The Making of the English Working Class

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 4

Part 1, Chapter 5

Part 2, Chapters 6-9

Part 2, Chapters 10-12

Part 3, Chapters 13-14

Part 3, Chapter 15

Part 3, Chapter 16

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Key Figures

E.P. Thompson (Author)

Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993) was a renowned English historian and socialist. A veteran of the Second World War, Thompson graduated from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and taught at Leeds University. By the time The Making of the English Working Class appeared in 1963, Thompson had already written a biography of the 19th-century socialist William Morris and had helped establish the Leftist journal The New Reasoner. In the late 1940s, Thompson joined the Communist Party; however, he left the Party in protest over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Marxist ideology, the driving force behind international communism, at times informs Thompson’s writing. The Making of the English Working Class features periodic references to Karl Marx and his critique of industrial capitalism. In the 20th century, communist revolutionaries around the world professed belief in Marxist ideas and established new regimes on Marxists principles. However, after those regimes degenerated into totalitarianism—for instance, Communists in the Soviet Union and China starved and slaughtered tens of millions of their own people—throughout much of the West, Communism, and by extension, Marxism, fell into disrepute.

Marxism is only one of many influences on The Making of the English Working Class. Above all, Thompson was a secular humanist, as evidenced by his scathing rebuke of industrial-era Methodism. He was also a pacifist and a harsh critic of government repression, which explains his sympathetic treatment of libertarianism and the Radical denunciation of war as an engine of class robbery.

In his later years, Thompson became an activist for nuclear disarmament. He also published (posthumously) a study of William Blake, who appears in the early chapters of The Making of the English Working Class as an intellectual sympathetic to Jacobinism.

William Cobbett

William Cobbett (1763-1835) was a Tory-turned-Radical polemicist. For more than 30 years, Cobbett’s Political Register was Radicalism’s most influential publication. Cobbett spread libertarian ideas in a defiant tone. His most frequent targets were Old Corruption and the government’s endless wars. Drawing upon 17th- and 18th-century political philosophies, Cobbett denounced systemic abuses of government power and drew connections between war, debt, and taxes, all of which combined to enrich the powerful at the expense of the poor. While Cobbett did not speak directly to England’s industrial workers, he nonetheless gave the nascent working class the language it needed to comprehend the full breadth of ruling-class oppression. Cobbett appears most conspicuously in Part 3 of The Making of the English Working Class, where he is the only historical figure to whom Thompson devotes an entire subsection.

Francis Place

A member of the London Corresponding Society in the mid-1790s, Francis Place (1771-1854) eventually drifted away from Jacobinism and toward more moderate reform movements such as Utilitarianism. He nonetheless played a leading role in the 1824 repeal of the Combination Acts, which opened the way to legal trade unionism. In The Making of the English Working Class, however, Place is most significant as an archivist of sorts who gathered and saved many useful documents relating to the early history of Radicalism. Thompson relies heavily upon the Place Collection in the British Museum.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) does not appear in the book’s major events but nonetheless might be its most important figure. Thompson regards Paine’s Rights of Man (1792) as a foundational text for the English working class. Paine argued for universal rights and against monarchy and aristocracy. Rights of Man inspired English Jacobinism, influencing English Radicalism well into the 19th century.

Lord Sidmouth

Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (1757-1844), served as Prime Minister (1801-04) and later as Home Secretary (1812-1822). In the latter capacity, Sidmouth employed a vast network of spies who infiltrated some Radical groups. He received regular reports on Radical activities, and these reports serve as one of Thompson’s major sources. Sidmouth helped orchestrate multiple waves of counter-revolutionary repression in 1816-1817 and again following Peterloo in 1819-1820.

Colonel Edmund Despard

An Irish officer who married a free Black woman from South America, Edward Despard (1751-1803) joined the London Corresponding Society and later the United Irishmen. He was arrested and imprisoned for three years. After his release, he resumed his Jacobin activities. In 1802, he was arrested again, convicted of high treason, and executed in February 1803. He appears in The Making of the English Working Class as both a symbol of popular Radicalism and a bridge between 1790s Jacobinism and the Radical underground of the early 19th century—proof of a continuous illegal tradition, both revolutionary and conspiratorial.