Visions of the People
Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–1914

"...a powerful, path-breaking book....one of those rare books which urges that we should look at our past in a new way....Joyce's immensely stimulating book prompts a thousand enquiries." Times Higher Education Supplement

"The most substantial and sustained attempt yet to go beyond the orthodoxy of class....its achievement should be welcomed and celebrated." Journal of Historical Geography

"Visions of the People is provocative and sweeping...a book of the first importance." Journal of British Studies

"It will be a key point of reference for years to come." Social History

"Joyce describes a richly textured and deeply ambivalent working-class culture. The most significant aspect of the book is the interesting and innovative reading of diverse and varied sources... this is a book which deserves careful consideration." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"A thoughtful, closely reasoned, revisionist analysis of class as a viable definition of worker experience in Victorian and Edwardian England." Choice

"What other historians have done speculatively or on a rather limited front Joyce does on a grand scale, exploring the artifacts of northern plebian culture through detailed documentation and a wide variety of contexts: work, trade unions, speech, dialect, ballad, theater, and popular perceptions of history and the the British constitution....Joyce's work demonstrates overwhelmingly both that working people shared in a wider national culture and that many aspects of that wider culture were made by working people themselves and not artificially imposed from above....Patrick Joyce deserves our gratitude for forcing readers to take seriously evidence that is too often dismissed as merely marginal and picaresque.' Jose Harris, Journal of Modern History