Disraeli: Myth and Reality, Policy and Presentation

John Walton
University
A recognition of Disraeli's style, especially as projected through the rhetoric of speeches, is central to an appreciation of Disraeli the politician and Disraeli the man. This style formed the climate for others to execute social and imperial policies although Disraeli's initiatives and actions in these spheres were very limited. Behind the flamboyance of presentation and tactical manoeuvre was Disraeli's belief in paternalist landed society - the interest which he worked to conserve and sustain. Enduring Fame

of Lancnster
historians, but he does not elicit widespread spontaneous identification and acclaim as Oisraeli does. Disraeli wrote popular novels whereas Gladstone specialized in abstruse theological tracts, but that is only part of the story, Churchill is a long-term contender for lasting glory, Pitt the younger did well for a generation or two after his death: as the 'Pilot that weathered the storm' of the French wars, he was celebrated by Tory dining clubs for many years. Peel was commemorated by large numbers of statues in industrial towns; but they were built out of the subscriptions of working men in gratitude for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and only the city pigeons now worship at these shrines. The other parties have nothing similar to offer. I was once told by an elderly voter in Lancaster that he was loyal to the Liberal Party in recognition of the excellent policies of Campbell-Bannerman, but this encounter was shrouded in eccentricity, in a town with a much more resilient Liberal tradition than most. And Disraeli also has a remarkable capacity for attracting the endorsement, however qualified, of his political enemies. Michael Foot famously named his dog 'Dizzy'. No other politician has such an enduring, popular aura; no other statesman can be relied on to influence the attitudes of voters a century and more beyond the grave. This aura has more to do with how Oisraeli presented himself, and how his successors have presented him, than with what he actually did; but it is, in itself, an important historical fact. The Disraelian Myth. Politician The Disraelian myth, assiduously promoted by propagandists from Lord Randolph Churchill onwards, and enshrined in the Primrose League which commemorated his supposed favourite flower and attracted a mass working-class 'membership in many urban constituencies, has several dimensions. It presents a Conservative Party which pulls together people from all social levels, from peer to pauper, in the celebration of English (and I use the word advisedly) patriotism. It emphasizes what is supposed to unite people rather than what divides them; and, above all, it celebrates the shared heritage of the English constitution. Above all, perhaps, the Disraelian legacy is attached to the idea of a li,'il1g constitution, justified and sanctified by its origins in the mists of time, handed down from numberless generations, powerfully validated by tradition and practice, flexible in its details but enduring at its core. This kind of constitution is contrasted with inferior foreign concoctions, imposed and alien, appealing to abstract rights and principles rather than to tradition and usage. Such identification with tradition strikes a chord in, for example, all those who opposed the imposition of new names and A Presentable

N 3 APRIL, 1990, the Spanish conservative newspaper ABC reported on the Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square, and tried to explain the context in which they took place:

On the one hand, commercial circles have experienced spectacular growth; on the other, important regions, hitherto devoted to manufacturing industry, have fallen into deep depression owing to their inability to adapt to technological change. The wealth of some sectors and regions contrasts with the impoverishment of others. Once again we see appearing the two Englands which Disraeli proclaimed.

More than a century after his death, there was no need for ABC to explain to its readers who this foreign politician was, or to elaborate on the illusion to the 'Two Nations' idea which "'as so famously developed in his novel Sybil. This mode of presentation implicitly identifies Oisraeli as a European statesman of enduring fame, almost in the same league as Bismarck. For a persistent loser in domestic politics, with only one session as Prime Minister with a majority government in the "'hole of his long political career, and that when his powers were beginning to fade, this is an amazing accolade. Disraeli himself would have enjoyed it immensely; and in England at the same time his name was being invoked by Conservative opponents of the policies and style of Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet. Heseltine, Heath and other dissident 'wets' used the Oisraelian ideal of 'One Nation' as shorthand for the advocacy of humanitarian interventionism in domestic policy and as a coded appeal for a return to a more emollient alternative to the strident and abrasive certainties of current policies and rhetoric. Where this version of a Oisraelian tradition \,'ill locate itself in John Major's Conservative Part~' is a matter for conjecture; but it would be unwise to assume that the old magician's legacy will lose its potency. It is difficult to find another British politician with such enduring powers of adaptable legendgeneration. Gladstone still strikes sparks among

