of Conservatism, pp. 120–56; M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1935), pp. 139 – 74; H. Cunningham, ‘The Conservative Party and Patriotism’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (Beckenham, 1986), pp. 283–307; J. Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–1914’, EHR, cviii (1993), pp. 629–52; Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism’, p. 66.

33. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, p. 9; Powell, Edwardian Crisis, p. 169; Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 5, 421; Murray, The People's Budget, pp. 5–15; G.R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford, 1987), p. 139.

34. C. Shaw, ‘The Large Manufacturing Employers of 1907' Business History, xxv (1983), pp. 24–60; P.L. Payne, ‘The Emergence of the Large Scale Company in Great Britain, EcHR, 2nd ser., xx (1967), pp. 519–42.

35. R.I. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 6–8 S. Baldwin, On England (London, 1926), pp. 34–5.

36. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, pp. 128–9; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 124–41; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 4, 37; A.J. Reid, ‘The Division of Labour and Politics in Britain, 1880–1920’, in W.J. Mommsen and H.-G. Husung (eds), The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (London, 1985), pp. 150–65; idem, ‘Class and Organisation’, HJ, xxx (1987), pp. 235–8; idem, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 18 – 29; R. Harrison and J. Zeitlin (eds), Divisions of Labour: Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1985).

37. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, pp. 140–41; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 2–3; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 114–41. See also Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, p. 441: ‘The rise of Labour between 1885 and 1931 cannot be explained by an expanding class consciousnes.’

38. Willis, ‘Marxist Thought in Britain’, pp. 419, 441–8, 455–9; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 1–41; E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Dr Marx and the Victorian Critics’, in idem, Labouring Men (London, 1964), pp. 239–49.

39. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 14; P.F. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (London, 1978), pp. 145–6; H. Pelling, ‘The Labour Unrest, 1911–14’, in idem, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain(London, 1968), pp. 147–64; G.A. Phillips, ‘The Triple Industrial Alliance in 1914', EcHR, 2nd ser., xxiv (1971), pp. 55–67; E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (London, 1981), pp. 329–34; Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 206.

40. Hennock, ‘Poverty and Social Theory in England’, pp. 72–7; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, pp. 103–4.

41. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 167–96; M. Bulmer et al., ‘The Social Survey’, in Bulmer et al., Social Survey in Historical Perspective, p. 22; K. Bales, ‘Charles Booth's Survey of Life and Labour of the People in London, 1889–1903’, in ibid, p. 91; J. Lewis, ‘The Place of Social Investigation, Social Theory and Social Work in the Approach to Late Victorian and Edwardian Social Problems: The Case of Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet’, in ibid., pp. 148–69.

42. Phillips, The Diehards, p. 102; Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 78.

43. Perkin, Professional Society, p. 101; Powell, Edwardian Crisis, p. 11; C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909).

44. J.F.C. Harrison, Late Victorian Britain, 1870–1901 (London, 1990), pp. 80–1; A. Clarke, The Effects of the Factory System (London, 1899; 3rd edn, 1913), pp. 27–8.

45. Thompson, The Edwardians, pp. 284–5.

46. A.J. Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as a Historical Problem’, JMH, xlvii (1975), pp. 409–31; G. Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1975); G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1977); idem, ‘Metaphors of the Middle: The Discovery of the Petit Bourgeoisie, 1880–1914’, TRHS, 6th ser., iv (1994), pp. 251–79.

47. W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1966); T.R. Gourvish, ‘The Rise of the Professions’, in T.R. Gourvish and A. O'Day (eds), Later Victorian Britain (London, 1988), pp. 18–23; Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, esp. pp. 78–101, 116–22.

48. J. Camplin, The Rise of the Rich (New York, 1979); W.D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1981), pp. 38–43, 60, 74; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 90–91.

49. G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London, n.d.), p. 13.

50. G. Huxley, Victorian Duke: The Life of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, First Duke of Westminster (London, 1967), p. 164.

51. P. Addison, ‘Winston Churchill and the Working Class, 1900–1914’, in Winter, Working Class in Modern British History, p. 48.

52. Green, A Short History of the English People (new edn, revised and enlarged, with epilogue by Alice Stopford Green, London, 1916), p. 838; S. Webb, ‘The Basis of Socialism: Historic’, in G.B. Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays on Socialism (New York, 1891), pp. 12, 14; A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, 1981 edn), pp. 185–6; G.M. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London, 1920), p. 245.

53. W.L. Blease, A Short History of English Liberalism (London, 1913), pp. 73, 168; D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 413–17.

54. H.V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 171–3; J. Cooper: Class: A View from Middle England (London, 1993 edn), p. 29.

55. Epstein Nord, Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb, p. 49; D. Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980’, P&P, no. 103 (1984), pp. 133–9.

56. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, p. 287; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 414–15, n. 11; M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 82–6.

57. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, pp.103–237; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 329–35.

58. R.A. Rempel, Unionists Divided: Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain and the Unionist Free Traders (Newton Abbot, 1972), p. 109; Weiner, English Culture, pp. 99–100.

59. E.E. Williams, ‘Made in Germany’ (London, 1896, ed. A. Albu, Brighton, 1973), pp. xxi, 1; Sir J.H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. iii (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 42–3, 130.

60. C. Wilson, ‘Economy and Society in Late Victorian Britain’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xviii (1965), p. 194; D.H. Aldcroft and H.W. Richardson, The British Economy, 1870 –1939 (London, 1969), p. 113, n. 2.

61. Masterman, Condition of England, pp. 14, 71, 80–82.

62. Masterman, Condition of England, pp. 12, 18, 96, 112; B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, 1992 edn), pp. 52–3, 58–60.

63. Keating, Into Unknown England, p. 124; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, p. 111.

64. Phillips, The Diehards, pp. 57, 111, 113; Masterman, Condition of England, p. 12.

65. R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London, 1965), p. 196; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 160, 173.

66. M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 2, 6, 13, 20–22, 27, 141–2 2. It can scarcely be coincidence that it was during this period that the Conservatives also espoused the ‘ramparts of property’ policy, whereby they sought to promote owner occupation among a much larger proportion of the population than hitherto. It was hoped that this finely graded and securely established propertied order would underpin and support the finely graded but no-longer securely established social order, a policy which it has been argued came to its fullest fruition under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, with the sale of council houses. See Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 453–4; Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 148–9 9, 353, 362, 380, 406; Green, Crisis of Conservatism, pp. 290–91.

