"Classic Soil divides between "Romanticism" and "Reform." The latter exemplifies middle-class alliances toward amelioration, informed and challenged in Bolton by voices from the working classes. The former represents conflicting individual aspirations toward alternatives to that more pedestrian but ultimately more effective pattern of renewal. Terminal points of the book are the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the reform of the corn laws of 1846. A pivotal chapter concerns Boltonian-American landscapist Thomas Cole.

Like Engels in south Lancashire, young Cole in North America yearns toward an ideogram of "classic perfection," "Arcadia." It was Cole, not Engels, who made the transition to a more mature view, dividing his energies, after 1844, between a radical new empiricism and an iconic transcendentalism that, together, implied an abandonment of the pseudoclassic Arcadia of adolescence."--Jacket.