Work, class, and politics in Ashton-under-Lyne, 1830-1860

If any town met Marx's criteria for the emergence of a revolutionary, class conscious working class, it was the Lancashire mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the strongholds of "physical force" Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s. Stressing the rapid decline of the working-class challenge after 1850, historians have typically regarded the collapse of the movement as a profound discontinuity in the history of the nineteenth-century working class and have questioned E. P. Thompson's famous claim about emergence of class consciousness in the 1830s. This dissertation challenges the emphasis on discontinuity and "idealist" notions about class and class consciousness. By focusing either on the insurgent years 1830 to 1848 or on the reformism of the later decades, historians have missed the continuities in class politics during these decades and have overemphasized the sharp discontinuity between the insurgency of early Chartism and the reformist politics of the decades after the mid-century mark. Even though bitter class animosities dominated the politics of the 1830s and early 1840s, Ashton's working-class leaders never ruled out the possibility of an alliance with "honest" members of the middle classes and were essentially parliamentarian (rather than revolutionary) in their outlook. While the Ashton working class failed to live up to the "idealist" model of revolutionary class consciousness, Ashton's working men and women were keenly aware of their identity as a class and the opposition of interests between themselves and the "purse-proud cotton tyrants." Their awareness of themselves as a class and their belief in democracy continued to shape and influence the struggle for control of the labor process, class relations, and politics during the decades after the demise of Chartism and in fact redefined and radicalized the political culture in which the mass parties of the age of Gladstone and Disraeli grew and matured. The integration of the working-class challenge into the framework of Victorian politics and society involved resistance and conflict as well as compromise and cooperation and was ultimately a two-way process, one that affected middle-class Liberals and Tories and Chartists alike.