ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century and increasingly in recent decades, the life-expectancy of historiographical conventions has tended to diminish. Empirical research uncovers evidence which modifies or even negates earlier accounts; new theoretical developments, reflecting different epistemological positions, undermine the truth effects of conventional histories; and current events serve to falsify the teleologies of existing narratives, demanding new constructions of the past and demonstrating the extent to which the meaning of the past is determined in the present. 1 Predominantly, though not exclusively, the production of ‘new’ history has been an enterprise of the Left, an important aspect of whose role has been to challenge dominant truth. And perhaps nowhere more, nor with more intellectual rigour, has the past so consistently been rewritten than in the historiography of the nineteenth-century English working classes.
