ABSTRACT
The mid-century years – the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s – were really the formative years of the Victorian state. The medical profession was well aware of this, even though they remained ignorant of the precise ways in which disease was transmitted from one person to another until later in the century. Trade unionism as a movement made significant progress in the middle years of the nineteenth century, though confined very largely to skilled workers. It remains unclear how far the movement contributed to Chartism. Even in mining, where trade unionism was relatively well established, the Miners’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland, which was formed in 1842, finally collapsed during the depression in the coal trade in 1847–1848. For the Webbs, the pioneer historians of trade unionism, the setting up of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers represented the beginning of a new era, the era of ‘model unionism’.
