As Raymond Williams notes, the meanings of words belong to their time, although within that moment definitions are ‘sectarian’. Significations belong to differing factions. The Google Books Ngram viewer shows peaks in the use of ‘liberal’ in the 1780s and again in the 1820s. Uday Singh Mehta argues that, in this time frame, liberalism came out of a ‘substantially European’ tradition and became ‘self-consciously universal as a political, ethical and epistemological creed’. But, as D. M. Craig writes, even ‘by the end of the eighteen-twenties … it remained unclear precisely what a “liberal” was … “liberals” were not a firmly defined group and “liberalism” did not securely mark out a single intellectual phenomenon’. In the 1820s, liberalism could mean support for free trade, reform, Catholic emancipation and a pro-European stance. Liberalism signalled being neither a Tory, nor a member of the labouring classes.

Writing in 1819, William Hazlitt simply identified liberalism with tolerance: ‘It always struck me as a singular proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend who had Paine's Rights of Man and Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together, they made a very good book.’4 In 1827 Thomas Hodgskin took a similar view: ‘I trust that our countrymen are now much too liberal and enlightened to be offended with the honest expression’ of opinions. However, for the weaver poet Samuel Bamford, liberalism was something only the educated and enfranchised could enjoy, not the working classes. In his preface to The Weaver Boy, Bamford has ‘Liberal’ as a class-bound word, associated with a particular kind of education:

For Bamford, whose training was occupational, a ‘“Liberal Education”’ marks a class barrier between him and his ‘“betters”’.