67. Sir I. De la Bere, The Queen's Orders of Chivalry (London, 1964), pp. 15–16, 129, 143, 144, 149, 168, 171, 177–8; W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The Evolution of the British Honours System since the Mid-nineteenth Century’, in idem, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History: Essays in Social and Economic History (New York, 1987), pp. 222–61; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 198–202, 299–302, 307.

68. A. Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA since 1930 (London, 1980), p. 30; Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, pp. 6, 234–5.

69. B. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165–210; D. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (London, 1994), pp. 78–90; S. Khilnani, The Idea of India (London, 1997), pp. 122, 134.

70. D.A. Washbrook, ‘Caste, Class and Dominance in Modern Tamil Nadu: Non-Brahmanism, Dravidianism and Tamil Nationalism, in F.R. Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order (Delhi, 1989), p. 248; I. Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 21.

71. G.C. Bolton, ‘The Idea of a Colonial Gentry’, Historical Studies, xiii (1968), pp. 307, 323; R. Hubbard, Rideau Hall: An Illustrated History of Government House, Ottawa (Montreal, 1977); C. Cunneen, King's Men: Australia's Governors General (London, 1983); Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 588–601; idem, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 109–10; idem, ‘Imperial Canada: Old History: New Problems’, in C.M. Coates (ed.), Imperial Canada, 1867–1917 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 8–9;

72. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 17–20; Pugh, Tories and The People, p. 163.

73. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1899), p. 133; D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, pp. 129–38. At the time of the coronation of Edward VII, in 1902, the SDF sent a loyal address, specifically denying any intention of replacing the monarchy by a republic: Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, p. 211.

74. Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 182–3; D. Cannadine and E. Hammeron, ‘Conflict and Consensus on a Ceremonial Occasion: The Diamond Jubilee in Cambridge', HJ, xxiv (1981), pp. 111–46.

75. D. Cannadine, ‘The Transformation of Civic Ritual in Modern Britain: The Colchester Oyster Feast', P&P, no. 94 (1982), pp. 107–30; idem, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 90–99; T.B. Smith, ‘In Defense of Privilege: The City of London and the Challenge of Municipal Reform, 1875–1900’, Journal of Social History, xxvii (1993–94), pp. 59–83; M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, 1850–1970 (London, 1972), p. 81.

76. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 559–72. Labour councillors were as attracted to mayoral chains of office and aldermanic robes as Liberals or Conservatives: McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 25, n. 79.

77. J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966); G. Weber, ‘Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century Anthropology’, History of Science, xii (1974), pp. 260–83.

78. S.R. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 165–73.

79. Lynd, England in the Eighteen Eighties, pp. 77–8, 179; Mallock, Aristocracy and Evolution, p. 49; idem, Memoirs of Life and Literature, p. 197; Lord Hugh Cecil, Liberty and Authority (London, 1910), p. 56.

80. Cf. G. Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain’, in P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), p. 171.

81. A. Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Nineteenth-Century England’, in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974), p. 171.

82. R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 13, 17, 19, 21, 41, 153, 167, 184–5.

83. Roberts, Classic Slum, pp. 13, 17, 23, 28, 91.

84. A. Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1978); Waites, Class Society at War.

85. Perkin, Professional Society, pp. 192, 207; P. Renshaw, The General Strike (London, 1975), pp. 67–8. This was also, of course, the view articulated in the novels of John Buchan.

86. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 156–7; M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 320–28; W.S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. i, 1911–14 (London, 1923), p. 188; idem, The World Crisis, vol. iv, The Eastern Front (London, 1931), pp. 17–32; idem, My Early Life (New York, 1939 edn), pp. 89–92, 122; idem, Marlborough: His Life and Times, vol. i, 1650–1688 (London, 1933), pp. 37–40.

87. P. Addison, ‘The Political Beliefs of Winston Churchill’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxx (1980), p. 46; M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. v, 1922–39 (London, 1977), pp. 914–15.

88. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 298; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 103–25, 230–31,266–9.

89. E.D. Goldstein, ‘Quis Separabit?: The Order of St Patrick and Anglo-Irish Relations, 1922–34’, Historical Research, lxii (1989), pp. 70–80; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 177–9, 485–7.

90. A.L. Gleason, What The Workers Want (London, 1920), p. 250; Roberts, Classic Slum, pp. 220, 225, 227.

91. Perkin, Professional Society, pp. 219, 268; Pugh, Tories and the People, pp. 175–91; J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1934), pp. 401–3.

92. C.F.G. Masterman, England After War (London, 1923), pp. 33–4, 42, 96; Perkin, Professional Society, p. 393.

93. G.D.H. Cole and M.I. Cole, The Condition of Britain (London, 1937), pp. 65, 79.

94. A.A. Jackson, The Middle Classes, 1900–1950 (Nairn, 1991), p. 11; Cole and Cole, Condition of Britain, p. 79.

95. G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Harmondsworth, 1982 edn), p. 66. This book was originally published in 1941.

96. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 268; J. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940 (London, 1978), pp. 98–9; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 189–95; G.R. Searle, Country Before Party: Coalition and the Idea of ‘National Government’ in Modern Britain, 1885–1987 (London, 1995), pp. 103–4.

97. Quoted in J. Cooper, Class: A View from Middle England (London, 1993 edn), p. 29; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 228–9.

98. Masterman, England After War, pp. 71–122; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 272–3; M. Petter, ‘“Temporary Gentlemen” in the Aftermath of the Great War: Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem’, HJ, xxxvii (1994), pp. 127–52.

99. T. Jeffrey and K. McClelland, ‘A World Fit To Live In: the Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918–39’, in J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (eds), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century (London, 1987), pp. 27–52; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 268.

100. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 221, 229, 295; P. Williamson (ed.), The Modernisation of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman, 1904–1935 (London, 1988), pp. 126–7.

101. B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, 1992 edn), p. 52; Jackson, Middle Classes, p. 316.

102. Carr-Saunders and D. Caradog Jones, A Survey of the Social Structure of England and Wales (London, 1927), pp. 70–73.

103. A.M. Carr-Saunders and D. Caradog Jones, A Survey of the Social Structure of England and Wales (2nd edn, Oxford, 1937), p. 67.

