ABSTRACT
The relative impotence of the agencies of middle-class moral imperialism, and their failure to effect any significant inroads into working-class culture, questions their influence over the development of working-class consciousness. In the 1960s and 1970s historians, observing the collapse of working-class politics after chartism, argued (although they relied on behavioural rather than attitudinal evidence) that there was a disintegration of working-class attitudes in this period.1 In the later 1980s and early 1990s, prompted by Gareth Stedman Jones' 'Rethinking Chartism', focus began to shift towards the continuities of working-class radicalism, the motifs of radical patriotism, of free trade and anti-statism, and the franchise not as a mechanism of social and economic transformation but as a badge of citizenship.2 In some cases, this re-evaluation has been taken to the extent of questioning the existence, even in the chartist period, of anything which can usefully be described as working-class consciousness, suggesting instead that populism provides a more fruitful framework for what thus become 'popular' rather than working-class attitudes.3
