ABSTRACT
In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time.
Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |6 pages
Introduction
part |82 pages
1832–70
chapter |4 pages
Introduction: Britain in 1832
chapter |17 pages
Forming the urban working class
chapter |21 pages
Labour in the ‘factory age’
chapter |17 pages
Leisure and the urban worker
chapter |21 pages
Working-class identity and politics
part |76 pages
1870–1914
chapter |4 pages
Introduction: Discontinuity in 1870?
chapter |15 pages
The ‘traditional’ working-class community
chapter |17 pages
Control, conflict and collective bargaining in the workplace
chapter |19 pages
Expanding leisure opportunities
chapter |19 pages
Class identity and everyday politics
part |78 pages
1914–40