This book seeks to enrich our understanding of middle-class life in England during the Industrial Revolution. For many years, questions about how the middle classes earned (and failed to earn) money, conducted their public and private lives, carried out what they took to be their civic and religious duties, and viewed themselves in relation to the rest of society have been largely neglected questions. These topics have been marginalized by the rise of social history, with its predominant focus on the political formation of the working classes, and by continuing interest in government and high politics, with its focus on the upper classes and landed aristocracy. This book forms part of the recent attempt, influenced by contemporary ideas of political culture, to reassess the role, composition, and outlook of the middle classes. It compares and contrasts three Lancashire milltowns and surrounding parishes in the early phase of textile industrialization—when the urbanizing process was at its most rapid and dysfunctional, and class relations were most fraught. The book’s range extends from the French Revolution to 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, which symbolized mid-century stability and prosperity. The author argues that members of the middle class were pivotal in the creation of this stability. He shows them creating themselves as a class while being created as a class, putting themselves in order while being ordered from above. The book shifts attention from the search for a single elusive “class consciousness” to demonstrate instead how the ideological leaders of the three milltowns negotiated their power within the powerful forces of capitalism and state-building. It argues that, at a time of intense labor-capital conflict, it was precisely because of their diversity, and their efforts to build bridges to the lower orders and upper class, that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was maintained.

The Letters of Richard Cobden (1804-65) aims in four printed volumes to provide the first critical edition of Cobden's letters, publishing the complete text in as near the original form as possible, accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, together with an introduction to each volume re-assessing Cobden's importance in their light. As a whole these volumes will make available a unique source of the understanding of British liberalism in its European and international contexts, throwing new light on issues such as the repeal of the Corn Laws, British radical movements, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-French relations, and the American Civil War. The second volume, drawing on over fifty archives world-wide, follows the career of Richard Cobden from that of the 'Manchester Manufacturer' who had gained celebrity in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 to that of the dominant Radical leader on the British political scene between 1848 and 1853, widely considered by contemporaries equal in importance to the leaders of the Whig and Conservative parties. Cobden in this period was concerned with an inter-connected series of movements which sought in different ways to reduce aristocratic power in Victorian Britain. These included the reform of parliament (especially through the secret ballot), of landownership, of government finances, of the British empire, as well as the introduction of state education. At the same time we see the emergence of Cobden 'the International Man', with a cosmopolitan following, playing a pivotal role in the global peace movement, and articulating a wide-ranging critique of British foreign policy, with regard to the dangers of French invasion, the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, British expansionism in India, and the ramifications of the Eastern Question as Britain drifted towards war in the Crimea. Although in his own day, Cobden's radical ideas increasingly separated him from many contemporaries, in the longer term they became a vital tributary of nineteenth-century British and international liberalism.