ABSTRACT
It was also a complex, syncopated process, operating at different speeds in different areas. Not only did the old society survive much longer in the countryside, but the new came to birth much more slowly in some towns than in others, ‘In 1830,’ its modern historian has written, ‘Coventry still epitomized the old order, in which there were many ranks and conditions of men within a single, homogeneous society. But Coventry could not stand still while England moved, and in the end Coventry succumbed to the standards of the nineteenth century all the more painfully for her long resistance to them.’2 Nevertheless, one of the distinguishing features of the new society, by contrast with the localism of the old, was the nationwide character of the classes, in appeal if not always in strength. At some point between the French Revolution and the Great Reform Act, the vertical antagonism and horizontal solidarities of class emerged on a national scale from and overlay the vertical bonds and horizontal rivalries of connection and interest. That moment, which it is one purpose of this chapter to isolate, saw the birth of class.
