About the Author:
Malcolm Hardman has taught at Haceteppe University in Turkey, and in England at Cambridge, and also at Warwick and Lancaster, where he holds personal Readerships. He is interested in the interplay between local communities and the "high" culture of literature and the visual arts. His Ruskin and Bradford was described by the Times of London as a "tour de force," and he has received commendations for his Six Victorian Thinkers and A Kingdom in Two Parishes, on Bolton's Reformation and Civil War writers. He plans a late-Victorian sequel to the present work.

Based on twenty years' research, Classic Soil explores one hundred square miles of industrialized south Lancashire during the early nineteenth century through contemporary local writings. Occupying a corner of this area was its market center: the adjacent townships of Great and Little Bolton, comprising one of the most densely populated districts of the United Kingdom, divided by rival political and religious traditions. Close reading tends to dissipate externally formed generalizations, such as those of Friedrich Engels, who defined the area as a mere sample of the "classic soil" of Victorian capitalism. Yet Bolton was the center of deep-rooted traditions of reform, particularly with its "jacobian" elements, rooted in centuries of opposition to local landlords and the established church, and was home to numerous articulate working-class groups already in vigorous dialogue with local capitalists.