ABSTRACT
Though it is often disguised by a concentration on political activity, the traditional picture of mid-nineteenth century working-class history involves a belief in the transformation of working-class consciousness which was, therefore, at base an intellectual process. This implies that a fundamental dimension of the explanation of change around midcentury must involve the operation of the structures and contexts within which consciousness was formed (which I have termed the 'intellectual morphology')-
Yet historians have remained uneasy with the notion of consciousness: some have ignored it, some have subsumed it under 'culture', and some have even considered it and then neglected it as of little explanatory use. Predominantly, this is a response to two problems, the difficulty of obtaining evidence of working-class attitudes, and the lack of a generally accepted and heuristically-useful framework of consciousness and its formation. This study has attempted to develop such a framework, and to use extensive newspaper and archival research to overcome, as far as possible, the difficulties of sources.
