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Originally published in 1976, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England examines working-class radicalism in the mid-Victorian period and suggests that after the fading of Chartist militancy the radical tradition was preserved in a working-class subculture that enabled working men to resist the full consolidation of middle-class hegemony. The book traces the growth of working-class radicalism as it developed dialectically in confrontation with middle-class liberal ideology in the generation after Waterloo. Intellectual forces were of central importance in shaping the character of the working-class Left and the Enlightenment, in particular, as the chief source of ideological weapons that were turned against the established order. The Enlightenment also provided the intellectual foundations of the middle-class ideology that was directed against the incipient threat of popular radicalism. The book notes that the same intellectual forces that entered into the first half of the nineteenth century also shaped the value system that provided the foundations of mid-Victorian urban culture. These forces also contributed to the rapprochement between working-class liberalism, bringing latent affinities to the surface. It is also emphasised, however, that inherited ideas and traditions exercised their influence in interaction with the structure of power and status.

"The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom", de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, "is the great political problem of the time." Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

On the spectrum of Victorian politics Birmingham stands at one extreme – the exemplar of class harmony and co-operation. Where other towns were torn by strife and discord, here the forces of cohesion and stability were triumphant. An alliance between the middle and working classes remained the cardinal fact of political life from Thomas Attwood's Political Union to Joseph Chamberlain's caucus. Political tranquillity reflected the deeper harmony of a well integrated culture, in which the masters and artisans of a small workshop economy shared a commitment to the social and moral values of the community.