It is fitting that the first attempt to produce working-class fiction should arise from Britain's (possibly the world's) earliest mass political movement. Chartism derived its name from the sixpoint ‘Charter’ drawn up in 1837 by the London Working Men's Association to demand the inclusion of working-class men in the franchise. The Charter was the working-class response to the Whig Reform Bill of 1832 which had betrayed its initial promise of delivering universal suffrage and given the vote only to the middle classes. While we must always be sceptical of placing too much historical meaning on one single event, there is a compelling case for seeing 1832 as the year in which the British working class were (in E. P. Thompson's famous description) ‘made’ – that is, born out of exclusion, absence, and denial of fundamental rights. To be working class was to be unrepresented, yet the classical political economy which underpinned the industrial revolution decreed that a country's wealth originated in the labour process. In Marx's terms, it was this economic ‘base’ that constituted a society's ‘real foundation’ – a claim strikingly at odds with the observable social reality. If the working class were now the acknowledged producers of wealth, they were not its consumers.

For the majority of the population, the 1830s and 1840s must have felt like a downward spiral into poverty, disease, misery and alienation. Much of this suffering was attributed to the laissez-faire and repressive policies of a government which preached individual freedoms while imposing or supporting vicious new social and economic controls on the mass of the population. To name but a few of the upheavals and regimes that were transforming the lives of the British proletariat: urbanization and slum housing; the factory system with its shiftwork, child labour and rigid supervisory culture; the new Poor Law of 1834 which created a national network of workhouses – emblems of pauperism, failure and the breaking-up of families; victimization of trade unions, symbolized by the persecution of the Tolpuddle ‘martyrs’ in 1834; a tougher colonial regime in Ireland, which culminated in the great famine of 1846–8, in which more than a million died or emigrated.