Like many histories this is a work shaped in large measure by the idiosyncrasies of its author. Unlike many histories it makes no attempt to pass off a necessarily personal perspective as a definitive or comprehensive study of its subject. The account which follows of English popular politics in the half century before the First World War is partial., not simply because the subject is so vast and multifaceted that no ‘final’ word would be possible, but because it has been written by a ‘situated author’. My efforts to make sense of the stories I have been told about my own past, and about the lives of my parents and grandparents, have necessarily influenced the ways in which I have thought about the past as a professional historian – so too have the stories I have told myself to give shape and meaning to my experiences. Rather than deny this interaction between making the self and making history I wish to celebrate it. Historical inquiry should emerge out of critical engagement with the ‘myths we live by’, as much as with historiographical debate.

Part I, ‘Rethinking popular polities’, maps out the historiographical and methodological location of the present study in fairly conventional terms; this introduction offers a more personal chart of the same terrain. Since much of part I is concerned with criticising historical accounts of class and ‘class polities’, I should perhaps begin by emphasising that the last thing I wish to suggest is that perceptions of class and class difference have had no impact on the development of English popular politics.