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² Hobsbawm, E. J., Labouring men (London, 1964), pp. 272–315.Google Scholar

³ See Reid's, A. J. review in Historical Journal, XXX (1987), 225–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a good presentation of such criticisms.

⁴ The literature on this topic is huge. Perhaps the most authoritative expression of the gradualist case for growth is Crafts, N. R., British economic growth during the industrial revolution (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. The history of the debate is most painlessly approached through Cannadine's, D. elegant, ‘The present and the past in the English industrial revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present, CIII (1984), 139–67.Google Scholar

⁵ Berg, M. and Hudson, P., ‘Rehabilitating the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XLV (1992), 24–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ A flawed attempt at establishing the common working class identity of the second pair can be found in Lindebaugh, P. and Rediker, M., ‘The multi-headed hydra: sailors, slaves and the Atlantic working class in the eighteenth-century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, III (1990), 225–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Joyce, P. (ed.), The historical meanings of work (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1–30Google Scholar summarizes much of this material.

⁸ ‘The fall of class’ was Patrick, Joyce's original title for what became Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. See Democratic subjects, p. 2 for this.

⁹ Cannadine, D., ‘Cutting classes’, New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 1992.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ McKendrick, N., Plumb, J. H. and Brewer, J., The birth of consumer society (London, 1982), pp. 1–34, esp. 1–9 and passim.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ More evidence of this trend is to be found in qualified form in Borsay, P., The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 222, 318Google Scholar and in less qualified form in Earle, P., The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660–1730, pp. 3–16, 328–37.Google Scholar

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²¹ This problem is exacerbated by the paucity of dialogue between eighteenth and nineteenth century historians, which is in turn reinforced by the existence of 1790s studies as almost a sub-discipline in its own right. Consequently, eighteenth-century historians generally take the presence of class society in the nineteenth century for granted, while their nineteenth-century counterparts start by assuming its absence in the eighteenth century.

²² Vickery, A. J., ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, Historical Journal, XXXVI (1993), esp. 383–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁴ Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘The making of the English working class 1870–1914’, in Worlds of labour (London, 1984), pp. 194–213.Google Scholar

²⁵ This phrase recurs in Joyce, P., Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), e.g. p. 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Dror, Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Dr Wahrman for kindly allowing me to read his important study in manuscript.

²⁷ For the first view, see Lawrence, J. and Taylor, M., ‘The poverty of protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language – a reply’, Social History, XVII (1993), 15Google Scholar. And for the second, Joyce, P., ‘The imaginary discontents of social history: a note of response…’Google Scholar, ibid. p. 84.

²⁸ Joyce, , Visions, p. 11.Google Scholar

²⁹ Rogers, N., Whigs and cities: popular politics in the age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), p. 128Google Scholar where he talks of ‘a sense of class’ informing London politics, though he is circumspect about attributing class consciousness in his conclusion on p. 304. In questioning Langford's concentration on middle class life in A polite and commercial people, Rogers bemoans the absence of plebeians from Langford's account, but does not seek to overturn his emphasis on the vitality and visibility of the middling sort. See Rogers, , ‘Paul Langford's “Age of improvements”’, Past and Present, CXLVIII (1991), 201–9, esp. 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wilson, K., ‘Empire, trade and popular politics in mid-Hanoverian Britain: the case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, CXXI (1988), 76, 92–3, 101–2Google Scholar. See also her ‘Empire of virtue’ in Lawrence, Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war (1994), pp. 128–64, esp. 131, 142Google Scholar. Her recent monograph, however, eschews totalizing accounts of class in favour of an emphasis on the instability of identity, and the role of politics in the construction of subjectivities. Nonetheless, she continues to talk of ‘class’ and the rise of middling consciousness. See Wilson, K., The sense of the people: politics, culture and empire in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11, 17 n. 27.Google Scholar

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³³ Clarke, P., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 15–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The electoral sociology of modern Britain’, History, LVII (1972), 31–55.Google Scholar

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³⁵ It is true, however, that philosophical arguments about meaning and holism can only be applied to a signifying system of a certain complexity and centrality to selfhood. Language seems unique in these respects. Perhaps the most coherent statement of the case for taking the ‘linguistic turn’ has been offered by Joan Wallach Scott. See Gender and the politics of history (New York, 1988), pp. 1–14, 28–67Google Scholar and ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, XVII (1991), 773–97.Google Scholar

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³⁷ Joyce, P., Democratic subjects, pp. 192–204Google Scholar, also Visions (Cambridge, 1991), p. 329Google Scholar. This is echoed in Vernon, J., Politics and the people: a study in English political culture 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 295–6.Google Scholar

³⁸ Vernon, J., Politics and the people, p. 1.Google Scholar

³⁹ Famously bemoaned in Eley, G. and Nields, K., ‘Why does social history ignore politics?’, Social History, V (1980), 249–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ This process was, of course, far more theoretically informed in the French case. It gained much momentum from Furet's, F.Penser la révolution française (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar. Hunt, L., Politics, culture, and class in the French revolution (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar was, and is, a key text. Morrill's, J.The revolt of the provinces (London, 1976)Google Scholar was crucial in the English case, along with the work of Conrad Russell.

⁴¹ The work of W. Sewell and K. M. Baker has done much to encourage such an approach. Sewell, W., Work and revolution in France: the language of labour from the old regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Baker, K. M., Inventing the French revolution: essays on political culture in the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² Jones, G. Stedman, ‘Rethinking chartism’, in his Languages of class, pp. 90–178.Google Scholar

⁴³ See Joyce, , Visions, p. 10Google Scholar and Vernon, , Politics, p. 4Google Scholar for this line. On Stedman Jones's neglect of visual sources see especially Epstein, J. A., Radical expression: political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 70–1Google Scholar and Pickering, P. A., ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the chartist movement’, Past and Present, CXII (1986), 144–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ Epstein, J. A., ‘Understanding the cap of liberty: symbolic practice and social conflict in early-nineteenth century England’, Past and Present, CXXII (1989), pp. 75–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar and chapter 3 of Radical expression. In Radical expression, see pp. vii, 4–5, 11–28, 71.

