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.
... Middlemost and the Milltowns, pp. 290–4. 15 Timothy Grimshaw, The Cogitations and Opinions of Timothy Grimshaw Esq. (Bolton, 1839), p. 76. 16 William Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 3rd edn ...
In promoting public opinion , MacKinnon was placing his faith in a mechanical device , one utilising the stimulating effect of approbation and the repressive effect of disapprobation , as the sole source of moral notions and as the ...
... The Middlemost and the Milltowns Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England ( Stanford , Calif . , 2001 ) . LOWE , N. , ' The Lancashire Textile Industry in the Sixteenth Century ' , Chetham Society , 3rd . ser . , 20 ...
... Middle-Class, 84–105; Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns, 248–86; and Roberts, Making English Morals. For the United States, see Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community, 119–93; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 105–44 ...
... the Middle Ages. The eighteenth-century business ideal owed a great deal to the collective honour and fair dealing ... Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) ...
Boyd Hilton examines the changes in society between 1783-1846 and the transformations from raffish and rakish behaviour to the new norms of Victorian respectability.
Beiträge zur deutschen und europäischen Geschichte (Hamburg: Krämer, 1999), 119–30. Schwoerer, L.G. 'Celebrating the Glorious Revolution 1689–1989'. Albion 22 (1990): 1–20. Scott, C.L. 'A Comparative Re-Examination of Anglo-Irish ...
... for mastery over everyday life.35 Yet the cost of such control was the creation of a disenchanted 32 See Sharpe, Instruments ofDarkness, pp. 276–94. 33 See O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning, p. 9. 34 Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, p. 228.
94 C.C. Booth, “John Haygarth frs (1740–1827),” The James Lind Library http://www.jameslindlibrary.org (Accessed 29 Jan. 2005). 95 “The Royal American magazine, or universal repository [To be published monthly] To the PUBLIC, ...
By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.