This chapter adopts the case study approach to develop a detailed analysis of English popular politics in the thirty or so years between the passing of the Second Reform Act and the emergence of the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s. If the work has an underlying theme it is that, in endeavouring to recreate something of the texture and vitality of popular politics, we must focus special attention on the complex, and often deeply ambiguous, relationship between political activists – be they Liberal, Conservative or Labour – and the people they sought to represent. To many this must appear glaringly obvious: is this not everyone's common-sense understanding of the stuff of politics? And yet this basic insight has informed only a small fraction of the post war historiography of British working-class politics. The dominant approach has been to treat major political movements such as Chartism, socialism, or for that matter working-class Conservatism, as little more than the natural (i.e. causally determined) outgrowths of prior social and economic realities. Rarely has there been any attempt to understand the complex web of aspirations and identities which sustained popular political movements; in effect political history has been depoliticised.