⁴⁵ Epstein, J. A., ‘The populist turn’, Journal of British Studies, XXXII (1993), 177–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 14–15, 258–9.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 16, 41–9 and passim.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Briggs, , The language of “class”.’Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘The example of the English middle class 1870–1914’, in Kocka, J. and Mitchell, A., Bourgeois society in nineteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 1993), pp. 127–8.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 14–15, 258–9Google Scholar and Briggs, , ‘The language of “class”’, pp. 43–73, passimGoogle Scholar. Crossick, G., ‘From gentlemen to the residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain’, in Corfield, (ed.), Language, history and class, pp. 150–78.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 175, 213–14, 322, 347, 352 n. 51Google Scholar. Wahrman argues that radical publications generally employed dichotomous models of society to emphasize the distance between rich and poor, people and aristocracy. There is also evidence in his account of the use of terms like ‘lower orders’. He does, however, provide many citations referring to the ‘working’ and ‘labouring’ classes and these tend to come from more demotic sources. It is perhaps just such plebeian organs, rather than the more elevated periodicals Wahrman focuses on in his search for the ‘middle class’, that we would expect to display the transition from ‘rank’ to ‘class’ most clearly. Without wishing to construct an argument on the basis of a book's index, it is perhaps worth suggesting that the direction of Wahrman's efforts are revealed by the entry for ‘working classes’: it reads ‘see “middle classes”’.

⁵² Consult, Wahrman, Imagining, p. 12Google Scholar for a clear statement that ‘political language’ should ‘be given its due as a key site for the shaping of the social consciousness of large groups of people’. It is perhaps the case that Wahrman makes ‘political language’ not merely ‘a’ key site, but the key site for the shaping of social consciousness.

⁵³ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 6–7, 9.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 226–35, 241–50.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 16.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 55–6.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ See Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 142Google Scholar for the argument that the popularity of talk of the ‘middle class’ in response to the triple assessment was partly due to its being an indirect tax on consumption which thus fell on the middling orders.

⁵⁸ See Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 356Google Scholar for an example of this account of the English past which Wahrman argues originated in the 1820s.

⁵⁹ Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 6.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Wahrman, D., ‘Virtual representation: parliamentary reporting and the language of class in the 1790s’, Past and Present, CXXXV (1992), 83–113, especially 90 and 109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶¹ See Vickery, , ‘Golden age to separate spheres’, pp. 385–6, 390–1, 407, 413–14Google Scholar for evidence supporting this characterization of such literature.

⁶² Parry, J., The rise and fall of liberal government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), pp. 81–7.Google Scholar

⁶³ See Joyce, , Visions, p. 329Google Scholar and Democratic subjects, pp. 131, 163. And also see Vernon, , Politics, pp. 290–1, 297, 309–10 and 324–6Google Scholar. Vernon is careful to argue that identity should be seen as unstable and that no choice need, or should, be made between class or populism. It is clear, however, that for him populism provides the most potent prism through which people view society.

⁶⁴ Biagini, E. F., Liberty, retrenchment and reform (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 6–8Google Scholar and Biagini, E. and Reid, A. J., Currents of radicalism (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–9, esp. 5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁵ It has been previously argued by Miles Taylor that Stedman Jones's emphasis on the declining resonance of radicalism in the 1840s does not sit easily with Biagini and Joyce's emphasis on its robust survival into the late nineteenth century. The point is well made and in accord with my concern for better contextualizing popular political language, but does not detract from the claim that a stress on the enduring appeal of radicalism has often been accompanied by a reference to ‘Rethinking chartism’. See Taylor, M., The decline of British radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar for this argument.

⁶⁶ For instance, Epstein, , ‘The populist turn’, 180Google Scholar, and Cannadine, , ‘Cutting classes’, p. 56.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ McKibbin, R., The ideologies of class, pp. 35–6, 294–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ See Harris, J., Private lives, public spirit: a social history of Britain 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 8.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Harrison, B., Peaceable kingdom (Oxford, 1982), pp. 157–60, 191–216.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ On character see Collini, S., ‘The idea of character in Victorian political thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., XXXV (1985), 26–50Google Scholar. For property much can be gleaned from Offer, A., Property and politics 1870–1914: landowner ship, law, ideology and urban development in England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–7, 41–2, 340–2.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Samuel Smiles, Self-help (1859), Character (1871), and Duty (1880).

⁷² Collini, S., ‘The idea of character’, p. 38.Google Scholar

⁷³ Harris, , Private lives, public spirit, pp. 121–2Google Scholar makes this point well.

⁷⁴ Harris, , Private lives, public spirit, p. 13.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Harris, J., ‘Political thought and the welfare state: an intellectual framework for social policy 1880–1940’, Past and Present, CXXXV (1992), 116–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see particularly 140–1.

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⁷⁷ Williams, Consult R., Keywords (London, 2nd edn, 1983), p. 65.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ On ‘masses’ and ‘mass’ see Briggs, , ‘The language of “mass” and “masses” in nineteenth-century England’Google Scholar, in Martin, D. E. and Rubinstein, D., Ideology and the labour movement: essays presented to John Saville (1979), pp. 62–83Google Scholar now reprinted in the Collected essays. Also Williams, , Keywords, pp. 192–7.Google Scholar

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⁸⁰ Visions of the people has an entry for sociolinguistics in the index but none for soccer or football.