The Making of the English Working Class

In the book’s preface, Thompson declares that he hopes to “rescue” his working-class subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). This quotation has two meanings. First, it is a comment on those who condescend: mid-20th-century scholars, for instance, who devote years to studying the past without considering the perspectives of the people who lived through it. Second, it highlights the objects of condescension: the men and women of the late-18th and early-19th century who made the English working class.

Thompson challenges economists who subscribe to a “new anti-catastrophic orthodoxy” (195) regarding the Industrial Revolution. During the Cold War Era of the mid-20th century, some scholars responded to the global threat of totalitarian communism by writing supportively about the history of industrial capitalism. Economists in particular concluded that the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century had raised the standard of living in the West and therefore, on balance, had brought great benefits to the masses. Thompson takes issue with this new orthodoxy for several reasons. First, empirical studies, such as those undertaken by data-crunching economists, cannot tell the whole story. Standards of living statistics can be useful, but they ignore so many elements of human experience that they must be treated with care. Historians of industrialization encounter far too much evidence of widespread misery to offer complacent conclusions. For instance, a cold phrase such as “the decline of the handloom weavers” (290), which might seem reasonable to a data analyst, fails to convey the actual experiences of people who lived in centuries-old weaving communities that “were literally being extinguished” (290) by industrialization.

Thompson also takes issue with scholars who downplay the degree of revolutionary ferment that existed among England’s working people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Standard historical accounts argue that the threat of an English revolution, modeled after the French example, existed only “in the imaginations of Ministers, magistrates, and spies” (478). The problem is that surviving sources are overwhelmingly Home Office records, which necessarily include detailed reports from government spies. Paradoxically, historians who have noted the government’s success in preventing revolutionary outbreaks, have concluded that the revolutionary threat must have been exaggerated, as if only successful revolutions can be taken as proof of sincere and broad-based revolutionary aspirations. Thompson, however, sees too much evidence—the government’s vast network of spies, the recurrence of repressive legislation, the stationing of 12,000 troops in three industrial counties in 1812, the behavior of working people themselves—to dismiss as inconceivable the prospect of an English revolution. Thompson attributes other historians’ failure to see the same to condescension. One pair of historians, for instance, describes Jeremiah Brandreth, leader of the doomed Pentridge Rising, as “a half-starved, illiterate, and unemployed framework-knitter,” which Thompson calls “pejorative writing” (666)—a surviving letter in Brandreth’s hand proves that he was both literate and thoughtful.

One of the book’s central assertions is that “The working class made itself as much as it was made” (194). Thompson sees evidence of this in the working class’s appropriation of Methodism’s most democratic tenets, in the secretiveness of friendly societies, in the solidarity displayed by entire communities during the Luddite movement, and in the discipline of the crowd at Peterloo. He sees the Pentridge Rising as “one of the first attempts in history to mount a wholly proletarian insurrection” (668). He also describes the artisan literary movement of the 1820s as the culture “within which the genius of Dickens matured” (719).