Review article: Radicalism and protest

The clash between radicalism and loyalism in the early industrial revolution period created the basic progressive-conservative political divide that was to structure British politics until the fall of communism. This is the perspective of Gareth Stedman Jones in his recent book An End to Poverty, which for a landmark work by a major historian has received surprisingly little notice.(1) Discussing it at a seminar in Manchester, Stedman Jones remarked that he couldn’t really fathom pre-Chartist popular radicalism – a disarming confession from the author of Languages of Class. He was talking about the early 19th-century generation, between the Paineites and the Chartists, and he had put his finger on something: the popular politics of the early industrial revolution just don’t fit progressive models. This is particularly true (oddly enough) in Lancashire, the home of the factory system.