In a lecture delivered to the Baptist Historical Society in 1986 the Cambridge theologian, David Thompson, revealed that his grandfather had kept on his desk the busts of three noted contemporaries – those of W. E. Gladstone, Robert Blatchford, and John Clifford. It is difficult to imagine three individuals who might better epitomise some of the diverse strands of which nineteenth-century popular radicalism was composed: the Evangelical and Liberal politician, the jingo and socialist journalist, the reforming, Nonconformist minister from a lace factory. There can be no doubt that Gladstone and Blatchford – or at least the forces which they represented – have tended to dominate the historiographical stage, pushing Clifford's Nonconformity somewhat into the shadows. With a history going back at least to the seventeenth century, trade unionism was certainly a major institutional forum of radical thought and activity. Yet Nonconformity had an equally long association with radical movements. Despite the hyperbole, there was some truth in the suggestion of one mid-Victorian writer that its entire history was ‘a record of noble and often painful struggles for popular rights’. A more recent, though not necessarily less partisan, observer has argued that the Evangelicalism with which Nonconformity was deeply imbued was nothing less than the religious expression of radicalism.

In the course of the nineteenth century both trade unionism and Nonconformity grew numerically and acquired greater influence.