ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the new orthodoxy of 'partial realignment' and reassert the importance of working-class support to the Tories' electoral hegemony between 1886 and 1906. It also challenges traditional ways of thinking about the nature and origins of working-class Conservatism, not least by demonstrating that it appealed as much to gender-based as to class-based social identities. It may never have captured the inner, policy-making circles of the Conservative party, but it did play a significant part in Conservative electoral success between 1886 and 1906. The cultural symbols appropriated by late nineteenth-century urban Toryism were all key icons of male popular leisure. More substantively, the League placed much greater emphasis on the virtues of domestic family life than on the virtues of the world of non-domestic leisure. The Primrose League believed that it had a special mission to defend the family, especially the working-class family, from the demoralizing doctrines of atheistic Radicals and Socialists.
