E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (NY: Vintage Books, 1966, 2nd ed.).
F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
The development of the British working class remains one of many historical problems facing students of modern British history. How and why it developed, and what forms it took during the course of the nineteenth century are among the various questions posed by historians. E.P. Thompson, in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, discusses the development of a working class consciousness from the 1790s to the Great Reform Bill and argues that this was caused by prolonged conflict between the workers and the governing classes. Approaching the same topic, but with a different focus and argument is F.M.L. Thompson, who focuses more on the role of definitions and how the middle and working classes each defined themselves and were defined. Eric Hobsbawm also addresses this topic, but focuses specifically on the role that organized institutions such as religious bodies had on the development of working class radicalism. Finally, Ross McKibben in his article "Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?", carries the discussion forward beyond the Great Reform Bill, and discusses the limitations this consciousness posed for the development of a revolutionary working-class political movement during late Victorian and Edwardian England.
E.P. Thompson begins his narrative by describing the 1794 raid on Thomas Hardy's (a prominent Radical) home, a raid which led in his pregnant wife dying during "childbirth as a result of shock sustained when her home was besieged by a 'Church and King' mob." [1] The inclusion of this personal account first struck me as odd; why begin on such a personal note instead of describing a more public form of repression? It soon becomes apparent though, that Thompson is building a case that violence was needed for the working class to be formed, even in a nation that typically shuns violence.
He continues this argument throughout the entire book. In Chapter 6, he writes: "The History of England at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war." [2] He suggests that this is so, because of the intransigence of the political leaders who "regarded the idea of citizenship [and other ideas coming out of the French Revolution] as a challenge to their religion and their civilization." [3] Thompson paints a picture of Pitt and the other political leaders as evil men, scheming at ways to keep the working class as a "subject class." [4]
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