Made by Labour: A Material and Visual History of British Labour, c. 1780-1924

By Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright

This is the first full-length study of the material and visual culture of the British labour movement in almost half a century. It draws together the fruits of recent research into a comprehensive material and visual analysis of the nineteenth-century labour movement’s development. It analyses the meaning of ‘labour things’, the role they played in the lives of working people and the ways they have influenced the writing of labour history. Over ninety beautifully illustrated, expertly contextualised objects are used to narrate the history of British labour in its most crucial phase of development. Chapters on curation and preservation, a directory of museums where labour things may be seen, and a full bibliography complete the treatment of this important and rapidly developing field, making the book not just essential academic reading but a handbook for anyone who wishes to explore this vital part of our shared culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720088

Nick Mansfield

Rudyard J. Alcocer is the Forrest & Patsy Shumway Chair of Excellence in Romance Languages in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He teaches all levels of Latin American literature and culture, and has designed and taught advanced courses involving the Hispanic Caribbean and the African Diaspora in Spanish America.

Book preview

1UNDERSTANDING LABOUR THINGS

(I) INTRODUCTION

Britain’s long nineteenth century was labour’s century. The period from the 1780s to the 1920s witnessed the formation and rise of a powerful labour movement, which might be seen as a great river flowing through British life. Its source lies somewhere in the protest movements of shearmen, stockingers and handloom weavers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its tributaries include the Corresponding Societies of the 1790s, the underground revolutionary groups inspired by the ideas of Thomas Spence, the great constitutional reform movement that assembled at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in August 1819, the trade societies and unions that became a national cause célèbre after the prosecution of the Tolpuddle labourers in 1834, and the utopian socialists and co-operators that followed the ideas of Robert Owen. There were times when the tributaries came together to form one great flow, such as during the Chartist agitation of the late 1830s and 1840s. At other times the flow became broken and dissipated, and the channels braided; some went underground, later re-emerging with a different character. This is what happened after the great Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common in April 1848. In the face of overwhelming odds working people changed their priorities in the mid-nineteenth century to focus on more immediately achievable ends: education, local politics, dignity and control in the workplace, and cooperation. In the century’s last decades, however, the braided streams again coalesced into one vast current: an expansion and broadening of trade unionism, the re-emergence of socialist politics in a new and updated form, the idea of independent labour representation and, by the start of the new century, the new Labour Party. By 1924 – the end of the ‘long nineteenth century’ – the labour movement had reached a position from which it could aspire to ultimate control of the nation through the agency of the first Labour government. Labour had come of age.¹

This book narrates labour’s rise through an examination of its material and visual culture. It does so in the belief that history should be experienced with the senses as well as the intellect. This is, after all, how we experience the present. It was also how people experienced the past, which was three-dimensional – colourful, noisy, smelly and tactile. It is impossible to recover the full range of dimensions within which the past was performed and experienced but comprehending the fragments of material and visual culture presented in the pages that follow can take us some of the way. All of them were important to the people that made them, owned them, beheld them, lost, found and bequeathed them. Material objects are the only aspects of the past that truly exist in the present, and in this respect they defy time. Yet they have been marginal to most historical narratives. Our aim is to remedy this by presenting a relatable, accessible and usable history made from things and images. Some of the objects here will be familiar; others have not been widely seen before. This is the first time that they have been presented together to form a narrative, which we aim to present with the rigour of the academy, but which we hope will resonate with a wider readership than the merely academic.

