ABSTRACT
Southern market and county towns were largely passed over by many moulding forces of nineteenth-century history – rapid urbanisation, factories, trade unionism, Chartism and other popular movements – and they have been generally passed over by social historians as well. A literature on social structure, class relations, local politics and economic change hardly exists. One must, therefore, travel across this terrain with neither an Ordnance Survey map nor even a rudimentary sketch provided by a crossroads rustic. Nevertheless this study may open, if not a window, perhaps a peephole into some processes of cultural and social change in this region.
