Using Bury as a case study, this article reassesses the mechanism of the formation of political opinion in Lancashire factory towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subject has heretofore been dominated by sociological explanations of the 1970s and early 1980s. A re-examination of the ‘Three Lancashires’ paradigm, the socio-economic model that has underpinned most Lancashire studies for this period, demonstrates that the socio-economics of urban Lancashire were more diverse than previously thought. From this basis, the article challenges the empirical basis of one of the most enduring tenets of Lancashire politics: the deferential ‘factory politics’ model. To provide an alternative explanation, this article reasserts the importance of ‘issues’ to the debate, and underlines the contingent nature of the relationship between representative and constituents. An important strand is whether political activists integrated their plebeian rank and file into new party structures, thus neutralizing threats to status quo. This interpretation has been central to much recent revisionist history; however, this article demonstrates that the ‘rise of party’ during the mid-Victorian period was contingent upon political activists acquiescing to certain requirements of their followers.