Hughenden MalloI', Buckinghamshire, purclzased by Disraeli in 1852 and the house in which he died. Hughellden put Disraeli among the lallded society whose role in an aristocratic constitution he sougllt to defelld. boundaries in local government in 1974, and still case that the need to seem to be caring and campaign for the restoration of Rutland or Westmorresponsible, and to be acting in the national interest, land. It cuts across party lines, and sets England will affect actual policies as well as images of policy. apart from other countries, appealing to national pride and a sense of national identity. The Safe Hands of the Aristocracy Within this wider myth of the English constitution and English superiority, Oisraeli has been Oisraeli gave this view of how an elite-led politics associated more specifically with pride in the ought to work a high profile throughout his long Empire, the assertive protection of traditional institucareer. His Vindicatioll of the Ellglish COllstitl/tioll, tions such as the monarchy and the Church of published in 1835, set his ideas out clearly, though England, and ameliorative social reform of a kind with characteristic rhetorical flourishes. In the prowhich is held to celebrate the ultimate community of cess he accused the Whigs of being an aristocratic interests between rulers and ruled. Here, above all, clique or cabal who represented only their own we encounter the 'One .Nation' catch-phrase: the grubby self-interest, cloaked. in foreign nostrums most enduring and effective key-words in Oisraelian about political rights. As part of his hierarchical Conservatism and its legacy. vision of society and government, he was also a staunch defender of the powers and responsibilities of traditional local government against the threat of Duties of the Powerful and Privileged centralizing tendencies which could, he alleged, lead At the root of 'One Nation' was the idea that the to continental-style despotism. This is not to suggest Conservative Party's essential role was to sustain that he would have endorsed high levels of redistriwhat Oisraeli held to be a Ilatl/ral harmony of butive local government spending operating through interests between the various layers of an ordered, democratic institutions: such an eventuality was not practical politics in his time, though it was conhierarchical society, presided over by a responsible, humane, caring aristocracy which recognizes a duty gruent with current fears about the possible abuses to govern in the interests of the nation as a whole of democracy if the working class became dominant rather than solely its own interests as a class. It is and legislated in its own immediate interests. this recognition that property and power confer Oisraeli's concern was to preserve the autonomy of duties as well as privileges on their holders that is local and subordinate institutions, but in the hands the hallmark of traditional Toryism. Even if we of the aristocracy, the gentry and the propertied conclude that this posture is merely rhetorical, or classes. He wanted, essentially, to sustain governthat it serves as a smokescreen behind which the ment on traditional lines, through established instipolitics of greed and self-interest can proceed tutions, by an open aristocracy which governed beyond the vision of the electorate, it remains the responsibly, relieved distress, and allowed the restHISTORY REVIEW q

less and ambitious to seek advancement with some hope of success. He was, however, a believer more in advancement through patronage than through open competition by examination and on merit on what came to be the preferred Liberal model. Disraeli owed his own position to the help of a sequence of aristocratic patrons, including Palmerston, on whose behalf he undertook some decidedly shady commissions during the 1840s. In turn, he found younger proteges of his own, such as Lord Henry Lennox, with whom he exchanged emotional letters in the 1840s and whose advancement he was still seeking, in controversial ways, when Prime Minister thirty years later. For Disraeli, politics where it counted were highly personal, involving a tiny aristocracy of lineage, wealth, intellect and flair. His concern was to keep them that way. The Central Creed of Oisraeli's Mission Disraeli's central mission was to preserve the aristocratic constitution in Church and State from the political threats which were engendered by the unprecedented economic and social changes of a period characterized by industrial, commercial and communications revolutions and massive urbanization, coupled with the new political beliefs of liberals and radicals. J.CD. Clark argues that this battle had already been lost, with the subverting of the old constitution through Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the first Reform Act between 1828 and 1832. Perhaps the old constitution was doomed; but, if so, its death-throes were remarkably protracted. David Cannadine begins his analysis of the decline and fall of the British aristocracy in 1880, pointing to the 'overwhelmingly landed and aristocratic' tone of the Gladstone cabinet of that year, and reminding us that 'the Salisbury administrations of 1885 and 1886 were almost entirely filled by patricians'. Their condescension towards the small minority of 'new gentry' within their ranks may. help to put into perspective John Vincent's remarks about the men 'without great social position' in Disraeli's own cabinet: they only seem so if viewed from the stratospheric perspective of Lord Salisbury and his circle. The importance of Disraeli's role as defender of the aristocratic constitution and the rule of landed society has not always been emphasized as it should by historians; but it lies at the core of an understanding of Disraeli in terms of the politics of his own time. It is not a central component of the Disraeli myth as it has come down to us, and historians may have downgraded it because the preservation of landed society and its institutions has faded from the official agenda of twentieth-century politics. It has, of course, been high on an unofficial agenda of heritage and cultural politics in which the National Trust's policy of country house preservation has had a high profile since the 1930s; but that is another story. A further point about the limited visibility of this Disraelian theme is that it does not find direct

