Hopefully the preceding paragraphs will encourage those not familiar with the book to at least take a look at it, but Thompson himself would have been unhappy at any commentary on his book that simply said how good it was. The book was developed as he taught classes over a number of years and crucially, as Thompson himself noted, by discussion and interaction with his students, the inheritors of the traditions that he wrote about in the book.
He was a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) tutor in Yorkshire in the 1950s, teaching labour history to largely working class students. Indeed the scale of his achievement, 50 years on, is marked by the reality that there has never been a successor or updating volume from another historian.įortunately we do know something of the process that led Thompson to write the book. Anyone looking at the sheer length and range of the book today must surely wonder how Thompson managed to write such an epic volume, particularly in an age when all research notes were at best bashed out on a typewriter. In the second half of the book Thompson looks at “The Working-Class Presence”, writing in great detail about the range of working class responses to the development of market capitalism: from millenarians who thought the world would end, to Luddites who sought to control the advance of machinery, to revolutionaries and radicals of all types and trade unionists. Secondly, his partner, the late socialist historian Dorothy Thompson, was an acknowledged expert in this area. Thompson did not write about Chartism for several reasons.įirstly, the book was already nearly a thousand pages long and late in submission to the publisher. Thompson looks at the range of influences there were on the development of the English working class, in particular religion, and touches on the levels of exploitation and living standards that underwrote the political protests of the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, where the book ends as the Chartist movement starts. The book set the terms of reference for much labour history that followed.Ĭhapter headings such as “Members Unlimited”, a reference to the London Corresponding Society of the 1790s that moved to a then unknown open and democratic model of organising, or “The Free-Born Englishman” now hold their place in labour history itself. The impact and influence of the book have been worldwide, despite the fact that the paperback edition weighs in at 958 pages. The original paperback cover, a painting of a collier from 1814, clay pipe in mouth, walking stick in hand tramping for work, remains an iconic image of the origins of the modern working class. Published by Gollancz in the autumn of 1963, it was paper-backed by Penguin in 1968 and remains in print today. It is 50 years since the publication of E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
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