This pioneering and highly original study explores critically the nature of class identity by looking at the formation and influence of two men (Edwin Waugh and John Bright) who are taken as representative of what "working class" and "middle class" meant in England in the nineteenth century. The book points the way forward to a new history of democracy as an imagined entity. It represents a deepening of the author's engagement with "post-modernist" theory, in the process offering a critique of the conservatism and complacency of much academic history, particularly in Britain.