ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the formation of the working class in the years between 1840 and 1940 as a product of the consolidation of barriers between manual workers and various middle-class groups on the one hand, and of the declining differentiation within the working class on the other. The argument is in some ways a familiar one (Hobsbawm 1964), but we intend to use new data to substantiate it, to point out various qualifications, and to identify neglected features of the process. In particular, we draw attention to the way that while men's fates became increasingly bound up with class, women's fortunes were less so, with the result that they came to occupy an ambivalent position in the class structure.
