Using Lancashire—and more specifically, the towns of Bolton and Wigan—as his test case, Trevor Griffiths's valuable monograph, The Lancashire Working Classes c. 1880–1930, disputes that it is possible to speak of a single working class within Britain in 1914 or even in 1930. Indeed, his book is intended to demolish any lingering Marxist notions that a unified working class defined by shared experience existed in Britain. Griffiths challenges the old “new social history” and especially Eric Hobsbawm's argument about a remaking of working-class consciousness after 1880 (see his Worlds of Labour [London, 1984]) and the more subtle, but largely speculative, revision of this thesis provided by Michael Savage in The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 [Cambridge, 1987] and by Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 [London, 1994]). However, since the field has moved quite a distance in other methodological directions in the past two decades, Griffiths also addresses historians like Patrick Joyce, who have developed poststructuralist analyses of working-class language and culture—Visions of the People (Cambridge, 1991)—and Jon Lawrence, who, in Speaking for the People (Cambridge, 1998), analyzes both the rhetoric and actions of political activists in specific working-class locales. Griffiths frames his argument around the premise that too many recent historians have not so much undermined the narrative of class expression as merely pushed back the emergence of a unified class identity to the Great War or after. The approach taken by Griffiths to demonstrate his own view, that class identity neither developed nor provided the motor of social or political change in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, is relentlessly empirical. This book is crammed full of interesting detail culled from parliamentary papers, trade union records, employers’ associations, newspapers, and friendly society records. Griffiths is innovative in his use of source material (such as using the records of the disaster relief fund of the Hulton Colliery explosion in 1910 to probe family relationships), and he produces important insights on the variability of working-class behavior. However, while the arguments of each chapter are rooted in specific debates within the historiography, there is inadequate concern with the larger methodological issues of the field. In short, there are many tall and wonderful trees in Griffith's book, but for all his meticulous labors, he does not provide us with a clear picture of the forest.

Griffiths signals his general perspective with the title of the book; it is about the heterogeneity of the working classes. Important divisions among workers were constituted by occupation—mining in Wigan and cotton textiles in Bolton—and by the hierarchies of gender and skill. Griffiths shows, through his analysis of job-recruiting patterns, for instance, that intergenerational continuities were not as strong among cotton operatives as historians have previously thought. Families encouraged their children to enter different trades and occupations to spread the risk of future economic conditions and thereby manage the volatile job market. Many aspired to white collar positions. The dictates of working-class life required a range of survival strategies that included personal saving, friendly societies, and cooperative ventures, all of which, Griffiths stresses, were directed at individual family needs and did not necessarily develop a collective perspective. Neighborliness and workers mutuality were pragmatic and instrumental rather than a reflection of class solidarity. Indeed the “moral and material centre” of working-class life was the family. But are instrumentality, a concern with family, and class solidarity incompatible positions? As Griffiths focuses on what behavior implies rather than on working-class perceptions of their social roles, this is a question that remains unanswered.

In politics too, Griffiths reminds us that voting Labour was never simply a class or even an occupational vote. Trade unions neither unified nor politicized their constituencies, so that even at the outset of the 1930s, Labour had not yet managed to attain a sturdy working-class base in Lancashire. Again, countering perceived Marxist and linguistic determinisms, Griffiths suggests that while politics were not autonomous from social developments, neither were they dependent entirely on local factors, framed by party discourses, or the expression of class identities. Instead, Griffiths finds variegated voting patterns based on specific issues and interests. Religious ties remained important throughout the period. Moreover, the Catholic Irish population remained a solid bloc, and the mining industry structured political contests in Wigan. While this attention to the multiplicity of factors deciding political preference is salutary, it does throw into question the representativeness of Lancashire. To be fair, in concentrating on Lancashire Griffiths is traveling in the footsteps of many previous historians of working-class life. But if social patterns were as varied in two towns in Lancashire as Griffith suggests, how can any claims about working-class behavior and politics be made for Britain as a whole? Similarly, one wonders if the new industries of the midlands would be more relevant as the indicators of social identity in the first half of the twentieth century than cotton and coal, the increasingly eclipsed pioneers of the industrial revolution.

Do this impressive amassing of material and the careful claims made from it rebut arguments about the rise of class identity? A historian of the Thompsonian mode might dispute if it is even possible to demonstrate the existence or absence of social identity without examining relationships; not just among working people but, equally importantly, between workers and those in other social classes. Historians influenced by the “linguistic turn” will question whether any identity can be inferred from behavior alone, that is, without exploring how that behavior might have been framed by cultural norms rooted in various forms of language. Certainly, there is little attention in this book to “ordinary” working-class voices. And cultural and gender historians might question the depth of revisionism of a book that barely mentions gender identity. Was working-class masculine identity, for instance, formed in the workplace, and did this establish behavioral patterns within the family? This is a substantial book that will provoke further discussion from among contending methodological positions, but it will not settle the issues that divide them.