Ernest Jones's 1852 “Song of the Lower Classes” does not appear in Reform Acts by Chris Vanden Bossche, the distinguished Victorianist from Notre Dame whose previous book was the influential Carlyle and the Search for Authority (1991). However, we can learn a great deal about that poem's appeal by attending to Vanden Bossche's idea that the mid-Victorian print realm saw a three-cornered contest between Tory landowners, the rising Whig industrial class, and a working class just finding its political voice. The spokesmen and supporters of “the people” borrowed from older radicalism but also introduced new and potentially disruptive ideas about what counted as “disinterested” exercises of power and new notions about what sorts of actions might transform the public realm.

Vanden Bossche's main section divisions are straightforwardly chronological: first “Making Physical Force Moral: The Dilemma of Chartism 1838–1842”; second, “The Land! The Land! The Land! Land Ownership as Political Reform, 1842–1848”; and third, “The Social Turn: From Chartism to Cooperation and Trade Unionism, 1848–1855.” Vanden Bossche makes an intriguing formal argument, however, by trisecting each of those periods by ideology: separate sections within each era explores texts that unpack, respectively, a Tory (landowning, conservative, agrarian) perspective, a Whig (capitalist or mercantile, urban or free-trade) viewpoint, and finally an explicitly Chartist stance or one sympathetic to the rights and needs of the working class.

Vanden Bossche's thoughtful argument centers on thematic and formal analyses of novels by Disraeli, Dickens, Kingsley, Gaskell, Perce Egan, and Martin Wheeler. Making fiction his primary archive allows him to mine that genre's supple and subtle insights into shifts, even overtly unacknowledged ones, in the era's thinking about class, caste, and privilege. Vanden Bossche proposes that out of the three-way battle a distinct conception of action in the public realm began to emerge, a conception that hinged not just on political but on “social agency.” If one can persuasively define the terms under which “the people” became agents in their social as well as their political realm, Vanden Bossche proposes, one has won the battle of wits and of words. Hence—and this is perhaps Vanden Bossche's most intriguing point—we ignore the subterranean impact of such new social and political movements as Chartism at our peril. Even in texts where they are being mocked or their actions redefined (perhaps especially there), we may see their impact.

Vanden Bossche is persuasive in his readings of explicitly pro-Chartist or sympathizing texts, like Pierce Egan's 1840 Wat Tyler and Martin Wheeler's understudied 1848 Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century. However, the key contribution of the book is the way Vanden Bossche highlights curious and subtle rhetorical tricks whereby writers of the Whig and Tory side seek to align the interests of the working classes with their own—and, by contrast, to make certain aspects of working-class activism or dissidence appear to be associated with the political logic of their political opponents. Thus for Whig writers Tories stir up reactionary rural discontent among the lower orders (thus aligning them with Chartism at its most violent), while for Tories the logic of Whig free marketeering lends itself to urban rabble-rule, a kind of savage direct democracy. Both sides of the Whig-Tory debate, then, show themselves troubled about the subterranean rumbling that would lead to a trade union movement and active socialism by the end of the century.

One crucial twist is Vanden Bossche's point that predictable three-way debates about what constitutes politically valid “disinterestedness” (that highly prized Victorian virtue that the Puseyite H. P. Liddon defined in 1866 as “devotion to the real interest of humankind”) are paralleled by the somewhat discordant notion that legitimate governance depends not on distinterestedness but on a party's having a valid interest in the rule of the polity. To Tories—Vanden Bossche's readings of Sybil and Coningsby are especially telling on this point—it is such interest alone makes one's commitment to the nation's welfare credible. Whig discourse—Harrison Ainsworth's 1840 Guy Fawkes is one intriguing example—emphasized a mobile definition of middle-class respectability that grounded legitimacy in various (unlanded) forms of wealth possession and creation. To Chartists and their working class allies, however, the ownership of one's labor was paramount. This wrinkle is reminiscent of American historian Eric Foner's contention (which he also takes for his title) that it was the northern Republican doctrine of “free soil, free labor, free men” that made the working classes so ardently antislavery: the Northern workers' notion that one's bodily labor is a form of property meant they passionately believed that the labor of both white and black bodies should be properly valued.

Vanden Bossche demonstrates that behind (or below) the warring Whigs and Tories were writers who envisioned a new kind of class awareness. Without falling into a narrowly retrospective account of what those radical writers of the mid-century discerned, we can still credit their courage in offering a distinct view of what role workers might play within a liberal state. No regicide was in the cards in 1852, but Edward Jones may still have been onto something in the final verse of his “Song of the Lower Classes”: