The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City offers a broad examination of the history of the Victorian urban working class in Manchester through the eras of Chartism and post-Chartism. Rather than focus narrowly on labour relations or political movements, it begins from the belief that radical politics can only be understood in the context of the social and cultural structures within which it operated. The Emergence challenges those views of the post-1848 working class which argued that it was essentially co-opted into various forms of collaboration and individualistic self-improvement. Middle class ‘moral imperialism’ was no more successful in the 1850s than it had been in the 1840s. Instead it traces the essential persistence of radical critiques of the nature of social, political and economic relations, and explains the collapse of Chartism as arising out of a shifting ‘strategic consciousness’, in which the developing power of the state and its willingess to make limited concessions required a different set of political strategies.