There is an urgency to our task. The early 2020s have seen British politics increasingly revolving around a series of ‘culture wars’. A Conservative Government has aggressively promoted material symbols of British nationalism, through which it has made a visceral appeal to certain sections of British society. Material and visual culture has become the subject of intense political controversy, most dramatically played out in relation to public memorials in our towns and cities. The toppling of the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020 was just one moment in a wider campaign to make the tangible heritage that frames and defines public spaces more egalitarian.² In response, those on the political right have complained about an alleged ‘cancel culture’ and have mobilised to ‘protect the statues’. Many of the culture warriors doubtless do not realise that these arguments are not new. Joseph Pointer, Sheffield pattern-maker, socialist and Labour MP for Attercliffe from 1909 until 1914, would have understood them well enough. In 1910 he objected to plans to erect a statue of the Duke of Norfolk (who had gifted some park land to the city) in forthright terms: ‘the only place for a statue of the duke was the refuse tip’, he told Sheffield City Council, ‘If such a statue was reared … he hoped the working men of the city would gather in their thousands to resent the insult, pull it to the ground, and trample it in the dust.’³ Sixty-five years earlier the Chartist Northern Star commented on the erection in Newcastle of a statue of George Stephenson, inventor of the steam engine, contrasting it favourably with statues of kings or queens ‘that [were] only so high because [they had] so much wickedness to stand upon’.⁴ Twenty-first-century arguments over statues are, it seems, just another chapter in a feud over material culture that reaches back into past centuries. One of our aims in the following pages is to provide a historical context to current struggles and to support the engagement of those wishing to assert the value of the material and visual heritage of working people in the face of more top-down representations of our tangible past.

This introductory chapter examines the definitions of our subject matter and provides context for the objects and images that comprise the central sections of the book. It will begin by setting the historiographical context: outlining the development of the so-called ‘material turn’ in the study of the humanities and examining the ways in which what we might call ‘thing-ology’ has influenced historical writing, particularly that concerning the history of labour. It will then define our topic more clearly, examining what we mean by the words ‘labour’ and ‘things’. Both are open to a wide range of interpretations that must be fully understood if we are to appreciate the relationship between them. The subsequent sections will examine that relationship within the immediate historical context of the long nineteenth century. They will do so by first considering the way in which the material world was made for the nineteenth-century working class, through the processes of industrialisation and commercialisation, and then focusing upon the ways in which that world was experienced and modified by working people – how, in other words, ordinary people exercised their own agency to develop a material and visual literacy of their own. The final section is concerned with the ways in which this was achieved collectively, through the agency of the labour movement. It will outline the shape of a visual and material narrative of the long nineteenth century’s labour movement and consider some of the issues in approaching working-class history from this direction.

(II) HISTORIOGRAPHY

We are unashamedly presenting a work of labour history. The term has perhaps been unfashionable, and not so long ago the discipline was considered to be in terminal decline. A so-called ‘crisis of labour history’ arose from a number of converging factors in the late twentieth century. ‘The Forward March of Labour’ had been decisively halted, Marxism had been eclipsed by the ideology of the ‘Third Way’, and what one commentator prematurely called ‘the end of history’ had made the great themes of labour history – collective organisation and working-class struggle – seem marginal.⁵ Labour history’s uncertainties were part of a more general wave of postmodernist historical revisionism. A bewildering array of ‘turns’ – the cultural, linguistic and spatial among them – turned the discipline of history inside out, obliging historians to reconsider their relationship with their sources (or ‘traces’, as they were now called), abandon their established narratives and ponder a more fragmented past which really had become a foreign country.⁶ For many of us, whose historical instincts were based upon a combination of E. H. Carr’s liberal assumptions and the heroic narratives of British labour history, this was disorientating.⁷ It was not, however, without value. In any case, reports of the death of labour history were premature. The events of the early twenty-first century – the financial crisis of 2008, the return of visible mass poverty, class tension, a more polarised politics and a renewed popular interest in socialism – have all breathed new life into the discipline. Labour historians have assimilated the best of the revisionist insights referred to above, and their discipline has re-emerged from the margins revitalised by new perspectives and methodologies, one of which – the analysis of visual and material sources – is explored in this book. The following discussion will contextualise this exploration, first, by examining the philosophical roots of the ‘material turn’; secondly, by emphasising its interdisciplinary nature, and finally by examining its impact upon the study of history and labour history.

