The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England

This book forms part of the recent attempt, influenced by contemporary ideas of political culture, to reassess the role, composition, and outlook of the middle classes. It compares and contrasts three Lancashire milltowns and surrounding parishes in the early phase of textile industrialization—when the urbanizing process was at its most rapid and dysfunctional, and class relations were most fraught. The book’s range extends from the French Revolution to 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, which symbolized mid-century stability and prosperity. The author argues that members of the middle class were pivotal in the creation of this stability. He shows them creating themselves as a class while being created as a class, putting themselves in order while being ordered from above. The book shifts attention from the search for a single elusive “class consciousness” to demonstrate instead how the ideological leaders of the three milltowns negotiated their power within the powerful forces of capitalism and state-building. It argues that, at a time of intense labor-capital conflict, it was precisely because of their diversity, and their efforts to build bridges to the lower orders and upper class, that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was maintained.