104. Waites, Class Society at War, pp. 47, 74; G. Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes (London, 1920), pp. 67, 470. Even Masterman admitted ‘the struggle between Capital and Labour has become more fierce and uncompromising’: England after War, p. 13.

105. N. Branson, Britain in the Nineteen Twenties (London, 1976), pp. 143–5 L. Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (London, 1976), pp. 78–141.

106. Stevenson, British Society, p. 195; Marquand, MacDonald, p. 195; S. Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, 1980), p.11.

107. Branson, Nineteen Twenties, pp. 196–7; A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 245; Renshaw, The General Strike, pp. 180, 187; M. Morris, The General Strike (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 91; K. Laybourn, The General Strike of 1926 (Manchester, 1993), pp. 55–6, 65, 100–101.

108. Marquand, MacDonald, p. 488.

109. Macintyre, Proletarian Science, pp. 161, 165; H.M. Pelling and A.J. Reid, A Short History of the Labour Party (11th edn, London, 1996), pp. 39–40.

110. Marquand, MacDonald, pp. 288–9, 395, 450.

111. S. Brooke, Labour's War: The Labour Party During the Second World War (Oxford, 1992), pp. 17–18, 271; J. Campbell, Aneurin Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (New York, 1987), pp. 8–16, 43, 48–9, 52, 60, 70.

112. Macintyre, Proletarian Science, pp. 24, 31, 58, 76, 81, 87.

113. Taylor, English History, pp. 170–71; Branson, Nineteen Twenties, pp. 122–3.

114. Stevenson, British Society, p. 345; Cole and Cole, Condition of Britain, p. 72.

115. R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), pp. 62–6. It was precisely this anxiety about the split in society between ‘them’ and ‘us’, or capital and labour, which prompted the duke of York to undertake his annual summer camps, which brought together equal numbers of public-school and working-class boys, ‘to promote a sense of equality and comrade-ship between the upper and lower classes’: J.W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London, 1957), pp. 157–86; S. Bradford, King George VI (London, 1989), pp. 78–83.

116. M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920 –1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (London, 1971), pp. 15–44; K.O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 298–300.

117. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London, 1931), p. 324; P. Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), pp. 201, 208, 212–15.

118. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 270–75, 282–5, 288–92, 299–300; Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism,’ pp. 63, 72–5.

119. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 271–2; Masterman, England After War, pp. 79–81, 106–7.

120. Crick, Orwell, p. 52; McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 126–30, 233–6.

121. Perkin, Professional Society, pp. 269, 274; Stevenson, British Society, pp. 342, 344; Macintyre, Proletarian Science, pp. 173–4.

122. Branson, Britain in the Nineteen Twenties, p. 53; Renshaw, General Strike, p. 187.

123. Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism’, pp. 79–84; Macintyre, Proletarian Science, p. 11; Cole and Cole, Condition of Britain, p. 390; I. McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh, 1983).

124. Masterman, England after War, pp. 203–9; Renshaw, General Strike, pp. 250–51.

125. Marquand, MacDonald, p. 520; Macintyre, Proletarian Science, p. 198; P. Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975), p. 24.

126. Marquand, MacDonald, p. 258; Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism’, pp. 83–4.

127. Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism’, p. 59; J.P. Parry, ‘From the Thirty Nine Articles to the Thirty Nine Steps: Reflections on the Thought of John Buchan’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrines: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1993), p. 217; A. Duff Cooper, Why Workers Should Be Tories (London, 1926); quoted in Marwick, Class, p. 91.

128. P. Williamson, ‘The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Bentley, Public and Private Doctrines, p. 184.

129. S. Baldwin, Our Inheritance (London, 1928), p. 17; idem, Service of Our Lives (London, 1937), p. 117; idem, On England, pp. 4, 17, 27, 29, 58.

130. S. Baldwin, An Interpreter of England (London, 1939), p. 89; idem, On England, pp. 4, 12–13, 40, 181; idem, Our Inheritance, p. 111.

131. Baldwin, Service of Our Lives, p. 136; idem, Our Inheritance, pp. 30, 34, 88.

132. S. Baldwin, This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935), p. 169; idem, On England, pp. 34–5, 80; idem, Our Inheritance, p. 210; D. Cannadine, ‘Politics, Propaganda and Art: The Case of Two “Worcestershire Lads”’, Midland History, iv (1977), pp. 97–123.

133. Baldwin, Our Inheritance, p. 88; Williamson, ‘Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, pp. 192 – 5, 198.

134. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 51–5; Macintyre, Proletarian Science, p. 175.

135. Clarke, ‘Social Democratic Theory of the Class Struggle’, pp. 7–8; S. Brooke, ‘Evan Durbin: Reassessing a Labour “Revisionist”’, Twentieth-Century British History, vii (1996), pp. 29–31, 42–4; idem, Labour's War, pp. 296–9.

136. Macintyre, Proletarian Science, pp. 53, 175; Marquand, MacDonald, pp. 226, 278–9, 283, 312, 450–62.

137. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 25–6; Marquand, MacDonald, pp. 246–7, 312–14, 401–6, 410–11, 493, 495–9, 624, 674, 686–92, 774–8, 783–4, 788.

138. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, p. 301.

139. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 19.

140. Cannadine, ‘Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’, pp. 139–52.

141. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 24–5; M. Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995), pp. 20–21; H. Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London, 1989), p. 8.

142. E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, pp. 303–4; Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 100–107; idem, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in J. Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London, 1981), pp. 219–25.

143. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 175–6, 600–2; N. Mansergh, The Government of Northern Ireland (London, 1936), pp. 169–76.

144. Copland, Princes of India, pp. 41–3; Khilnani, Idea of India, pp. 122, 134; P. Scott, Staying On (London, 1994 edn), pp. 96–8, 169; G. Studdert-Kennedy, ‘The Christian Imperialism of the Die-Hard Defenders of the Raj, 1926–35’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xviii (1990), pp. 342–62.

145. Lord Hugh Cecil, Natural Instinct as the Basis for Social Institutions (London, 1926), pp. 14–15.

146. H. Belloc, The Contrast (London, 1923), pp. 88, 275–8; idem, An Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England (London, 1937), pp. 5–6, 18, 22, 28, 35, 38, 42, 78.

