In recent years, there has been a significant revival of the debate over the usefulness of the notion of a ‘labour aristocracy’ for the analysis of mid- and late nineteenth-century Britain. The idea was first introduced into serious historical discussion by Eric Hobsbawm in 1954, when he argued that it was possible to identify an upper stratum of about 10 per cent of the working class which had high and stable earnings and which corresponded, more or less, to those workers organized into trade unions in the period. Although not attempting simply to revive Lenin's crude attack on the reformism of the Second International, Hobsbawm was clearly influenced by it and certainly intended the security and prosperity of the ‘labour aristocracy’ to be a central part of his explanation of the political peculiarities of the British working class in the period, particularly of the absence of an independent party of its own.

While this masterly article soon established its position as the basic account of the social history of the period, it was another twenty years before the advance of research on the second half of the nineteenth century produced further elaborations in Robert Gray's analysis of Edinburgh and Geoffrey Crossick's case study of south-east London. These attempted, rather unsuccessfully in my opinion, to develop Hobsbawm's suggestions about social mobility and the relationship between piece-masters and subcontracted labour into a coherent account of the social formation of an ‘upper stratum’ of skilled workers.