The Development of the British Working Class, A Debate: Part I

He uses this to justify the actions of the Luddites. In Chapter 14 he writes: "At a time when the common law of conspiracy... was being employed to defeat trade union action, every attempt to enforce statute law favourable to the workers' interests ended in failure." [5] Thus, since the "journeymen and artisans felt themselves to be robbed of constitutional rights," their subsequent acts of violence became justifiable. [6]

Although Thompson argues quite convincingly that the working class consciousness was already molded by 1832 though forty years of class conflict, other historians dispute the existence of the consciousness this early. Instead of seeing the Great Reform Bill of that year as a culmination of this formative process, F.M.L. Thompson argues instead that it was the beginning. Focusing on the role that definitions played in this formation, he argues that the 1832 Reform Bill was the first and greatest excluding agent, and was enacted mainly "to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and working classes, buying off the one with votes and representation and leaving the other, isolated and weak, outside the pale." [7] By restricting suffrage to only those who could afford to rent or own a home valued at more than £10 annually, the limit, "defined, even created, the working class..." as "a common bond of resentment and frustration between otherwise diverse social groups..." was formed. [8]

Footnotes:

[1] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (NY: Vintage Books, 1966, 2nd ed, p. 19.

[2] Ibid., p. 196.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 197.

[5] Ibid., pp. 526-7.

[6] Ibid., p. 547.

[7] F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 16.

[8] Ibid.

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