expression in positive legislation and visible reforms. As Vincent argues, however, 'One must not judge Conservative leaders by Liberal criteria. . . it is the job of Conservative leaders not to legislate'. The survival of aristocratic power, and of respect for it and deference to it, was an important achievement, although it is, of course, impossible to isolate the role of Disraeli himself in this complex process. Even those who dismiss Disraeli's declarations of principle as self-serving vapourings, and regard him rather as master of the shady political deal and of disreputable jockeying for position, accept that he was serious in an overriding attachment to the enduring power of the landed interest. This may seem bizarre. Disraeli was Jewish, by race if not religion. He was personally on a different plane from the bluff John Bull foxhunting squires who formed the backbone of his back benches, and from the stern upright Evangelicals who came to have a growing influence on his front benches. He had, in his youth, sought to make an impression by living dangerously, cultivating an image of frivolity, dandyism and fast living which proved hard to dispel, although it was, of course, attractive to some. His position as the son of a literary man, and as himself a novelist, added to the air of bohemianism, despite his father's own respectability. He had not had the standard public school and Oxbridge education which was expected of a Conservative politician of his generation, and this gave him an alien-seeming frame of cultural and literary reference. Moreover, he was chronically short of money and visibly ambitious and 'on the make'. This was the stuff of which legends are eventually made; the problem was to reach and sustain a position from which to make the legend, But Disraeli also had assets. His Jewishness did bring him up against the endemic anti-semitism of his party and of society at large; but it also gave him an aristocratic frame of reference: he identified with the Jews as an ancient, untainted and superior race and claimed descent from the most aristocratic sectors of international Jewry. He used his Jewishness as part of his cultivation of an air of mystery and romance, which aided his acceptance in aristocratic society. And the experience of his Buckinghamshire neighbours the Rothschilds showed how Jews could become accepted into county society. Disraeli's father Isaac had himself been effectively 'squire' of the village of Bradenham, and Disraeli himself revelled in the role on his own estate at Hughenden. Not that he was ever fully assimilated: plots and cabals against his leadership dogged the whole of his career at the head of the Conservatives, and colleagues vented their spleen from time to time about the foreignness of his outlook. But his role as defender of the aristocratic society in whose innermost circles he moved makes complete sense when placed in full context.

Conserving Values by Sleight of Hand The key episodes in Disraeli's career can certainly be
u_____ :i7

I1ISR,\EI.I MYTH AND I~FAUTY, I'()UCY AND I'RESENTATlO!\! ~_u

interpreted in terms of the defence of landed society. His opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws, which really made his name, looks like an obvious defence of landed privilege; but in fact it is more complicated. Personal animus against Peel, and objections, perhaps on principle, to his betrayal of party and election promises, played their part; and Oisraeli was careful not to provide a straightforward endorsement for agricultural protection. He later denied that he had ever been a protectionist; and, as P.R. Ghosh has pointed out, his later performances as Chancellor of the Exchequer followed the financial orthodoxies of the time, apart from an alleged propensity to let expenditure rise to meet revenue which drew attacks from Gladstonians. Financial orthodoxy should not be elevated into a central Oisraelian tenet, however: laissez-faire and low taxation were essential elements in the political atmosphere, which Oisraeli would have been unable to challenge even had he been willing. More important, because more distinctive, were his attempts to look after the landed interest in his 1852 budget, while at the same time broadening the Conservative Party's appeal to a wider constituency. This was to be an enduring theme. The Second Reform Act was certainly an attempt to sustain and legitimize aristocratic domination of the constitution by carefully selected franchise extensions and astute manipulation of the redistribution of seats and the re-drawing of constituency boundaries. The controversy over the eventual adoption of household suffrage for men in the boroughs disguised the fact that this was more than outweighed by the extra seats for the counties and the permitted survival of small boroughs where landed influence could still prevail. And, importantly, the Tory ascendancy in most of the counties could no longer be threatened by the votes of borough householders, who were henceforth not permitted to vote in the counties, where they had generally bolstered the Liberals and Radicals. So the rural seats were kept safe for the Tories, for the time being. So the Second Reform Act conferred a spurious but convincing-looking veneer of legitimacy on continued aristocratic rule. The discovery of a hidden vein of working-class Conservatism in some of the urban seats, especially the Lancashire cotton towns, was a bonus which Oisraeli was happy to exploit when it became visible in the 1868 elections. Nor did he fail to note that it owed a great deal to popular attachment to the Church of England, or at least to detestation of Popery and the Irish, and to a related popular patriotism which readily modulated into jingoism in the late 1870s. Church and Monarchy

