The written record begins with the discovery of a body and the supposition of an unsolved crime. “It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner's inquest, “that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain.” The murder had occurred the night before, on August 26, 1379, in St. Nicholas Acton Lane, before Imperial's London residence. Arriving to view the body, the coroner and sheriffs gathered a jury from among men of Langbourne and adjacent wards and set about to determine how and in what way this foreign merchant met his death.

The jury's inquest was only the first step in an inquiry that would ultimately involve the mayor of London, the court of the king's bench, a second jury, the king and his council, and Parliament itself. So, too, did questions of motive and interest spool out from this seemingly random act to embrace the ambitions of London's mercantile elite, vicissitudes of royal finance, and the future and locus of the international wool trade. Starting with an apparent insufficiency of evidence, this investigation eventually found itself knee-deep in pertinent information, plausible motives, and likely suspects. Although it finally stumbled to a sort of stopping point, it never really achieved a satisfactory end.

The original investigation offers suggestive analogies to the task of historical reconstruction. The would-be historian is, like the crime's contemporaries, challenged to arrange known details into a coherent narration—and, as new elements emerge, into revised renarrations. The historian's location outside the crime's own participatory pattern is one of weakness and strength.

No reader of Bleak House is likely to forget its scathing portrayal of the excesses of the unreformed Court of Chancery in the handling of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. From its publication in 1852–53, it has created an indelible image of the Court, so powerfully influencing historians as well as laymen that it is sometimes hard to remember that it is fiction, and polemical fiction at that. The fiction, however, is built on a secure bedrock of fact; the voluminous testimony and submissions made by Dickens's contemporaries to a series of parliamentary inquiries on the legal system furnish ample backing for much of his “bill of complaint” on such scores as delay and expense, procedural technicality, and inconclusiveness of outcome. Thus, John Forster, a partner in one of the biggest firms in Lincoln's Inn, called the Court's delays “heart-sickening” and characterized its “modes of proceedings … as little adapted to the ordinary duration of human life as they are calculated for the determination of differences and the quiet of possessions”; in the same vein, a future master of the rolls averred that “cases have occurred, within my knowledge, in which the whole property to be administered in Chancery, has proved insufficient to pay the costs of the suit.”

As with the early nineteenth-century attacks on the unreformed House of Commons and the traditional electoral system, denunciations of the Court of Chancery's failings have a long history and, often, a repetitive quality.

On Guy Fawkes Day in 1876 an angry mob of retailers staged a charivari in the fashionable shopping promenade of Westbourne Grove in Bayswater. Their demonstration targeted William Whiteley, a linen-draper rapidly expanding his shop into London's first department store. With his recent addition of a meat and green grocery department, Mr. Whiteley “had made himself exceedingly distasteful” to the “provision dealers in the district.” This distaste turned into a raucous procession through the neighborhood's streets. Around noon, “a grotesque and noisy cortège entered the thoroughfare [Westbourne Grove]. At its head was a vehicle, in which a gigantic Guy was propped up … vested in the conventional frock coat of a draper … conspicuous on the figure was a label with the words ‘Live and Let Live’ … in one hand of the figure a piece of beef bore the label ‘5 1/2 d.’ and in the other was a handkerchief, with the ticket ‘2 1/2 d. all-linen.’” Dressed in their traditional blue frocks and making “hideous” noises by banging cleavers against marrow bones, Bayswater's butchers finally disposed of Whiteley's effigy in a bonfire in nearby Portobello Road.

The English charivari, “rough music,” was a communal protest that censured both public and private behaviors. Female scolds, wife beaters, or couples united in apparently mismatched unions might all be chastised in this way. These noisy protests were also directed at any individual who, as E. P. Thompson described it, rode “rough-shod over local custom.”

In the period from 1918 until 1931, the British Labour party adhered to the precepts of “gradualism”: incrementally and by degrees, the party would gain support and pass legislation in an inexorable progress toward the socialist millennium. For a while, it seemed that this strategy would carry all before it. Emerging from the First World War with a “socialist” commitment, it became the largest opposition party at the 1918 general election. In 1922 it became the clear opposition to the Conservatives, and Ramsay MacDonald was reelected leader after an eight-year break. A short-lived minority Labour government in 1924 was followed by heavy electoral defeat, but the party was able to form its second minority government in 1929. However, its credibility was destroyed by soaring unemployment, and the ministry collapsed in the summer of 1931 after failing to agree on public expenditure cuts. MacDonald and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, led a small Labour cohort into a “National” government, which went on to crush Labour at the polls that October. Detailed work on this complex period of Labour's history is hard to find, however. Little work has been done on policy: in particular, it is surprising that, given the party's symbiotic link with trade unionism and the central role of industry in Labour leaders' conception of the transformation to socialism, so little attention has been paid to the party's industrial policy in this period.

Gradualism implied that socialism would emerge from the success of capitalism.