147. Tawney, Equality (London, 1931), pp. 25–6, 28, 50, 88, 97, 123.

148. Tawney, Equality, pp. 27 – 8, 31, 38–9, 87.

149. E. Power, ‘What Feudalism Meant in England’, The Listener, 20 October 1938, pp. 817–18; J.H. Hutton, ‘What Caste Means in India’, The Listener, 20 October 1938, pp. 819–20; D. Forde, ‘Primitive Societies and Class Distinctions’, The Listener, 1 December 1938, pp. 1176–8; J.B. Condliffe and B. Braatoy, ‘Class in New Zealand and Scandinavia’, The Listener, 8 December 1938, pp. 1233–5; R. GramSwing, ‘Class in the USA’, The Listener, 15 December 1938, pp. 1308–10.

150. E. Salter Davies and D.G. Perry, ‘Does Education Create Barriers?’, The Listener, 27 October 1938, pp. 874–7; B. Thomas, ‘Jobs as Class Labels’, The Listener, 3 November 1938, pp. 939–41; J. Jewkes, ‘How Wealth Affects Class’, The Listener, 10 November 1938, pp. 997–9; Discussion, ‘How Class Affects Manners’, The Listener, 17 November 1938, p. 1075.

151. A. Ludovici, G.A. Isaacs and T. Harrison, ‘What Do We Mean by “Class”?’, The Listener, 13 October 1938, pp. 765–7; T.H. Marshall, ‘Class: An Enquiry into Social Distinctions’, The Listener, 22 December 1938, pp. 1353–5; Condliffe and Braatoy, ‘Class in New Zealand and Scandinavia’, p. 1233.

152. A. Horner and M.M. Postan, ‘The Class Struggle’, The Listener, 24 November 1938, pp. 1109–11.

153. Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, p. 52.

154. Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 40–45, 48–9, 51–3, 55–6, 66–7, 70, 77–8, 81–3, 102, 106, 109.

155. Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, p. 58; Crick, George Orwell, pp. 52–3, 57–60, 73, 107, 128, 148–9, 180, 184–5, 206–7, 281–2, 287–94, 305–6, 342–4, 380, 403–8, 432, 518–19, 559; R. Pearce, ‘Revisiting Orwell's Wigan Pier’, History, lxxxii (1997), pp. 410–28.

156. B. Crick, Introduction to Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 25, 30; Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 66–9, 95, 100.

157. A. Marwick, British Society since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1982); K.O. Morgan, The People's Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford, 1990); P.F. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–1990 (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 216 ff.

158. P. Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–51 (London, 1992), p. 38; P. Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), pp. 327, 380; Marwick, Class, p. 214.

159. Morgan, People's Peace, p. 17; P. Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class”’, in H.L. Smith (ed.), War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester, 1986), pp. 179–207; H.L. Smith, Britain in the Second World War: A Social History (Manchester, 1996), pp. 1–3, 9–10, 41–50.

160. Brooke, Labour's War, p. 88; Addison, Road to 1945, pp. 131–2, 140–41, 152–3, 161–3.

161. P. Fussell, Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA (London, 1984), p. 25; Addison, Road to 1945, p. 126; I. Gilmour, Whatever Happened to the Tories? The Conservatives Since 1945 (London, 1997), p. 16.

162. Morgan, People's Peace, pp. 63, 81; Marwick, Class, p. 279; H. Thomas (ed.), The Establishment (London, 1994); A. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography (London, 1994), p. 214.

163. Morgan, People's Peace, pp. 198–200; N. Mitford, ‘The English Aristocracy’, Encounter, September 1955, pp. 5–6.

164. Marwick, Class, p. 309; M. Kahan, D. Butler and D. Stokes, ‘On The Analytical Division of Social Classes’, British Journal of Sociology, xvii (1966), pp. 124, 128, 130.

165. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, p. 67.

166. Brooke, Labour's War, pp. 124, 131, 189, 272, 323; Morgan, People's Peace, p. 19; Addison, Road to 1945, p. 154; N. Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 1939–1945 (London, 1967), p. 465.

167. K.O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945 to 1951 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 79, 88–91, 152, 484; idem, People's Peace, pp. 35, 63, 81; Clarke, Question of Leadership, p. 237; R. Rhodes James (ed.), ‘Chips’: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London, 1967), p. 516; T. Burridge, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (London, 1985), p. 197.

168. K. Harris, Attlee (London, 1982), p. 257; Burridge, Attlee, p. 293.

169. A. Gamble, The Conservative Nation (London, 1974), p. 66; A. Sampson, The Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962), pp. 108–9; idem, Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity (London, 1967), p. 165.

170. B. Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London, 1992), pp. 273–5, 300–7, 313, 317; P. Ziegler, Wilson: The Authorized Life of Lord Wilson of Riveaulx (London, 1993), pp. 143–4, 150; Morgan, People's Peace, pp. 142–3, 177; Clarke, Hope and Glory, pp. 293–4.

171. J. Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (London, 1993), p. 414; Gilmour, The Tories, pp. 267–8; Morgan, People's Peace, pp. 345, 354, 389–90; Reid and Pelling, History of the Labour Party, pp. 147, 159; Gamble, Conservative Nation, pp. 231–2.

172. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, p. 77; Brooke, Labour's War, pp. 338–9.

173. The strongest academic case for embourgeoisement was made in F. Zweig, The Worker in an Affluent Society (London, 1961). But there have been many powerful criticisms, among them J.H. Goldthorpe and D. Lockwood, ‘Affluence and the British Class Structure’, Sociological Review, new ser., xi (1963), pp. 133–66; W.G. Runciman, ‘Embourgeoisement, Self-Rated Class and Party Preference', Sociological Review, new ser., xii (1964), pp. 137–54; J.H. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, 1968); idem, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge, 1969); Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 101–4.

174. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 80–94; Brooke, Labour's War, pp. 275, 296–302; C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), p. 20; Brooke, ‘Evan Durbin’, pp. 27–31; Clarke, ‘Social Democratic Theory of the Class Struggle’, pp. 3, 5, 7, 15–16; R. Plant, ‘Social Democracy, in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (eds), The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain (London, 1996), pp. 165–70.

175. R. Millward, ‘The 1940s Nationalisation in Britain: Means to an End or the Means of Production?’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 1(1997), pp. 209–34; Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 95–6, 136; C.R. Attlee, The Granada Historical Records Interview (London, 1967), p. 55.

176. R. Mackenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble: Working-Class Conservatives in Urban England (Chicago, 1968), p. 240; and G. Hutchinson, The Last Edwardian at Number 10: An Impression of Harold Macmillan (London, 1980), p. 179.