ing fascination, and he had flirted dangerously with a romantic vision of Roman Catholicism as part of an idealized hierarchical medieval society. The furious agitation against the granting of British territorial titles to Roman Catholic bishops in 1850-1 showed him the error of his ways, and his ostentatious support for the beleaguered Church of England against those who sought to end its special relationship with the State and divest it of its remaining privileges proved to be an electoral asset. Vincent suggests that Oisraeli's new-found 'churchiness' in the early 1860s was brought on partly by the need to find a way of differentiating himself from Palmerston, who was occupying most of the Tories' natural
territory; but whatever his motives

and

Oisraeli

never really understood the internal politics of the Church - he did not lose by it. As Vincent points out: Religious sectarianism, opposition to temperance fanatics, and an anti-Irish working class (Bible, beer and brawls) were the three pillars which made realizable Disraeli's rhetoric of a popular and national party. At about the same time Oisraeli was cultivating the special relationship with Queen Victoria which helped to bring the monarch back to popularity and the limelight after the reclusive years which had followed the death of Prince Albert, and which helped to create a climate of opinion in which republican ideas became widely disseminated. Oisraeli led the Queen, by gentle persuasion and manipulation, into showing herself to her subjects more often than hitherto, and his showmanship helped to ensure that her investiture as Empress of India in 1877 was a suitably flamboyant display of imperial power and symbolism. The timing of this event was governed by the Queen's preference rather than Oisraeli's political convenience, however, and the Queen was able to get her way on other issues which mattered to her, especially the restraint of 'Popish' practices in the Church of England through the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, and the disposition of Church patronage. The relationship was emphatically' a two-way one, but Oisraeli's influence helped to prepare the ground for the bright glittering evening of Victoria's reign, with the elaborate ceremonial and display of the Jubilees helping to attach popular loyalty to the Queen and the constitution at a time of sharpening class conflict in the ind ustrial sphere. The Rhetoric of Imperialism

Oisraeli also became an assiduous supporter of the Church of England and the monarchy. His emergence as a pillar of the Church in the early 1860s was surprising but opportune. In earlier years he had investigated the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in his writings, with an endur-

Building up the Queen's mystique and power suited the authoritarian side of Oisraeli's paternalist vision of government. So did his imperial rhetoric; and both these themes attracted magisterial censure from Gladstone during Oisraeli's years in power between 1874 and 1880. But although the Oisraeli myth identifies him with the expansion and celebration of Empire, his contribution was more a matter of style and presentation than substance. He did not concern himself much with the Empire before his famous
HISTOI~Y REVIEW 1-l

