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This growth in self-respect and political consciousness was one real gain of the Industrial Revolution. It dispelled some forms of superstition and of deference, and made certain kinds of oppression no longer tolerable. We can find abundant testimony as to the steady growth of the ethos of mutualit…

[...] The twenty years between 1815 and 1835 see also the first indications of independent trade union action among women workers. John Wade, commenting upon a strike of 1,500 female card-setters in the West Riding in 1835, pointed the moral: ‘Alarmists may view these indications of female independ…

There is a sense in which any religion which places great emphasis on the after-life is the Chiliasm of the defeated and the hopeless.

From both it took over the almost-Manichaean sense of guilt at man’s depravity.

The Methodists made of religion (wrote Southey) ‘a thing of sensation and passion, craving perpetually for sympathy and stimulants’.1 These Sabbath orgasms of feeling made more possible the single-minded weekday direction of these energies to the consummation of productive labour. Moreover, since s…