177. Campbell, Heath, p. 420; Gilmour, The Tories, p. 268; M. Moran, The Politics of Industrial Relations (London, 1977), p. 152; A.J. Davies, We, The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power (London, 1989), p. 196.

178. H. Fairlie, ‘The BBC’, in Thomas, The Establishment, p. 202.

179. Sampson, Macmillan, p. 176; W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 45–52; M. Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (London, 1958); M. Shanks, The Stagnant Society (Harmondsworth, 1961); Perkin, Professional Society, p. 449.

180. M. Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (Oxford, 1960), pp. 144–65; F.M. Martin, ‘Some Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification’, in D.V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (Glencoe, Ill., 1954), p. 58.

181. A.M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog Jones and C.A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales (Oxford, 1958), p. 116; A.S.C. Ross, ‘“U and Non-U”: An Essay in Sociological Linguistics’, Encounter, November 1955, p. 11.

182. Marwick, Class, p. 229; Gamble, Conservative Nation, p. 59.

183. R. Lewis and A. Maude, The English Middle Classes (New York, 1950), pp. vii, 337, 341, 346.

184. Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, pp. vii, 111, 113, 247, 250, 302, 313, 324, 334.

185. Gilmour, The Tories, pp. 107, 170; Gamble, Conservative Nation, p. 78; J. Bonham, ‘The Middle Class Revolt’, Political Quarterly, xxxiii (1962), pp. 238–46.

186. Hutchinson, The Last Edwardian, p. 365; A. Horne, Harold Macmillan, vol. ii, 1957–1986 (London, 1989), p. 62.

187. A. Horne, Harold Macmillan, vol. i, 1894–1956 1956 (London, 1988), pp. 105, 115; idem, Macmillan, vol. ii, pp. 156–7; Clarke, Question of Leadership, pp. 215, 219; Davies, We, The Nation, p. 110.

188. J. Harris, ‘“Contract” and “Citizenship”’, in Marquand and Seldon, Post-War Britain, p. 132.

189. I. Crewe, B. Sarvlik and J. Alt, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain, 1964–1974’, British Journal of Political Science, vii (1977), pp. 135–68.

190. S.H. Beer, Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism (London, 1982), pp. 175–80; Sir K. Joseph, Reversing the Trend: A Critical Reappraisal of Conservative Economic and Social Policies (London, 1975). See also Quintin Hogg's speech of 1974, ‘I am myself passionately a defender of the middle class…. I will maintain to my last gasp the right of the middle class… to its own way of life’: quoted in K. Baker (ed.), The Faber Book of Conservatism (London,1993), p. 124.

191. Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, pp. 3–21.

192. Martin, ‘Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification’, pp. 58–63.

193. See above, chapter one, section i, and chapter three, introduction.

194. Marwick, Class, p. 309; H. Thomas, ‘The Establishment and Society’, in Thomas, The Establishment, p. 9; M. Stacey et al., Power, Persistence and Change: A Second Study of Banbury (London, 1975), pp. 121,131–5.

195. R. Scase, ‘English and Swedish Concepts of Class’, in F. Parkin (ed.), The Social Analysis of Class Structure (London, 1974), pp. 149–77. Compare the slightly different figures given in Goldthorpe et al., Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, pp. 145–6.

196. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, p. 66.

197. H. Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 1959–61 (London, 1972), p. 18; Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, pp. 18–19.

198. Davies, We, The Nation, p. 333; A. Howard, ‘“We Are The Masters Now”’, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds), Age of Austerity (London, 1963), p. 31; Morgan, Labour in Power, p. 327.

199. Rhodes James, ‘Chips’, p. 580; Fairlie, ‘The BBC’, p. 191.

200. Quoted in Marwick, Class, p. 244.

201. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock (Oxford, 1987), pp. 146–7; Burridge, Attlee, pp. 2, 4, 7, 10, 16, 313–14;–14; Harris, Attlee, pp. 544–56; Ziegler, Wilson, 96–7, 215, 367, 499, 513–14.

202. Crosland, Future of Socialism, pp. 41, 116, 169, 171, 177–8, 186–8, 217. Perhaps this explains why, as Minister of Education, he was eager to get rid of ‘every fucking grammar school in England and Wales and Northern Ireland’, but left the public schools alone: S. Crosland, Tony Crosland (London, 1982), p. 148; Clarke, Hope and Glory, p. 286.

203. Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, pp. 47, 52–3, 211, 311–15, 439; V. Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London, 1965), p. 161; I. Berlin, ‘Mr Churchill in 1940’, in H. Hardy and R. Hausheer (eds), Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays(London, 1997), pp. 609, 612, 619, 621, 625.

204. A. Eden, Another World, 1870–1914 (London, 1970); Sampson, Macmillan, pp. 173–6; Lord Home, The Way the Wind Blows (London, 1976).

205. Stevenson, British Society, pp. 259–62; Addison, Road to 1945, pp. 237 - 8; J. Ramsden, ‘“A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?” How Far Did the British Conservative Party Really Change after 1945?’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxxvii (1987), pp. 49–63.

206. D. Clarke, The Conservative Faith in a Modern Age [first pub. 1947] in R.A. Butler (ed.), Conservatism, 1945–50 (London, 1950), esp. pp. 7, 9, 10, 15–18, 24–5, 41–2; A.D. Cooper, Old Men Forget (London, 1953), pp. 65–6; Sir Geoffrey Butler, The Tory Tradition (London, 1914, reprinted 1957), pp. 67–71; Gamble, Conservative Nation, pp. 111–13; A. Sampson, The New Anatomy of Britain (London, 1971), p. 37.

207. In which regard it is worth recalling Orwell's regretful (but correct) recognition of ‘the British preference for doing things slowly and not stirring up class hatred’: G. Orwell, ‘London Letter’, Partisan Review, Summer 1946, p. 321. See also Young, Rise of the Meritocracy, p. 22: ‘Britain… remained rural minded long after eighty per cent of its population were collected together in towns.’

208. Runciman, Relative Deprivation, pp. 170–87; E.A. Nordlinger, The Working Class Tories (London, 1967); F. Parkin, ‘Working-Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance’, British Journal of Sociology, xviii (1967), pp. 278–90; Mackenzie and Silver, Angels in Marble; R. Waller, ‘Conservative Electoral Support and Social Class’, in A. Seldon and S. Ball (eds), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), p. 583.

