We can talk of a self made; we can also talk of a self deployed in the public realm (from whence it is returned to the subject in a new form). Bright deployed himself, and was in turn deployed by his contemporaries. What models or conceptions of the social order can we see Bright himself deploying? Perhaps the most revealing one is a vision of independence that was almost the exact social analogue of the personal self. The created self of the common, plain man issued in a social utopia of the plain man. The understanding of his father's condition as of the common people produced a social vision in which the imagined society of the patriarch was reproduced in an imagined social ideal, that of what might be termed the urban yeomanry. This social vision had no fixed social base or constituency: it could and did appeal to men of many social conditions and ‘classes’, not least men of the ‘working class’ for whom a vision of social, moral, and political independence was of quite crucial significance.

When men of the ‘middle class’ spoke of what it was to be middle class, especially in the first half of the century, this dimension of independence was central to the meanings given these words.