ABSTRACT
The previous chapter ought to have made it clear that some sort of move from trade union to class consciousness did take place in Oldham during the 1830s and early 1840s. It should also have indicated the importance of industrial factors in this process-a finding that would support the argument that the main previous social trend (during the period of coercive trade union solidarity) had been the formation-or at least strengthening-of industrially based occupational cultures. If this was so, and if a radical erosion and replacement of these cultures then took place, at least something of it ought to show up in terms of social structure. Compared with Shields (still in the stage of trade union consciousness) and the even less advanced Northampton, one would expect Oldham to reveal a markedly greater degree of social closeness between working people of different occupational backgrounds. Indeed, the mere growth of mass class consciousness ought to have brought with it a corresponding repudiation of any system of occupational hierarchy based on bourgeois values. What follows is an attempt to see whether this was in fact so.