209. Campbell, Heath, pp. 144, 171, 177; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 675–6; Sampson, New Anatomy of Britain, pp. 103–7; Clarke, Hope and Glory, p. 359.

210. Campbell, Heath, p. 189; Beer, Britain Against Itself, pp. 169–75; I. Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (London, 1977); W. Waldegrave, The Binding of Leviathan: Conservatism and the Future (London, 1978).

211. J.G. Darwin, ‘The Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline since 1900’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxxvi (1986), pp. 27–43.

212. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp. 686, 723–5; Copland, Princes of India, pp. 261–8.

213. P. Worsthorne, ‘Class and Conflict in British Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, xxxvii (1959), pp. 419–31.

214. Beer, Britain Against Itself, pp. 5, 105; D. Kavanagh, ‘Political Culture in Great Britain: The Decline of the Civic Culture’, in G.A. Almond and S. Verba (eds), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980), p. 170; Marwick, British Society, pp. 205–15.

215. J. Deverson and K. Lindsay, Voices from the Middle Class (London, 1975); P. Bauer, Class on the Brain: The Cost of a British Obsession (London, 1978); Beer, Britain Against Itself, pp. 158–65; Clarke, Hope and Glory, pp. 355–7.

216. D. Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’, Sociological Review, new ser., xiv (1966), pp. 249–67; Goldthorpe et al., Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, pp. 118–20; E. Bott, ‘The Concept of Class as a Reference Group’, Human Relations, vii (1954), p. 259; Martin, ‘Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification, pp. 51–75; Runciman, Relative Deprivation, p. 160; Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 66, 94; R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959), p. 284.

217. Cooper, Class, passim, esp. pp. 11–14, 17, 149, 242, 318. My italics.

5 Conclusion: Towards a ‘Classless Society’?

1. For an alternative vocabulary, describing the same polarised model, in which historians are divided into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, see J.H. Hexter, On Historians (London, 1979), p. 242; J.A. Cannon, ‘The Historian at Work’, in idem (ed.), The Historian at Work (London, 1980), p. 3.

2. F. Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (New York, 1956), pp. 55–62.

3. McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, 1983), pp. 8–9.

4. A.H. Halsey, Change in British Society (4th edn, Oxford, 1995), p. 144.

5. G. Marshall, H. Newby, D. Rose and C. Vogler, Social Class in Modern Britain (London, 1988), p. 187.

6. G. Watson, The English Ideology (London, 1973), p. 181; M.C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 11; F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988), p. 361; E. Gellner, ‘Knowledge of Nature and Society’, in M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustafsson (eds), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1997), p. 17.

7. P. Fussell, Caste Marks: Style and Status in the U.S.A. (London, 1984), p. 24.

8. One more example, already mentioned in chapter two: James Nelson's observation of 1753 that ‘every nation has its custom of dividing people into classes’. It is not at all clear from this remark what model(s) of society he had in mind: P. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in idem (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 101–2.

9. For the dangers of a ‘very literal reading of language’, see D. Wahrman, ‘The New Political History: A Review Essay’, SH, xxi (1996), p. 345; S.O. Rose, ‘Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The Language of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers' Strike of 1878 in Britain’, Gender and History, v (1993), p. 393; M.W. Steinberg, ‘Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons Between Post-Structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective', SH, xxi (1996), pp. 194–201.

10. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 195, 201, 915; Halsey, Change in British Society, pp. 57–9; S. Edgell, Class (London, 1993), p. 1; A. Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA since 1930 (London, 1980), p. 16; idem, British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 39.

11. The only book I know which has tried to treat hierarchy as a serious subject in the history of this country is R. Strong, The Story of Britain (London, 1996), pp. 79–83, 205, 210, 259, 333, 335, 431–41, 489, 502–3, 527, 538, 568. In strictly analytical terms, of course, hierarchy is a complex phenomenon, which can be varyingly discussed in terms of wealth, power or prestige – or careers. But throughout this book, I have been dealing with it in its vernacular sense. See J.H. Goldthorpe and K. Hope, ‘Occupational Grading and Occupational Prestige', Social Science Information, xi (1972), pp. 21–2; H.J. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989), pp. 2–3, 9.

12. M. Taylor, ‘The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?’, HW, no. 43 (1997), p. 162; E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943), pp. 101–2. For two suggestive and stimulating uses of hierarchy as a way of understanding the past, with reference to jewellery and food, see G. Clark, Symbols of Excellence: Precious Metals as Expressions of Status (Cambridge, 1986), esp. pp. 9–11, 27–30, 65–7, 104–5; J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, 1982), esp. pp. vii, 99–111, 133–53. On occasions, Goody also uses the triadic and polarised models of society.

13. M. Thatcher, ‘Don't Undo My Work’, Newsweek, 27 April 1992, p. 37.

14. Edgell, Class, p. 2; K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (2 vols, Moscow, 1962), vol. i, pp. 34–5.

15. For an earlier discussion of Marx as a special case of a more general formulation of social analysis, see R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959), pp. 136–7, 245.

16. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990) pp. 270–4.

17. It bears repeating that we do not know – and may well never be able to know – whether this is actually the case. But the fact that many people believe it to be true means that there is something that needs to be explained.

18. P. Gottschalk and T.M. Smeeding, ‘Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Earning and Income Inequality’, Journal of Economic Literature, xxxv (1997), pp. 633–87; J.H. Goldthorpe et al., Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), pp. 303 - 23. Hence this remark of Stein Ringen: ‘There is nothing exceptional about Britain… Britain is a pretty open society without strong barriers to social or economic mobility…. The British, however, punish themselves by believing that their society is one of unusually strong and rigid class distinctions’(‘The Great British Myth’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 January 1998, p. 3).

19. M. Thatcher, The Revival of Britain (London, 1989), p. 98.

20. M. Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995), pp. 20, 47.

21. M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), p. 10; idem, Path to Power, pp. 5, 19, 23, 546.

22. Thatcher, Path to Power, pp. 4, 13, 566, 568.

23. P. Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 82–3; H. Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London, 1989), pp. 28–36.

24. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 285; Young, One of Us, pp. 489–90; S. Bradford, Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 1996), pp. 380–81; B. Pimlott, The Queen (London, 1996), p. 495.