The philosophical underpinnings of the ‘material turn’ are multifarious. Nietzsche, Freud and Weber, among others, all influenced the development of academic approaches to materiality,⁸ but undeniably the most important philosophical framework for the study of material culture was provided by Marx. It is of primary significance that Marx’s analysis of capitalism begins with the commodity: ‘an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another’. Marx analysed both the nature of value inherent in commodities and the relationship of commodities to the labour process and to the individual. He recognised that commodities are not merely ‘trivial’ and ‘easily understood’, but are ‘abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’. Once ‘materials furnished by nature’ are altered by the application of human labour, he argued, they are ‘changed into something transcendent’; these commodities are ‘social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses’.⁹ All of the objects featured in the chapters that follow may be considered in the light of these comments, and in the context of the ideas of thinkers who built upon Marx’s perspectives in the twentieth century. These include the ‘science’ of semiotics, developed in the years prior to the Great War by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, which conceptualised the human environment as a system of signs, each signifying a communicated meaning dependent upon context.¹⁰ Another important contribution was made by the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin in the interwar period. Benjamin examined the meaning of objects and art in the age of mass production, elaborating upon Marx’s ideas of commodity fetishism to assert the concept of an object’s ‘aura’ – its essentially unique, unrepeatable property. For Benjamin, the industrial age, mass production and particularly the advent of photography and film, fundamentally changed the nature of objects, depleting their ‘aura’ and irretrievably altering the relationship between people and things.¹¹ Collectively speaking, the objects presented here were made and used by people who lived through this momentous period of social and cultural development. Benjamin’s ideas were developed after his premature death in 1940 by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Baudrillard’s Marxian analysis of the relationships between objects and their social contexts in The System of Objects (1968) is of particular significance in exposing the ‘processes whereby people relate to [objects] and … the systems of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom’.¹² By the final decades of the twentieth century the work of these thinkers had stimulated the study of material and visual culture, and spurred the development of methodologies to facilitate it within numerous academic disciplines.¹³

This took place not just within disciplines but between them. Indeed, a defining feature of the interest in material and visual culture stimulated by structuralist and post-structuralist theory is its necessarily interdisciplinary nature. Archaeology, anthropology, sociology, geography, art history, museum and heritage studies, and English literature have all played their part in the development of the material turn. Or, to put it another way, the influence of materiality across this range of disciplines has played an important role in eroding the boundaries between them.¹⁴ Archaeologists, for example, have always been concerned primarily with the interpretation of artefacts, but the fusion of archaeological methodology with that of the folklorist or anthropologist has added new dimensions to both disciplines. Anthropologists have embraced the importance of ‘things’ in addition to customs or behaviours;¹⁵ while archaeologists have developed what they call ‘post-processualist’ and ‘phenomenological’ approaches that emphasise the importance of the relationship between human behaviour and the material world, and the role of sensation and experience in the interpretation of material culture.¹⁶ Meanwhile, encounters with material culture in other disciplines have introduced further elements to the intellectual mix: sociologists have analysed ‘things’ in relation to science and technology;¹⁷ geographers have located material culture within a spatial context, emphasising the importance of layout, placing and arrangement;¹⁸ students of literature have broken into the museum, developing their own ‘thing theory’ to illuminate literary texts.¹⁹ This survey of materially inspired interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation could go on: as one literary scholar put it earlier this century, ‘It seems that we are all cultural materialists nowadays.’²⁰

Historians of Britain’s nineteenth century were, by the 1980s, no exception to this trend, as the publication in 1988 of Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things testified. Briggs’s professed aim was to reconstruct what he called the ‘intelligible universes’ of the Victorians.²¹ His book viewed ‘things’, borrowing from T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, as ‘emissaries of past cultures’, and took the reader on a labyrinthine tour of Victoriana: collections, optical tools, portraits and figurines, common household objects, pieces of clothing, pieces of coal, iron and paper, postage stamps and telephones. It was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an odd book, tending towards an anatomy’.²² It presented ‘the spirit of the age in tangible terms’, but seemed almost indifferent to the theoretical perspectives discussed above.²³ Perhaps the most telling comment on Victorian Things was made by Catherine Hall, who sensed ‘an absence at the centre of the book’, arising from its failure ‘to consider the relation between objects and their meaning’. She observed that ‘the proliferation of the things can never be understood unless it is set in the context of the beliefs and practices of the people who used them’.²⁴ Victorian Things did a great deal to promote interest in the materiality of Victorian Britain, but it is nevertheless something of an eccentric outlier in theoretical and historiographic terms, an afterthought to Briggs’s earlier Victorian People (1955) and Victorian Cities (1963). Although it is a rich exploration of the material wealth of Victorian society, it is wholly empirical in its approach. It avoids direct engagement with the theoretical developments that were, as Briggs was writing, revolutionising understandings of the role of material culture in human history and complicating ideas of the social function and significance of ‘things’.

