Author | E. P. Thompson |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Labour history Social history |
Publisher | Victor Gollancz Ltd Vintage Books |
Publication date | 1963, 1968 (rev. ed.), 1980 (new preface) |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
Pages | 848 |
ISBN | 0-14-013603-7 |
OCLC | 29894851 |
The Making of the English Working Class [1] is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, [2] and republished in revised form in 1968 by Pelican, [3] after which it became an early Open University set book. It concentrates on English artisan and working-class society "in its formative years 1780 to 1832".
It was placed 30th in the Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century. [4]
Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface: "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." [5] : 12
Thompson attempts to add a humanist element to social history, being critical of those who turn the people of the working class into an inhuman statistical bloc. Those people were not just the victims of history, and Thompson displays them as being in control of their own making: "The working class made itself as much as it was made." He also discusses the popular movements that are often forgotten in history, such as obscure Jacobin societies like the London Corresponding Society. Thompson makes great effort to recreate the life experience of the working class, which is what often marks the work out as so influential.
Thompson uses the term "working class", rather than "classes", throughout the book to emphasize the growth of a working-class consciousness. He claims in the Preface that "in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs". [5] : 11 This change in consciousness is exemplified in Thompson's 1975 book on the 1723 Waltham Black Act. The Black act was a newly imposed forestry law and legislation in Great Britain, that changed the way "the King's forests" had been managed traditionally, [6] Thompson cited the Waltham forest, north of round London, as an example of rising tensions between local hunters, "farmers, cottagers and other foresters" and the Whigs. [7] Traditionally these farmers and others had some rights and privileges to grow crops on small holdings but it was illegal for them to kill or harm "the King's deer" for profit, food, or even to protect their crops from the deer. [7] Tensions escalated as 18th century nouveau riche who held new leases in Waltham began to violate the traditional rights of the local population by enclosing their ever expanding estates and surrounding gardens with fences. [7] In response, under the leadership of a Robin Hood-like figure, a small group of local people began to respond to each act by the Whigs that hurt or dispossessed the local people, by killing a deer, burning a barn, etc. Although they were not, strictly speaking, poachers, they also blackened their faces to be invisible at night. They became known as the Blacks. The 1723 Black Act was a long and detailed list of new crimes for which the local people could be legally punished. Thompson decried this inequity and detailed the widespread corruption that enabled the passage of the bill, specifically the role of "Robert Walpole and the Whig administration in the passing and implementation of the Act". [7]
Thompson's re-evaluation of the Luddite movement and his unsympathetic treatment of the influence of the early Methodist movement on working-class aspirations are also particularly memorable. (Thompson's parents were Methodist missionaries.)
Thompson's theories on working-class consciousness are at the core of his work, and the working class's agency was manifested by its core values of solidarity, collectivism, mutuality, political radicalism and Methodism. Thompson wished to disassociate Marxism from Stalinism and his injection of humanistic principles in the book was his way of steering the left towards democratic socialism, as opposed to totalitarianism. [1]
Sidney Pollard called the book "without a doubt, a landmark in English historiography". [8] : 574 Robert K. Webb called it "both very important and extremely exasperating". [8] : 574 David Eastwood argued that it "transformed the study of labour, class and political radicalism in Britain and America and is incontestably the single most influential work of history of the post-war period". [9] : 65
Geoffrey Best called it a "valuable and exciting book" but noted Thompson's neglect of the "flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebeian mind" and asked, "How large a portion of 'the working class' did those 'artisans' form from whom so much of his evidence necessarily comes, and of how many hundreds of thousands of lower-class folk do we remain so much more ignorant that we cannot speak as confidently about them?" [10] : 278
In April 2020, Jacobin magazine launched a podcast series, Casualties of History, focusing on the book. [11]
In December 2023, BBC Radio 3 issued five episodes of its series The Essay "reflecting on the legacy, ideas and personal inspiration of The Making of the English Working Class" to mark sixty years since its first publication. [12]
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns regarding decreased pay for textile workers and a perceived reduction of output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a mythical weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
The London Corresponding Society (LCS) was a federation of local reading and debating clubs that in the decade following the French Revolution agitated for the democratic reform of the British Parliament. In contrast to other reform associations of the period, it drew largely upon working men and was itself organised on a formal democratic basis.
The Act 9 Geo. 1. c. 22, commonly known as the Black Act, or the Waltham Black Act, and sometimes called the Black Act 1722, the Black Act 1723, the Waltham Black Act 1722, the Criminal Law Act 1722, or the Criminal Law Act 1723, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. It was passed in 1723 in response to a series of raids against landowners by two groups of poachers, known as the Blacks from their habit of blacking their faces when they undertook the raids. The Act was expanded over the years and greatly strengthened the criminal code by specifying over 200 capital crimes, many with intensified punishment. Arson, for example, had its definition expanded to include the new crime of burning haystacks.
Labor history is a sub-discipline of social history which specializes on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.
David Crystal, is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of the English language.
Sheila Rowbotham is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian. She is the author of many notable books in the field of women's studies, including Hidden from History (1973), Beyond the Fragments (1979), A Century of Women (1997) and Threads Through Time (1999), as well as the 2021 memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. She has lived in Bristol since 2010.
The English underground is a branch in England's history of art, especially the musical traditions. It usually refers to popular musicians who have benefited from acquiring the sensibility of native English folk song, as that tradition has been passed down through the generations, often without any formal conveyance. It was first identified by the neo-romantic historian E. P. Thompson in 1963, in his The Making of the English Working Class:
We must remember the 'underground' of the ballad singer and the fairground which handed on traditions to the nineteenth century ; for in these ways the 'inarticulate' [masses of people] conserve certain values - a spontaneity and capacity for enjoyment and mutual loyalties - despite the inhibiting pressures of magistrates, mill-owners, and Methodists.
Liversedge is an industrial town in the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees, West Yorkshire, England. Historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Liversedge lies between Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike. The Kirklees ward is now called Liversedge and Gomersal with a population at the 2011 Census of 19,420. Liversedge forms part of the Heavy Woollen District and was historically part of the parish of Birstall.
Events from the year 1837 in the United Kingdom. This marks the beginning of the Victorian era.
The Spa Fields riots were incidents of public disorder arising out of the second of two mass meetings at Spa Fields, Islington, England on 15 November and 2 December 1816.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution is a 1938 book by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, a history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804.
Events from the year 1715 in Great Britain.
William J. Oliver, (?1774–1827) also known as Oliver the Spy, W. J. Richards and W. O. Jones, was a police informer and supposed agent provocateur at a time of social unrest, immediately after the Napoleonic Wars.
Marxian class theory asserts that an individual's position within a class hierarchy is determined by their role in the production process, and argues that political and ideological consciousness is determined by class position. A class is those who share common economic interests, are conscious of those interests, and engage in collective action which advances those interests. Within Marxian class theory, the structure of the production process forms the basis of class construction.
The Black Lamp was a secret and illegal working class revolutionary group that existed during the early 19th century in Yorkshire.
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into this category; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies.
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.
John Gravener Henson, was a workers' leader from Nottingham, England, and a historian of the framework knitters. E. P. Thompson saw him as one of three outstanding figures in the early English working-class movement.
The historiography of the United Kingdom includes the historical and archival research and writing on the history of the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For studies of the overseas empire see historiography of the British Empire.