25. J. Ranelagh, Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, the Power and the Personalities (London, 1991), p. 64; Thatcher, Path to Power, pp. 20–21; idem, Downing Street Years, p. 23; Young, One of Us, p. 8; P. Riddell, The Thatcher Decade (Oxford, 1989), pp. 3, 150.

26. Young, One of Us, p. 322; Thatcher, Path to Power, p. 546; idem, Downing Street Years, p. 627; Ranelagh, Thatchers People, pp. 179–80.

27. Thatcher, Path to Power, p. 243.

28. Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, pp. 178, 334; Thatcher, Revival of Britain, p. 56.

29. M. Holmes, Thatcherism: Scope and Limits, 1983–87 (Basingstoke, 1989), D. Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? (Oxford, 1987), p. 291; R. Skidelsky, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Thatcherism (London, 1988), p. 22; R. Dahrendorf, ‘Changing Social Values under Mrs Thatcher’, in ibid, pp. 198–9; Thatcher, Revival of Britain, pp. 56–7.

30. Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, p. 323; Thatcher, Revival of Britain, pp. 116–17, 230. This phrase had been in Labour's election manifesto in October 1974.

31. P.F. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–1990 (London, 1996), p. 379; idem, A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher (London, 1991), pp. 299, 318, 319.

32. J. Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (London, 1993), p. 654; D. Marquand, ‘The Paradoxes of Thatcherism’, in Skidelsky, Thatcherism, pp. 163–72; R. Levitas (ed.), The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge, 1986); I. Buruma, ‘Action Anglaise’, New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994, pp. 66–71.

33. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, p. 111, n. 37: ‘A tradition of not referring explicitly to social class is continued today in some political circles, especially among economic liberals; but it is still difficult to avoid some aggregative groupings.’ See also Thatcher, ‘Don't Undo My Work’, p. 37: ‘The more you talk about class – or even about ‘classlessness’ – the more you fix the idea in people's minds.’

34. Thatcher, Path to Power, pp. 58–9, 73; idem, Downing Street Years, p. 371; idem, Revival of Britain, pp. 69, 74, 182, 199.

35. See above, chapter one, section ii.

36. Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, p. 53; Thatcher, Revival of Britain, pp. 54, 56, 141, 186, 196, 218; idem, Path to Power, p. 47.

37. Young, One of Us, pp. 143, 412, 490; Clarke, Hope and Glory, p. 380; Ranelagh, Thatcher's People, p. 296; Thatcher, Revival of Britain, p. 155; Bradford, Elizabeth, pp. 379–81, 387–90; Pimlott, The Queen, pp. 461–9, 494–515.

38. Thatcher, Path to Power, p. 51; Ranelagh, Thatcher's People, p. 39; I. Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (London, 1992), p. 140; W. Whitelaw, The Whitelaw Memoirs (London, 1989), pp. 2, 12, 19, 32–4, 204, 245; J. Prior, A Balance of Power (London, 1986), pp. 252–4, 269–70; Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things Past (London, 1988), pp. 12, 20–21, 31, 45–8, 374–5.

39. Young, One of Us, pp. 118, 331; Ranelagh, Thatcher's People, p. 24; Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 28–9, 129; Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, pp. 53–4.

40. Young, One of Us, pp. 220–21; Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 104–5, 150–51, 832.

41. Young, One of Us, pp. 108, 115–16, 127.

42. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 625–6.

43. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 339–78; Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, p. 232; A. Horne, Harold Macmillan, vol. ii, 1957–1986 (New York, 1989), p. 626.

44. Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, pp. 13, 225–7; Young, One of Us, pp. 366–7; Clarke, Hope and Glory, pp. 378–9; Holmes, Thatcherism, p. 46; M. Crick, Scargill and the Miners (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 28–31, 147–8. This Scargillite view has made its way into surviving Marxist analysis of Thatcher, which sees her prime ministership, far too simplistically, as a ‘hegemonic project’, of waging ruling class war against the working class: Riddell, Thatcher Decade, pp. 4–5; A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 1988); S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (Edinburgh, 1983); R. Jessop et al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Oxford, 1988).

45. Jenkins, Thatcher's Revolution, p. 228; Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 352–3, 377.

46. Riddell, Thatcher Decade, p. 171; Young, One of Us, p. 490; Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 626.

47. Young, One of Us, p. 536.

48. Riddell, Thatcher Decade, pp. 8, 212–13; Young, One of Us, pp. 410–12, 525–6.

49. Holmes, Thatcherism, pp. 138–51; Kavanagh, Thatcherism, pp. 145–6; Jenkins, Thatcher Revolution, pp. 133–4, 317–19; D. Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (London, 1974).

50. P. Junor, The Major Enigma (Lond 1993), pp. 202, 253.

51. D. Kavanagh, ‘A Major Agenda?’, in D. Kavanagh and A. Seldon (eds), The Major Effect (London, 1994), pp. 14, 17.

52. Junor, Major, pp. 146–7, 176–7, 254; Kavanagh, ‘Major Agenda?’, p. 15; H. Young, ‘The Prime Minister’, in Kavanagh and Seldon, Major Effect, p. 22; R. Harris, ‘And is there honey still for Tory tea?’, Sunday Times, 23 February 1997.

53. Junor, Major Enigma, pp. 53–4, 60, 85, 112, 114, 153; Young, ‘The Prime Minister’, p. 22; R. Holt and A. Tomlinson, ‘Sport and Leisure’, in Kavanagh and Seldon, Major Effect, pp. 444–5; W. Rees-Mogg, ‘Class politics is below the salt’, The Times, 14 October 1996.

54. For Cowling's stress on the importance of inequality in Conservative thinking, see M. Cowling, ‘The Present Position’, in idem (ed.), Conservative Essays (London, 1978), pp. 10–11; idem, A Conservative Future (London, 1997).

55. Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene iii. I am most grateful to the Rt Hon. Michael Portillo for kindly allowing me to see a copy of his speech, which was delivered on 14 January 1994. This Shakespearean passage is also printed in K. Baker (ed.), The Faber Book of Conservatism (London, 1993), pp. 19–20, and is approvingly quoted by Lord Lawson in his foreword to Lord Bauer, Class on the Brain: The Cost of a British Obsession (London, 1977). It is not coincidence that E.M.W. Tillyard begins his first chapter, entitled ‘Order’, with a discussion of it: Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, pp. 7–9.

