Work, Society and Politics - The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England

The Harvester Press, 1980

Work, Society and Politics provides a lucid analysis of industrial change and its impact on the factory town in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Dr. Joyce attacks the naivety of the `labour aristocracy' thesis, concentrating on the factory community's internalisation of the paternalist ethos. The mechanics of this internalisation are in the cultures of their work, and are not to be understood in terms either of crude, unilaterlly-imposed social control, or of shared moral or ideological values. The political focus allows the first extensive examination of working class Conservatism. This book is genuinely original, opening up a whole myriad of problems and possibilities. It puts a very great deal of recent labour and social history in an altogether different perspective...

Note - Ex library