Fifty years of E. P. Thompson's<i>The Making of the English Working Class</i>: some field notes

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 < http://greatbustard.org/the-project/> (accessed 11 May 2013). One cannot help but hope that the Group meets with some success in its endeavours.2 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 4th edn (London, 1981), 319.3ibid., 42.4 Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, 1985), 3.5 Some of the most important of these criticisms are found in Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London, 1980); Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), chap. 4; Catherine Hall, ‘The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: gender and working-class culture in nineteenth-century England’ in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1990), 78–102. The end notes to Bryan Palmer's E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (London, 1994) provide a far more comprehensive record of the various polemics in which Thompson engaged over the course of his life as a public intellectual and activist.6 Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics (Manchester, 2011); Wade Matthews, The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-Up of Britain (Leiden, 2013).7 There were numerous events which we were unable to attend, or which had yet to take place at the time of writing: a one-day conference organized by the People's History Museum and the Working Class Movement Library took place in Manchester on 13 April 2013, supported by the History Workshop Journal, while a celebration of E. P. Thompson as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas took place on 18 May. BBC Radio 3 marked the anniversary with a forty-minute programme by Philip Dodd, while a three-day conference on ‘The global E. P. Thompson’ took place at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in October. The Canadian journal Labour/Le Travail also recently published the contents of a roundtable on ‘The Making at fifty’, Labour/Le Travail, lxxi (Spring 2013), 149–92. The 2013 Historical Materialism conference, that took place in London in November, makes reference to the dual anniversaries of Thompson's TheMaking and C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) in its call for papers. A fascinating video of a conversation between James and Thompson recorded for the ‘Talking History’ series is available here: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = MI7n7M6nAOA> (accessed 11 May 2013). Since it was posted in September 2012, it has been viewed over 4000 times.8 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38, 1 (1967), 56–97 (60–1).9 E. P. Thompson (ed.), WarwickUniversity Ltd: Industry, Management, and the Universities (Harmondsworth, 1970), 154.10 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 4th edn (Harmondsworth, 1991), 11–12.11ibid., 16.12 See Barbara Taylor, ‘Religion, radicalism and fantasy’, History Workshop Journal, xxxix, 1 (1995), 102–12; also Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003) and Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge, 2007), chap. 8.13 Griffin's case is best assessed at first hand: see Emma Griffin, Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven, 2013).14 < http://www.thestudentsurvey.com/the_nss.html#.UdBcy8jLfQE> (accessed 30 June 2013).15 < http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/projects/sxl> (accessed 30 June 2013).16 A short excerpt from the film is available on Vimeo here: < http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId = 1374> (accessed 8 July 2013).17 E. P. Thompson, ‘Commitment in poetry’, Persons and Polemics: Historical Essays (London, 1994), 332–41 (342).18 In his account of the post-Thompson New Left Review, Perry Anderson was quick to point out, among his many criticisms, that the ‘popular register that comes from participation in a real mass movement [went] missing’. Anderson, op. cit., 150.19 On the potential consequences of this shift, read Andrew McGettigan, TheGreat University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education (London, 2013).20 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. edn (London, 1976), 355–7, 741–62.21ibid., 786.22ibid., 791.23 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and Moral Law (New York, 1993), xxi. Ludowick Muggleton (1609–98) was a journeyman tailor and self-proclaimed prophet, who is one of the main figures discussed by Thompson in Witness Against the Beast. ‘Muggletonian doctrine’, Thompson recounts, ‘concentrated upon three areas – the problem of the first creation of matter and of the origin of evil: Genesis and the Fall; and Revelation, 70.24ibid., xxi.25 Thompson, William Morris, 243.26 Thompson offered his own reflections on this in his short unpublished essay ‘Reflections on Jacoby and all that’, a paper presented at the University of Minnesota in 1987, in which he notes a shift in register and key in his later writings, which, he suggests, err on the side of caution. We might also note, at this point, that 2013 has also seen the re-publication of Thompson's Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975) by Breviary Stuff publications. The Morris biography was re-published in 2011, with a new preface by Peter Linebaugh, by the PM Press. History Workshop Online have made ‘Reflections on Jacoby’ accessible at the following url: < http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/reflections-on-jacoby-and-all-that-an-unpublished-essay-by-e-[-thompson/>.27 Patrick Joyce, ‘What is the social in social history?’, Past and Present, 206 (2010), 213–48.28 Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘The new poverty of theory: material turns in a Latourian world’ in Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine (New Haven, 2013), 218, 221.29 E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialist humanism: an epistle to the Philistines’, The New Reasoner: A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism, 1 (Summer 1957), 113–14, quoted in David McNally, ‘E. P. Thompson: class struggle and historical materialism’, International Socialism, 2, 61 (Winter 1993), < http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1993/isj2-061/mcnally.htm#n23> (accessed 23 January 2014).30 For more on this point, see Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990).31 Thompson, ‘Commitment in poetry’, op. cit., 333.

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