Short story of the British working - class movement, (1789 - 1947)

The following study of the British Working-class Movement purports to be no more than an introductory survey of a field which needs much further research. There exist already full histories of the Trade Union Movement (up to 1920), by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of the Co-operative Movement (up to 1944)., by the present writer, as well as many excellent studies of particular phases and periods. But no one, to my knowledge, had attempted, until this book was written, to bring within a single work a general survey of the growth of the working class movement in all its leading aspects, political as well as industrial and co-operative. As a teacher, I had long felt the want of such a book; for the histories of separate phases of working-class activity fail to give just that synoptic view which seems to me essential for those who begin to study the subject. When this book was first published, I hoped, at a later stage, to cover the ground far more adequately, and in a much larger work. But I venture to believe that this book as it is has been found useful, and deserves the thorough revision which I have bestowed upon it twenty years after its original publication. I have in effect re-written it from start to finish, and, I believe and hope, have made it a good deal better in the process. In addition, I have added chapters dealing with the past twenty years, and have added a number of new charts and tables designed to illustrate, better than those which they replace, the changes in working-class conditions during the period of the Industrial Revolution. I am by no means so confident as I was that I shall ever write the bigger, more comprehensive study that I had then in mind. To some extent, a part of the ground has been covered in The Common People, in which I collaborated with my brother-in-law, Raymond Postgate; and I have made other specialist studies by myself, such as Chartist Portraits, and expect to make more. The big, definitive book I may or may not live to write: assuredly, there is no prospect of my attempting to write it now.

Naturally, this book owes a very great deal to writers who have studied, far more closely than I, particular branches of the subject-to Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to Mr. Max Beer, and to many others. They have done much to revive among British workers a knowledge of their own history, and thereby, I believe, to give them greater strength in facing the problems of the present.