56. Kavanagh, Thatcherism, p. 107. This goes back to F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960) pp. 402–3, which discussed the contradictions between neo-conservatives and neo-liberals. For an attempt to claim there is no such contradiction, see D. Willetts, Modern Conservatism (London, 1992), p. 47. For the more plausible insistence that there is, see J. Gray, ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’, Dissent, Fall 1995, pp. 447–52. See also A.J. Davies, We, The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power (London, 1995), p. 279, where he argues that ‘the indifference of the free market to hierarchy could be dangerous’ for the Tories. It has been – and still is.

57. A. Adonis, ‘The Transformation of the Conservative Party in the 1980s’, in A. Adonis and T. Hames (eds), A Conservative Revolution? The Thatcher-Reagan Decade in Perspective (Manchester, 1994), pp. 145–67.

58. Kavanagh, ‘A Major Agenda?’, p. 11; J. Gray, ‘Labour's struggle to avoid class war’, Guardian, 10 August 1995; A. Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London, 1996), pp. 6, 216.

59. A. Blair, ‘Introduction: My Vision for Britain’, in G. Radice (ed.), What Needs to Change: New Visions of Britain (London, 1996), pp. 7, 10; idem, New Britain, pp. 45, 65, 69, 237, 298.

60. J. Rentoul, Tony Blair (London, 1995), p. 424; Blair, ‘My Vision for Britain’, p. 6; idem, New Britain, pp. 6, 22, 139, 209, 301.

61. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, pp. 129 –30; Bradford, Elizabeth, p. 379. See the definitions of middle America and middle England offered in J. Pearsall and W. Trumble (eds), The Oxford English Reference Dictionary (2nd edn, Oxford,1996), p. 914: ‘The middle class in the US, especially as a conservative political force’; ‘the middle classes in England outside London, especially as representative of conservative political views.’

62. Junor, Major, p. 112. M. Balen, Kenneth Clarke (London, 1994), p. 5; Holt and Tomlinson, ‘Sport and Leisure’, pp. 444–5; R. Hewison, ‘The Arts’, in Kavanagh and Seldon, Major Effect, p. 419. For an earlier use of the phrase ‘middle England’, in connection with Thatcher (at the time of the miners’ strike), see Young, One of Us, pp. 377, 489.

63. M. Jacques, ‘The rebel alliance of British talents’, Guardian, 20 February 1997. The Observer, 3 November 1996, claimed that Chester was ‘the statistical heart of middle England’, whatever that meant.

64. J. Sopel, Tony Blair: The Moderniser (London, 1995), p. 32; Rentoul, Blair, pp. 40–44; Blair, New Britain, p. 56: ‘We are not just isolated figures struggling to compete against each other, but human beings, members of a community and a society.’

65. Rentoul, Blair, pp. 304, 454; Blair, New Britain, pp. 29, 37; D. Marquand, ‘Community and the Left’, in Radice, What Needs to Change, pp. 67–8; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

66. Sopel, Tony Blair, pp. 159, 244–6. See also the many references to ‘middle England’ as the constituency Labour needed to attract in M. Perryman (ed.), The Blair Agenda (London, 1996), pp. 13, 39, 77, 93–4.

67. I. Jack, ‘The Model of a Modern Middle Englander’, Independent on Sunday, 27 April 1997.

68. M. Jacques, ‘Caste down’, Sunday Times, 12 June 1994.

69. Blair, New Britain, pp. 65, 121.

70. A. Sampson, The Essential Anatomy of Britain (London, 1992), pp. 63–4; R. Hoggart, The Way We Live Now (London, 1995), pp. 3–11, 193–212; A. Marwick, British Society since 1945 (new edn, Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 449–57; F. McDonough, ‘Class and politics’, in M. Storry and P. Childs (eds), British Cultural Identities (London, 1997), pp. 208–20. For some of the contradictions and complex-ties inherent in the idea of the ‘classless society’ see W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Berkeley, 1966), p.40.

71. Since 1978, inequality has been rising much faster in the USA than in the UK: K. Bradsher, ‘Gap in wealth in US called widest in the West’, New York Times, 17 April 1995.

72. A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 310.

73. In this regard, consider these remarks of Martin Kettle, ‘What's in a name’, Guardian, 10 May 1997: ‘Names are an extraordinarily potent starting point for any cultural revolution. How we address one another is always a resonant matter, and the right has always favoured formal hierarchies which emphasise class and other forms of power, while the left has always tended towards democratic informality. Whole volumes of etiquette still exist – and are regularly consulted – to ensure that language and title are ‘correctly’ used in order to maintain networks of deference and support the mystique of authority.’ See also W. Rees-Mogg, ‘History, privilege, class and a matter of honour’, Daily Mail, 1 January 1994: ‘A government which wanted to create a genuinely classless society would no doubt abolish the Honours List altogether, along with the House of Lords and the monarchy, all of which tend to support a class structure.’ ‘It is’, he concludes, ‘a plausible but probably dangerous objective.’ He may well be right.

74. G. Walden, ‘Kick class out of the schoolroom’, Observer, 18 August 1996: ‘While other European countries have a single national culture of education, in Britain there are two: a superior one for a social and moneyed caste, and an inferior one for the rest. The ethos of the first is aspirational; of the second, egalitarian.’ These arguments are developed more fully in G. Walden, We Should Know Better (London, 1996).

75. R. Harris, ‘Deference is alive and well and killing us’, Sunday Times, 21 July 1996. See also R. Hoggart, Townscape with Figures (London, 1994), p. 150: ‘In all things English, there is a pecking order.’

76. S. Boseley, ‘Labour's class question’, Guardian, 7 December 1994; B. Appleyard, ‘Divided we stand’, Independent, 18 April 1996.

77. Holt and Tomlinson, ‘Sport and Leisure’, p. 455.

78. L.O'Kelly, ‘So much for the death of class’, Sunday Times, 21 August 1994.

79. H.M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London, 1911), pp. 244–5; C. Tsuzuki, H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford, 1961), p. 35; D. Aitkenhead, ‘Empty promises of a classless warrior’, Guardian, 21 March 1997.

80. S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), pp. 10–18.

81. J. Dimbleby, The Prince of Wales: A Biography (London, 1994), p. 523; A. Bennett, Writing Home (London, 1994), p. 33; J.K. Galbraith, The Good Society: The Humane Agenda (London, 1996), pp. 6–9.