Since Victorian Things historians have evolved more systematic and theoretical approaches to visual and material sources. They have learnt, as Raphael Samuel put it, to ‘read the signs’, evolving ‘a more prismatic way of looking at things than a positivist preoccupation with facts’, and acting on the invitation presented by structuralism and post-structuralism ‘to consider society as a spectacle in which appearances are double-coded, meanings occult and images opaque’.²⁵ The impact of this upon the nature of historical enquiry has been profound. Historians have embraced the ‘material turn’ with enthusiasm, have overcome their traditional distrust of the extralinguistic and have developed new narratives and analyses.²⁶ Interdisciplinary influences and the global nature of materiality have encouraged history to become more supranational and transcultural in nature.²⁷ Material history has intersected with other histories, for example the history of the body and the emotions.²⁸ The ubiquity and mundanity of ‘things’ has encouraged history to become more quotidian in focus, with the ‘politics of everyday life’ moving from the margins to centre stage,²⁹ which has led in turn to a collapse of divisions between studies of the public and domestic spheres, as historians have realised that the home is an equally important site of political expression and discourse as the public sphere or the ‘mass platform’.³⁰ Richard Grassby usefully summarised the insights brought into the discipline of history by new approaches to material culture in 2005:

Objects can be read as well as counted. Goods can make visible statements about the hierarchies of value. They carry social and personal information within a larger framework. Inanimate objects communicate relationships and mediate progress through the social world; their diffusion bridges cultural boundaries and connects centers with peripheries. Although artifacts are produced at particular moments, their persistence creates histories. In addition to information and ideas, they can also convey hidden cultural constraints, moral standards, social fears, and emotionally laden issues … Material culture sheds light on how people understood themselves.³¹

The outcome of all this, considered alongside the influences of other late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century historiographic ‘turns’, is that history as a discipline in the 2020s is almost unrecognisable compared to its mid-twentieth-century former self. And labour history is no exception.

The great labour historians of the past paid scant attention to the place of material or visual culture within the labour movement. They were more interested in structures and events than in things or images. They regarded the minute books of trade societies and political associations as simple sources of information, not iconic statements of existence, and they tended to see the banners and flags described in press reports of mass meetings as incidental rather than integral to events. There were exceptions. Of these, the exhibition organised by G. D. H. Cole and Collett’s bookshop in London in 1937 is notable. The ‘Road to ’37’ claimed to show ‘in print and picture the story of the working-class struggle through six generations to the present day’. Its aim was simultaneously didactic and affirmative:

Step by step it leads you to the present day and in the most graphic way tells the epic story of the workers’ fight for freedom. Older members of the Movement may re-live the stirring times of the past, and those of us who are now taking up the struggle may see and understand the glorious heritage handed down by yesterday’s leaders. Here you may weigh what has been won, and lost too, and what there remains to be done in this heroic work.

It claimed, perhaps slightly defensively, ‘to be no dry-as-dust exhibition’, and was supplemented by expert guides and lectures to ‘explain the exhibits and to enable you to bring to life the recorded exploits of the stalwarts of past generations of the working class movement’. It was not an exhibition of three-dimensional material culture; rather it was an exhibition of print culture, comprising mainly documents, books and cartoons. It was significant, though, in that it presented printed items not simply as texts, but as objects. It represented an attempt to draw together the printed culture of the working-class movement in one place for the first time and to present it as a spectacle to be not just read, but experienced. Exhibits included a ‘unique’ copy of the Beehive newspaper, lent by former dockers’ leader John Burns, and ‘the actual cheque’ paid to the Taff Vale Railway Company after the Taff Vale Judgement of 1901, lent by the National Union of Railwaymen. Cole’s exhibition was ahead of its time and exceptional.³²

It was the 1970s before systematic attention was again focused upon the material and visual dimensions of the labour movement, and focus shifted in particular to trade union emblems and banners. In a landmark study of 1971, R. A. Leeson recognised that trade union emblems ‘represent the movement as trade unionists saw it themselves and wanted others to see it’.³³ Leeson moved beyond Cole’s simple celebratory approach by demonstrating the functionality of material and visual culture to the labour movement and initiating the task of decoding and interpreting labour’s lost visual language. In this, he was accompanied by John Gorman, whose Banner Bright of 1973 took up Leeson’s themes on a greater scale.³⁴ Gorman’s book is a sumptuous presentation of the labour movement’s banners. It was accompanied by an exhibition, held at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which asserted the dual meanings of the banners in the past and present. Partisan and acutely aware of its own place in the history of the labour movement, it conveys the sense of a closing era:

