Making of the English Working Class

E.P. Thompson's magnum opus is a real classic. No serious student of social history should omit reading it! As a history student, I had read it more than 25 years ago. When I reread large parts of it, recently, I noticed - with the life experience acquired since that time - that the book is an even finer gem than I remembered.

It is clear that the author shows a certain bias in favour of the "losers" of the first Industrial Revolution: the English artisans in the textile trade, who in the late 18th and early 19th century were being reduced to the position of factory workers condemned to work under appalling conditions. But this bias does not substract anything from the worth of this study. On the contrary, such bias, or rather such sympathy towards the groups the author focuses on, is probably necessary to motivate a historian in examining his subject in such detail and writing such a full report about the activities of Jacobites, Luddites, Owenites, Chartists and all the other groups who did not accept the oppressing social and economic order of their time. Of course, such sympathy (or bias) should be kept in check by professional rigour, which is certainly the case in profesor Thompson's magnificent study.

The author persuasively argues that, during the generation between 1815 and 1848, England had come much closer to a Revolution of the kind France had gone through between 1789 and 1794, than the "Whig Interpretation of History" would make us believe.

Some of Thompson's assertions are not beyond dispute. He claims, for instance, that the position of the English poor had definitely deteriorated compared to the 18th century. It has been convincingly shown that their position was already dismal long before the Industrial Revolution started. The historians' dispute over this question is still far from being concluded.

Thompson also puts forward the question how so many Englishmen of that time could have been so callously insensitive towards the suffering of the poor. He blaims it for a good part on Methodism, the creed that tended "to make man his own slave driver". He approvingly cites a late 19th century historian: "A more appalling system of religious terrorism, one more fitted to unhinge a tottering intellect and to darken and embitter a sensitive nature, has seldom existed."'


Literary as well as historical classic   April 21, 2000
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

This is an extraordinary book and still hold its power to suprise and challenge the reader. Its structure would suggest that its really a series of essays each of which uses some remarkable research. However such a perspective would not do justice to its underlying thesis -that the English working class was not the sterile output of economic forces but actively engaged through aspiration and struggle in its own making. This is the essential thread of the book and as such constitutes a challenge not only to traditional top down theories, but also to mechanist or 'vulgar ' marxist accounts. Yet leaving aside its value stance it is a masterpiece of writing. The attack of Thompsons style could be a pleasure even to those who may not share his persuasions and there is no question that he makes history live in a way only the greatest of historians can. The book does suffer from considerable faults. While Thompson does an effective demolition on the quantative/systemic school of historians this does not justify the shortage of figures.As Perry Anderson has pointed out we do not know much about the size of the working class by the end of the book. Additionally Thompson is sometimes led astray by his own talent for metaphor or the telling phrase Famously he does this in the chapter 'The Redeeming Power of the Cross' with his characterisation of certain hymn texts as 'psychic masturbation'.

Whatever the limitations of the book they are overwhelmed by its originality and its capability to stimulate thought. It is well worth purchase.


The most influential history text ever written   March 10, 1999
 15 out of 16 found this review helpful

I can't possibly do justice to EP Thompson is a short review - I'll just say that this is book is revolutionary and infinately influential. It is the book most cited *ever* by historians. Thompson's definition of class - that class is made within the day-to-day lives of people, and that classes only exist in relationship to one another - has become the paradigm for understanding how societies function. This book revolutionized history and social thought.