ABSTRACT
A good deal has been written on the culture of the workplace in the second half of the nineteenth century. Patrick Joyce’s recent research, for example, has demonstrated that the work experience of this period can be retrieved and imaginatively recreated from a plethora of available documentation. 1 The interventionist role which the state increasingly claimed, has provided a wealth of detail from which to begin the process of understanding the authority structures of the factory. The concentration of trade-union historiography on developments post-1850 reflects, in itself, the increased formalism of industrial relations in this period, and the gradual ascription of an accredited role to the trade union as the century passed. The historian who chooses to operate on similar themes for the earlier part of the century, however, is likely to encounter a number of difficulties. There is, in short, an apparent openness to the later-nineteenth-century workplace that is absent earlier in the period.
