Under the Skin of English Life

Abstract

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, then the workshop of the world and the first industrial nation, there was a yawning gap between the objective conditions of social life and their subjective recuperation. In the face of rapid change and seemingly overnight development, older forms of inter-class rela tions proved, in many places, to be a sheet-anchor of stability and continuity. The helplessness of the working class, adrift in chaos, is nowhere better recounted than in the bitter-sweet remonstrances of Allen Clarke, a Bolton, Lancashire, cotton factory operative and socialist militant: