Monday, June 6, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 19 / The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 19 – The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

This influential, painstakingly compiled masterpiece reads as an anatomy of preindustrial Britain – and a description of the lost experience of the common man

Robert McCrumb
Monday 6 June 2016

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

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. Indeed, in 1946, he had joined the Communist Party Historians Group. 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. 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.

As Thompson writes in one stirring passage: “Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. 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.”

EP Thompson: a profound and addictive sympathy for his subject.

Thompson’s profound and addictive sympathy for his subject was almost novelistic. As a student of rural ritual, he owed a debt to the William Cobbett of Rural Rides (1822). As a historian, he was an outsider, a maverick and a lifelong idealist. 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. For Thompson, class was an expression of “community”, not – as Marx had instructed – one component of a mechanistic structure. What mattered to Thompson were the numerous, semi-articulate expressions of English working men’s fraternity – among the countless artisans, weavers, printers, blacksmiths, and domestic servants – that labour historians had ignored, patronised, or glossed over. For Thompson, a shared consciousness among working people was to be identified much sooner than had hitherto been understood. In an oft-quoted passage, he wrote his own passionate definition of this consciousness, urging his belief that “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.”

For Thompson, it was the mundane, half-forgotten details of everyday working life that told the all-important story of working-class aspirations. He was among the first to refer extensively to small-town customs, parish-pump traditions, squibs and broadsheets, semi-literate letters and diaries, and faded, repressed pamphlets, even to cite the evidence of popular ditties or quote from the ink-stained minutes of working men’s clubs.

In hindsight, Thompson was painstakingly compiling an anatomy of preindustrial Britain. He was also describing, in a very English way, the lost experience of the common man (his critics would complain that he had largely overlooked the story of working-class women), a theme traceable to Anglo-Saxon England. In part, too, as the white heat of technological change in the 1960s engulfed many ancient English communities, The Making of the English Working Class was an unconscious elegy for a way of life that – we can now see – has been lost for ever.

Edward Thompson was a trailblazer and a pioneer who deeply influenced a generation of English and American historiography. But he was, unwittingly, on the wrong side of history. Although he was writing in a golden age of Marxist history, around him more than a century of sociopolitical egalitarian struggle was drawing to close. Today, a generation after 1989, and the comprehensive dismantling of a once-proud intellectual tradition, it’s easy to place Thompson in Trotsky’s “dustbin of history”, but that would be wrong. His book is, in its understated way, a revolutionary rhetorical document, showing how a dynamic culture and political consciousness of astonishing vitality were forged in the teeth of official opposition, and the dehumanising blight of mass industrialisation. As he put it in his closing pages:

“Enriched by the experiences of the 17th century, carrying through the 18th century the intellectual and libertarian traditions which we have described, forming their own traditions of mutuality in the friendly society and trades club, these men did not pass, in one generation, from the peasantry to the new industrial town. They suffered the experience of the Industrial Revolution as articulate freeborn Englishmen… This was, perhaps, the most distinguished popular culture England had known.”

Summarising Thompson’s achievement, the distinguished professor of political thought Michael Kenny has said that The Making of the English Working Class is one of the most influential and widely read works of English history published after 1945. To the Observer, it was, and remains, “a masterpiece”.

A signature sentence

“In the event, the scene on the hustings turned into a riot, where Oastler and the 10 Hour Men ‘rang matins on the thick skulls of the flying oranges’. When Sadler was defeated at the poll, Marshall and Macaulay were burned in effigy in the same city centre where Paine had been burnt by the loyalists in 1792.”