To review the banners of the trade union movement from 1821 is to see a pictorial history of trade union and working class progress. They are a grass roots visual record of the fears, hopes and aspirations of the common people of their time. We may never again see the great pageantry associated with the working people that existed during those bitter struggles before the first world war. The banners lie now for the most part, neglected and rotting, cumbersome and dirty, in basements, trade union halls, working men’s clubs, pubs and even chapels, a silent witness to the courage of our fathers and grandfathers who fought for justice and a decent life for ordinary working people.³⁵

The following decades confirmed Gorman’s prescience. The Thatcher government’s assault on trade unions may have brought many union banners out onto the streets, but for some – such as that behind which the Maerdy miners famously marched back to work, proud but defeated, in 1985 – it was the last time. Gorman’s response was an even more comprehensive look at labour’s materiality: Images of Labour (1985). This book expanded his initial focus on banners to include a celebration of the ‘visual evidence of labour history’ more generally, including ‘badges, banners, emblems, tokens, coins, commemorative ware, certificates, regalia, membership cards, paintings, prints and the day-to-day paraphernalia that emerges from the organisation of any group of people’.³⁶ Rooted in an activist tradition that it sought to pass on, it placed material culture at the centre of labour’s story. It remains a work of immense value, an essential sourcebook for anyone interested in labour’s past. Without it, our understanding of ‘labour things’ would be much diminished, and its achievement is an integral part of the inspiration for the material and visual history presented here. Its primary concern is the presentation of a typology of labour items rather than a narrative of labour’s history. In this respect, it very much reflected the preoccupation of its time: the preservation of a labour heritage, which, lacking the state-sponsored protection accorded to the material culture of dominant social groups, was threatened with oblivion. It was a literary expression of the effort to preserve the physical fabric of labour heritage that gathered pace in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, which is discussed in the final chapter of this book.

It should be clear from the above that labour historians were at the forefront of the so-called ‘material turn’ in historical thinking. Even before the conscious focus on material history in the work of Leeson, Gorman and Briggs, the 1960s pioneers of ‘history from below’ almost unconsciously drew material themes into their work. E. P. Thompson’s discussion of the role played by clocks in signifying the imposition of time discipline in early industrial capitalism stands out as one notable example.³⁷ Thompson’s work on ritual and charivari was likewise informed by an acute understanding of the ways in which extralinguistic communication within plebeian movements depended upon the use of material and visual cues. His use of key images, such as the medal of the London Corresponding Society and the ‘Enter None But Ludd’ chitty in The Making of the English Working Class is also a significant statement in itself.³⁸ Thompson’s engagement with visual and material aspects of the past had a long-term influence that may be seen in the work of contemporary historians such as Katrina Navickas and Matthew Roberts.³⁹ Indeed, it may be argued that the wider adoption of this inherent material and visual turn in the methodology of ‘history from below’ was in itself a factor in eroding the distinct identity of labour history. The so-called ‘crisis in labour history’ mentioned earlier was, at least in part, a result of the innovative nature of labour history itself. One testament to this was the so-called ‘new political history’ championed by James Vernon, which claimed to eschew the ‘traditional sources of political history which have tended to privilege the most literate and articulate members of the political nation’ in favour of ‘much neglected traces like ballads, banners, cartoons, handbills, statues, architecture, the uses of time and space, and the rich vein of ceremonial and iconographic forms’.⁴⁰ Whether located within an explicitly defined ‘labour history’ or not, a growing appreciation of the importance of material and visual culture to working people has become an important part of the historiographic landscape, immeasurably advancing our understanding of the history of labour. The closing part of this section will offer a brief overview of some of the more important aspects of this development.