Queen Victoria with the small Imperial crown, 1885. speeches on this theme in 1872, although it is clear that he never really regarded the colonies as 'millstones'. This often-quoted expression dealt with specific and short-term problems in Canada, and has been taken out of context. But the policy of his government of 1874-80 was not as distinctively imperialist as Gladstone and other critics made out. The wars in South Africa and Afghanistan were the products of inherited policies and mind-sets: the pursuit of South African federation, which annoyed the Boers and stirred up the Zulus, and the obsession with protecting India and keeping Russia at a safe distance. More immediately, the wars arose through the incompetent assertiveness of subordinates, from Carnarvon ('Twitters') and Lytton downwards. Disraeli was responsible for these events in the sense that these underlings theoretically reported to him; but he exercized no systematic oversight over their actions. What he did provide was a public rhetoric and a climate of expectations which encouraged aggressive excesses in his subordinates; and in this sense it was not wholly unfair of Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign and the 1880 election struggle to lay these embarrassments at his door. Disraeli's vision of Empire was bound up distinctively with the prestige and glory of England, a pattern of thought which his fellow politicians, in the Cabinet as well as in opposition, found distasteful. The Empire was to be a vehicle for spreading the peculiar glories of aristocratic rule and the English constitution to the furthest points of the globe, although the personnel involved in colonial administration and the Indian Civil Service turned out to be overwhelmingly middle-class public school products, with only a small leavening of financially embarrassed offshoots of landed society itself. DisD\SR;\FLI: \11TII;\NI) RF;\LlTY, I'OLICY AND

raeli's vision of Empire was, again, ultimately authoritarian: a benevolent despotism shored up by ceremonial and the invention of tradition, with which the Queen came to identify eagerly. It was this power-and-glory aspect of Empire which reached a popular constituency, un English though Disraeli's colleague Derby thought it to be; and, ironically, the Empire as popular vote-winner for the Conservatives was particularly effective in the Lancashire heartland of Derby's traditional influence. In the Salford by-election of 1877, for example, Disraeli's loyal lieutenant Montagu Corry reported that a forward imperialist foreign policy was a great success among the working-class electorate.' It was Disraeli's vision of Empire, with its romanticization of exotic cultures and distant battlefields, on which no\'elists and popular journalists were to build, which counted here. Disraeli's imperial legacy was rhetorical rather than administrative - he tended to stand above and aloof from mere administration but it was none the less powerful for this. In many ways, of course, Disraeli's later foreign and imperial outlook represented a donning of Palmerston's mantle when that garment became available after 1863; but the gloss and image-making were Disraeli's own. Paternalism versus Legislation

Disraeli was perhaps ahead of his time in his grasp of the ways in which social conflict at home could be minimized by the distractions of Empire and of imperial wars, although this perception was shared by his successor Salisbury. This aspect of his strategy of government was probably more important and more effective than the winning of working-class gratitude through social reform which has become such a strong component of the Disraeli legend. Here, again, the rhetoric was more than the substance. We hear a lot about Young England and the novels of the 1840s, especially Coningsby and Sybil; and much has been made of DisraeWs support for the Old Poor Law and for factory reform at the beginning of his career. But Disraeli himself never took much interest in legislative measures to improve the lot of the working class in the 1830s and 18405. He even voted against the Mines Act of 1850 because his aristocratic patroness, Lady Londonderry, wife of a despotic coalowner, told him to do so. The message of Young England was that
aristocrats

- and

employers,

and property-owners

in

general - needed to change their attitudes and behaviour as individuals. Thev needed to act in accordance with the duties and responsibilities of property ownership, and to treat their inferiors and dependants with protective, paternal humanity. Here Disraeli stood on similar ground to Carlyle and even Ruskin. What was needed was a revolution of attitudes and values, not a revolution in government. Disraeli's ideas on social reform were entirely compatible with the sternest laissez-faire and the strictest fiscal rectitude. Nor would he have got any\\'here if they had been otherwise.

[,I~ESENTAT\ON

TIMEFRAME
1804 Benjamin born, grandson of Venetian immigrant 1820s Worked as solicitor's clerk; 1826 first novel 1837 Elected Tory MP for Maidstone 1839 Married his wealthy political patroness 1841 Excluded for Peel's government 1846 Opposed free trade and repeal of Corn Laws 1848 Sybil or the Two Nations published 1852, 1858-9 & 1867 Chancellor of the Exchequer 1867 Introduced the Second Reform Bill 1872 Crystal Palace speech presents Disraeli's Toryism 1874-80 Disraeli's Second Ministry 1875 Artisans' Dwellings Act and Public Health Act 1875 Suez Canal shares purchased 1876 Royal Titles Act: 1877 Victoria Empress of India 1876 Disraeli created Earl of Beaconsfield 1875-1878 Eastern Crisis. 1878 Congress of Berlin 1879-1881 Invasion of Afghanistan

elsewhere, was rhetorical, and the events of 1874-6 were used to land credence to the claim that the Conservatives had working-class interests more at heart than the Liberals. The Capture of the English Patriot

