After the enfranchisement of some urban voters in 1832 the towns became, for a few years, the citadels of the Liberal party. Today, in the 1980s, political alignments are also polarised along an urban–rural axis, with the Labour party deriving most of its support from urban areas. The late Victorian period was to some extent distinctive in being a period when political alignment had only a weak urban–rural dimension. The enfranchisement of numbers of rural labourers in 1884 helped the Liberals in the countryside, whilst the Conservatives made steady gains in the towns, particularly in Lancashire. Preston, along with its neighbour Blackburn, presented the most marked case of an urban working-class seat supporting the Conservatives in this period, as Table 6.1 shows.

This Tory hegemony almost certainly rested upon working-class votes. Although considerable sections of the male working class, and all women, were not enfranchised until 1918, the majority of voters were workers. About 60% of adult males in Preston had the vote, a figure close to the average for county boroughs (see Table 6.2). In 1911 there were 19,729 voters in Preston, and the Census shows that even a loose definition of ‘middle-class’ occupations would account for no more than about 8,000 of these voters. Even if we assume that all these ‘middleclass’ men voted Tory, this still leaves a considerable number of workers who must also have cast their vote to the Conservatives; but in fact many sections of the middle class voted Liberal.