Historians have identified three main aspects of social change which contributed to making Britain a more class divided and class conscious society between 1870 and 1914: the erosion of artisanal independence in the workplace, the growth of residential segregation by class, and the growth of cultural homogeneity within the urban working class. These themes were systematically explored in a series of major studies of workingclass Victorian society published during the 1970s. Since then, though not uncriticised, the approach has been strongly defended and developed, first by Eric Hobsbawm in his influential collection of essays Worlds of labour (1984), and more recently by Mike Savage and Andrew Miles in The remaking of the British working class. This emphasis on the structural transformation of the British working class after 1870 is examined at length in the present chapter because it remains central to the whole notion of ‘the rise of class’ in modern British politics. We need to ask both how strong were trends towards working-class homogenisation during this period, and, what were the political implications of any social changes that did occur?

There have been many attempts, not always complimentary, to link the decline of artisanal independence in the workplace to shifts in working-class politics. In the 1970s Gareth Stedman Jones suggested that a shift from the ‘formal’ to the ‘real’ subordination of wage labour to capital may have been a key factor undermining the working-class militancy of the early nineteenth century, and that the decline of artisans' workplace culture may have had a similar effect in London at the end of the century.