ABSTRACT
What has been later collected under the generic name of ‘the working class’ was towards the end of the eighteenth century and long into the nineteenth a motley collection of working or unemployed people, destitute, poor, or not-so-poor, dependent on charity or their own masters, with numerous, unconnected traditions, tied to localities or trades, each keen to preserve, or kept perforce in, its own boundaries. There was little to unite them, plenty to divide. Each group was affected by the advancing industrial age in a different way. Some hardly noticed a change in the bleak life of stultifying drudgery. Some felt their world suddenly falling into pieces and the few secure orientation points around which their life cycle evolved disappearing. Some experienced an uncomfortable and frightening tightening of their weekly budget and growing difficulty in keeping up to the standards they considered to be normal. Some found their material standards improving thanks to the increased demand for their skills or products.
