ABSTRACT
Working-class London' includes all of East London and of the inner South and North, together with the numerous, but more scattered areas of the periphery in which wage-earners formed an overwhelming majority of the working population. The features of working-class London that gave rise to the body of attitudes were the poverty of many, the insecurity of most, and, in relation to the social system as a whole, the lack of status and power that was universal. Working-class parochialism was imposed by the exigencies of the struggle to scrape together a living. The large Roman Catholic minority in the working class was to a considerable degree concentrated within distinctive sub-communities. The first and most crucial difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism was that, in the middle decades of the century at least, large sections of the Catholic population. The sort of community the Anglo-Catholic was trying to recreate did not exist in the English countryside, let alone in the metropolis.