Constituency

for the Tories

The social reform legislation of the 1874-80 administration is consistent with this picture. It enabled rather than requiring, and showed due respect for the independence of local government and the rights of property-owners. Much of it was inherited from the previous Liberal government, including the trade union legislation: the Liberals had intended to legalize peaceful picketing in 1871, and again in 1873, and it is an enjoyable irony that Disraeli eventually did so. In any case, this legislation was compatible with strict laissez-faire principles: it equalised the legal positions of masters and employees, until the judges subverted it in the next generation. Otherwise, the Merchant Shipping Act was largely due to an agitation from a single Liberal MP; the river pollution legislation was effectively unenforceable; the initiative on food adulteration left so much discretion to the local authorities that hardly anything was done; and the Artizans Dwellings Act, which was really R.H. Cross's measure, from the Home Office, protected private property rights so thoroughly that. it led to very little actual slum clearance and still less redevelopment of improved dwellings for the denizens of the slums. The Education Act of 1876 was mainly directed to protecting Church of England schools in rural districts, and the drink licensing act was aimed incompetently

In this sphere as in others, Disraeli's legacy, carefully managed over the generations and re-made in appropriate new guises, is more a matter of image than reality. Disraeli was, after all, the greatest and longest-serving opposition leader in British parliamentary history. His actual policies, as opposed to the tone of his utterances, are difficult to pin down, and most were up for negotiation when it mattered. But his job was to conserve, not to innm'ate; and his kind of rearguard action required a creed rather than a legislative programme. The very vagueness of the Disraelian legacy has given flexibility and freedom of presentation to those who wish to use it. And perhaps his own greatest contribution was to take over a dominant national myth of cultural superiority and military mettle which had long been identified with Palmers ton, and to capture mainstream patriotic emotion for the Conservative Party in the imperial and Near Eastern crises of the late 1870s. This national myth is English, and excludes the rest of the United Kingdom; and it shuts out other patriotisms, which celebrate other virtues. But it is arguable that Disraeli, especially during the crisis over war with Russia in 1877-8, turned this frame of mind into a Conservative electoral asset which his successors were able to retain. This shared outlook, more than anything else, recruited and kept working-class Tories and sustained the mvth of 'One Nation'. This, above all, was Disraeli's contribution to British politics, and to the perpetuation of the traditional politics of the landed interest, in important respects, well into the twentieth century. This is the basis of his enduring, and transnational, charisma.
FURTHER READl"G

Two short introductions to Disraeli are John K. Walton, Disraeli. Routledge: Lancaster Pamphlets. 1990, and John Vincent. Disraeli.
Oxford University Press Past Ylasters Series. 1990. They are complementary in coverage and can usefully be read in tandem. The full classic biography, still unsurpassed. is lord Blake, Disrae/i (1966 and many subsequent editions>. Full bibliographies can be found in all of these books. I have also used David Cannadine. The decline ami .~111of ti,e British ari:'tocracy. Yale University Press, 1990; J.C.D. Clark. EII:;/isl1 sacit'fll 1688-1832, Cambridge University Press, 1983; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and morals among the Victorians. london. 1989 edn.; and ].M. Bourne, Patronage alld society ill Ililleteelltl1-,'entury ElIgland. london,

as a sop

to Tory

publicans.

The

Public Health Act merely codified bipartisan legislation which was in the pipeline anyway. Disraeli provided a benign environment for this legislation: his direct, personal contribution was minimal. But, as Ghosh points out, by his rhetorical support and willingness to make room for this sort of legislation Disraeli made it acceptable as a Conservative activity, although it was still seen as small beer compared with the.. great principled questions of religious conflict and foreign affairs. The impulse to social reform, such as it was, died away after 1876, and arguments proposing its revival towards 1880 are difficult to sustain. The great Disraelian contribution and legacy, here as
.IO

1986. The translation

from ABC is m\' own.

Routledge - Lancaster Pamphlets Series 1990, and Fish and Chips and the British Working Class 1870-1940, Leicester Unh.'ersity Press, 1992.
REVIEW 1.I

Dr Johll University

Walton is Reader ill of Lancaster. His works

Histo/'ll include

at the Disraeli,

HISTORY