The Making of the English Working Class

E.P. Thompson argues that the English working class made itself. This act of creation occurred in the context of new ideas about political liberty. It also occurred despite powerful social and economic forces working against it.

Eighteenth-century English writers celebrated the idea of liberty as their nation’s special inheritance. This idea was rooted in both myth and fact. As a myth, the story of English liberty chronicles the nation’s centuries-long recovery from the tyranny imposed by William the Norman, whose invasion and conquest in 1066 brought feudalism to England. According to this myth, events such as Magna Carta in 1215 and the English Civil War of the 1640s represent dramatic moments in a long story of redemption that culminates in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, the triumphant moment that secured English liberty. Notwithstanding its mythical elements, the story of English liberty does have a factual basis. By “liberty,” English writers meant, first and foremost, freedom from the arbitrary power wielded by absolute monarchs. The Glorious Revolution, for instance, established a constitutional balance that made Parliament a permanent and independent feature in the English government, not subject to the will of a king or queen. Likewise, England boasted a much stronger tradition of respect for individual rights than did its European neighbors.

Not until the second half of the eighteenth century did the idea of English liberty as a special inheritance from the Glorious Revolution face serious challenges. Ironically, American revolutionaries concluded that the English Constitution offered no protection for their liberties because Parliament, in its oversight of the British Empire, had itself grown arbitrary and despotic. In their ideological justifications for rebellion, America’s most articulate revolutionaries, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, drew upon the writings of obscure late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century English radicals, who argued that England’s much-celebrated constitutional liberty had not survived the nation’s perpetual wars, runaway debt, crushing taxes, and bloated government. This anti-war, anti-government corrective to the triumphant story of English liberty provides context for the arguments of Thomas Paine and William Cobbett, the two most important Radical polemicists to appear in The Making of the English Working Class.

In late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England, debates over liberty and other political matters occurred in a social context that readers in modern democratic societies would find alien. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and subsequent “making” of the English working class, English writers noted vast differences between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, but they did not describe these differences in terms of “class.” Instead, they used phrases such as “better sort,” “middling sort,” and “lower sort.” These phrases implied differences not only in condition but in the quality of the people involved. Men and women of the English aristocracy believed that they were born “better” than everyone else. Furthermore, they expected their inferiors to acknowledge as much, and many did. Modern democratic citizens, raised with egalitarian sensibilities, can scarcely imagine the depth and pervasiveness of these aristocratic assumptions. Even familiar words carry different meanings in such contexts: “Condescension,” for instance, offends the modern democratic soul, for it suggests that the speaker thinks himself or herself superior in some unwarranted way. Thompson, in fact, denounces the “enormous condescension of posterity” toward the working-class people of whom he writes. As readers of Jane Austen novels can attest, however, “condescension” had positive connotations in a world where lords and ladies exhibited generosity by coming down from their rightful perches and “condescending” to speak with inferiors. Thus, despite hierarchical traditions and expectations of social deference, working-class men and women developed a consciousness of their distinct identity and interests.

While England’s liberty myth and hierarchical society helped frustrate democratic hopes, industrialization worked to smother those hopes altogether by reducing England’s working poor to a state of permanent dependence. Although the Industrial Revolution did little to improve the material lives of England’s impoverished masses, Thompson’s critique of industrial capitalism goes far beyond its material output. Above all, industrialization changed the nature of work. In pre-industrial communities, skilled artisans enjoyed the rhythms of a task-oriented workday, which meant working at their craft for as long as necessary to complete a job and then retiring for the day on their own terms. This afforded a degree of independence that the agents of industrialization could not tolerate, for factory work required strict regimentation, monotonous repetition, and a time-oriented workday. The proliferation of clocks during the Industrial Revolution illustrates this dramatic, demoralizing, and de-humanizing change in the way people worked and lived. Pre-industrial workers might wish to know the hour of the day but never the precise minute. Industrial capitalists, on the other hand, viewed relentless competition as justification for their efforts to maximize production by structuring every minute of the worker’s day. This descent from independent artisan to factory automaton constitutes industrialization’s heaviest cost to the laborer.

Faced with a formidable myth of constitutional liberty, a corrupt government whose administrators enriched themselves on war and taxes, a ruling-class that demanded deference, and an emerging capitalist order that threatened permanent economic dependence, the men and women of the English working class had little choice but to find strength in their own numbers.