the making of the english working class 1963

For Thompson, class was an expression of “community”, not – as Marx had instructed – one component of a mechanistic structure. Where previous historians of English labour had for decades focused on unemployment figures, wage differentials and urban population statistics, on Chartism and the rise of the Independent Labour Party, Thompson approached a democratic theme with an appropriate humility, researching and writing about his subject bottom-up not top-down. As a historian, he was an outsider, a maverick and a lifelong idealist. As a student of rural ritual, he owed a debt to the William Cobbett of Rural Rides (1822). Thompson’s profound and addictive sympathy for his subject was almost novelistic. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.” But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. When he came to write The Making of the English Working Class (first commissioned as “Working Class Politics 1790-1921”), he wrote as a patriot and a political radical wanting to express a passionate engagement with the dissenting cultural traditions of his country whose proto-working-class protagonists he venerated.Īs Thompson writes in one stirring passage: “Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Like many in the CP, he left the movement in the late 50s, disillusioned by the Soviet response to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and the direction of the USSR after Stalin. Indeed, in 1946, he had joined the Communist Party Historians Group. Thompson was a northerner who had both served with a tank regiment in north Africa during the second world war, and also been active in the Communist party throughout the 1940s and 50s.

After Thompson, “popular culture” would become a settled touchstone of progressive intellectual concern.

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan… from the enormous condescension of posterity.” With these stirring words, a virtually unknown provincial historian launched a revolution in social and cultural history that would influence the minds and attitudes of a college generation in a way almost unparalleled in late 20th-century Britain.

The making of the english working class 1963