One has been the continuation of the work pioneered by Gorman: the continued collection, surveying and analysis of surviving artefacts. This book is partly a progress statement of that collective project. Naturally enough, given their central role and importance to working-class activists, banners and emblems continue to be a key focus, and it is no coincidence that they feature prominently in the collection presented here. In 1998 the People’s History Museum at Manchester, itself the home of 360 trade union and other radical banners, initiated the National Banner Survey. This recorded details of over 2,500 surviving banners from across Britain, thus firmly establishing the importance of banners as sites of memory and as a rich resource for those writing histories of labour.⁴¹ A more detailed account of this work, which has provided an essential platform for scholars to develop an understanding of banners, their use and meaning, and the people who made them, is provided in chapter four.⁴² Recently Matthew Roberts has used nineteenth-century press reports to reconstruct banners that have perished, extending the work of the banner survey into the virtual sphere. Roberts’s work opens up some fascinating issues about the relationship between material and textual records. It also presents some formidable methodological problems: the degree to which newspaper reports can be read as accurate representations of banners or any other forms of visual and material culture is surely open to question. Nevertheless, in the absence of surviving material evidence, they are irrefutably better than no evidence at all, and Roberts’s work offers a significant analysis of the relationship between nineteenth-century radicals, their visual culture and the state.⁴³

If banners have featured centrally in the development of labour’s material and visual historiography, they have not been the only items to attract attention. The pioneering work of Paul Pickering examines the ways in which items of clothing – Henry Hunt’s famous white hat, or Feargus O’Connor’s references to his supporters’ ‘fustian jackets’ – could be used as what he called ‘mnemotechnic aids’: items that jogged the memory of their beholders, serving as forms of symbolic communication at public meetings. Clothing, he argued, could communicate ‘class without words’.⁴⁴ James Epstein broadened the argument further by examining the significance of an item often used by radicals in abstract rather than material form: the cap of liberty. Epstein demonstrated how this could take on different, sometimes multiple meanings according to its context, and how these changed over time as radicalism’s relationship with authority developed.⁴⁵ The insights provided by Pickering and Epstein provided a foundation enabling subsequent historians to examine the symbolic role of material and visual props within popular movements across the nineteenth century. Studies of the ‘vestimentary symbolism’ of early industrial and agrarian popular movements such as Luddism, Swing and Rebecca have, for example, rendered those movements intelligible in new ways. No longer do they belong to a world of ‘primitive rebels’ half-consciously groping their way towards more ‘modern’ forms of organisation; analysis of their material culture allows us to relate to them on something like their own terms.⁴⁶ As we move beyond ‘popular protest’ to studies of the more formally organised nineteenth-century labour movement, the scope for analysis of material and visual communication widens even further. It has, for example, extended to the study of mantlepiece and household items such as figurines,⁴⁷ cartoons and posters,⁴⁸ and classical imagery of all types.⁴⁹

This work demonstrates, as Mark Nixon, Gordon Pentland and Matthew Roberts argue in their study of the Scottish reform movement, that the symbolism of material culture allowed radicals and working-class activists to send ‘silent messages’ to their followers. In an age of repression, its inherent ambiguity afforded them greater licence than the spoken word and allowed the expression of a much wider range of ideas than was ever possible in print. Its analysis therefore allows us to ‘read the movement more fully’.⁵⁰ Recent scholarship has shown material and visual culture to be an essential component in the internal dynamics of popular movements, of crucial importance in nourishing associational culture and promoting coherence and unity.⁵¹ The relationship between ‘leaders and led’, which has exercised labour historians in no small way,⁵² has been illuminated through the study of ‘things’.⁵³ The same is true of another relationship crucial to the functioning and existence of the labour movement: that between generations. The role of commemoration and memory in shaping radical politics and sustaining a ‘radical tradition’ has been shown to have had important material and visual dimensions.⁵⁴ It has become apparent that all of these processes took place not just in the performative, public sphere, on the mass platform or in the press, but also in the private sphere, where material and visual culture helped form and reinforce political beliefs.⁵⁵ Working-class politics both colluded and collided with personal identities (gendered, local, regional and national), and material and visual culture played a crucial role in brokering this relationship.

The above is merely the briefest summary of some of the key insights that material and visual approaches have brought to the field of labour history. This historiography has explored some of the key theoretical problems in using material and visual culture in historical analysis. It includes some excellent studies of the ways in which material and visual culture illuminates the history of the labour movement, focusing upon particular types of objects or symbols, particular periods or movements, or particular places. What we do not yet have is an over-arching narrative of