The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson is a Famous Slog

 “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not” (13)

Some theories become so entrenched that even idiots like myself recognize them instinctively as the truth.

In the spring of 2020, I approached my mother with a question. My AP Euro teacher had assigned my class an essay on how the Industrial Revolution affected Europe’s working classes. But I wasn’t sure how to phrase my thesis, I told her. Didn’t the Industrial Revolution create Europe’s working classes? My mother said yes, and that there was a very famous book on that topic. It had permanently influenced our modern understanding of working-class organization. She had read it in graduate school. And the author was a socialist.

Did I want to read it?

I did. I’d learned in AP Euro about steamships and factories, child laborers and dispossessed artisans, Luddites and Chartists—the vocabulary of an era defined by Dickens and Marx. But that was surface knowledge. I wanted to know why historians looked at that era the way they did. And since I wasn’t a stranger to academic nonfiction, E.P. Thompon’s 800-page tome The Making of the English Working Class seemed like an attainable challenge.

But I can’t recommend it. The Making of the English Working Class is monotonous, even in the cramped and ugly world of academic nonfiction. Thompson allegedly didn’t care for George Orwell, a fellow 20th-century British socialist, but a visit from the author of Politics and the English Language would probably clean up the “decadence of language” Thompson prefers. Words lose their meaning, and it’s hard to tell if a new name (Tom Paine? Joanna Southcott?) has appeared before. The book is supposedly set in working-class Britain from the 1790s to the 1830s, but it feels like a Silmarillion* bog of Places and Graves, Thelwalls and Cobbetts and fruitless Hunts. Perhaps these figures are important if you’re writing a dissertation, but they don’t deserve 40%—roughly 300 pages—of Thompson’s work.

By now you might be asking: are you sure you’re not the problem? It’s true that I’m not a historian or a graduate student, and Thompson didn’t The Making of the English Working Class with everyday 16-year-olds in mind, but I suspect he is at fault because his book isn’t totally incomprehensible: it’s uneven.

And it’s really good when it actually talks about its title characters.

Thompson’s revolutionary thesis is thus: in the early 19th century, industrial exploitation forced disparate groups of laborers and artisans to see themselves as a single class capable of campaigning, constitutionally or through violence, for better rights. The second chapter, “The Curse of Adam,” explores the degradation of artisans in-depth and challenges historical myths about the Industrial Revolution. Where Dickens appealed to empathy and Marx to theory, Thompson uses an impressive collection of data and primary sources to animate the misery—and occasionally the hopes—of working-class pre-Victorians. “The Curse of Adam” also features Thompson at his snarkiest, which is both entertaining and important; according to him, British scholars tended to underplay the danger and poverty that everyday people faced. As a socialist, he’s very interested in how misconceptions about past and present poverty affect policy, but as a historian, he always uses data to back up his analyses.

“The commercial expansion, the enclosure movement, the early years of the Industrial Revolution—all took place within the shadow of the gallows...the greatest offence against property was to have none” (61)

 

That’s not to say that Thompson is the perfect scholar either. It’s clear that he’s neither a psychologist nor a theologian, and his quasi-Freudian analysis of Methodism betrays an anti-religious snobbishness which is disappointingly common in 20th-century Marxist scholarship. By 1966, when The Making of the English Working Class was published, these ideas looked embarrassingly outdated; even if he didn’t speak Spanish, Thompson could easily observe the union of divine and socioeconomic justice in the contemporary American campaign for civil rights. He relies unquestingly on the works of German sociologist Max Weber, so if those theories aren’t you thing I recommend taking “The Curse of Adam” with a grain of salt.

If you’re assigned this book for school, you won’t have a choice about reading it. Otherwise, you really don’t have to. The experience itself is tedious and its ideas are probably already familiar to you. But that’s part of being a nonfiction legend.

“We forget how long abuses can continue ‘unknown’ until they are articulated: how people can look at misery and not notice it, until misery itself rebels” (342)

*in this case “Silmarillion” does not mean “bright,” or “shiny,” but “long, confusing and populated by thousands of interchangeable recurring characters.”