First published in 1978. Mid-Victorian Britain was relatively stable in comparison with the turbulent period that preceded it, and that stability is in part explained by the emergence of an artisan elite with a specific relationship to the society around it. This book examines that elite: its clubs and societies, co-operatives and building societies; its values and ideology, challenging the notion that these artisans directly absorbed middle-class values; its politics, tracing the evolution from Chartism through the Reform League and on to a radical liberalism which existed in constant tension with the local liberal middle class.