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

Author: Joseph Sramek
Published on: Mar 10, 2000

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), "Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in England."

Ross McKibben, "Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?" English Historical Review, (Vol. XCIX (April 1984), No. 391), pp. 297-331.

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]

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.