Visions of the People
Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–1914

This book shows how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part.

Patrick Joyce (Author)

9780521447973, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 October 1993

464 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm, 0.76 kg

' … of consuming interest for all those concerned to understand Victorian England … a very important book.' The Times Literary Supplement

This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art.

1. Introduction
Part I. Power and the People: Politics and the Social Order: 2. The languages of popular politics: from radicalism to Liberalism
3. Class, populism and socialism: Liberalism and after
Part II. Moralising the Market: Work and the Social Order: 4. Civilising capital: class and the moral discources of labour
5. Buiding the union: 'the gospel of absolute and perfect organisation'
Part III. Custom, History, Language: Popular Culture and the Social Order
6. Custom and the symbolic structure of the social order
7. The sense of the past
8. The people's English
Part IV. Kingdoms of the Mind: The Imaginary Constitution of the Social Order: 9. Investigating popular art
10. The broadside ballad
11. The voice of the people? The character and development of dialect literature
12. Dialect and the making of social identity
13. Stages of class: popular theatre and the geography of belonging
14. Summary and conclusion: the making of the English working class before 1914
Appendices.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]