The Making of the English Working Class

E. P. Thompson

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781504022170
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A history of the common people and the Industrial Revolution: "A true masterpiece" and one of the Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the twentieth century ( Tribune ). During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class—the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England's greatest cultural and political force. Crucial to contemporary trends in all aspects of society, at the turn of the nineteenth century, these workers united into the class that we recognize all across the Western world today. E. P. Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain's greatest postwar historian. Its publication in 1963 was highly controversial in academia, but the work has become a seminal text on the history of the working class. It remains incredibly relevant to the social and economic issues of current times, with the Guardian saying upon the book's fiftieth anniversary that it "continues to delight and inspire new readers."

Part One

THE LIBERTY TREE

“You are wrestling with the Enemies of the human Race, not for yourself merely, for you may not see the full Day of Liberty, but for the Child hanging at the Breast.”

Instructions of the London Corresponding

Society to its travelling delegates, 1796

“The Beast & the Whore rule without control.”

WILLIAM BLAKE, 1798

CHAPTER ONE

MEMBERS UNLIMITED

“That the number of our Members be unlimited.” This is the first of the “leading rules” of the London Corresponding Society, as cited by its Secretary when he began to correspond with a similar society in Sheffield in March 1792.¹ The first meeting of the London society had been held two months before in a tavern off the Strand (“The Bell” in Exeter Street) and nine “well-meaning, sober and industrious men” were present. The founder and first Secretary, Thomas Hardy, later recalled this meeting:

After having had their bread and cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some conversation on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life … the business for which they had met was brought forward—Parliamentary Reform—an important subject to be deliberated upon and dealt with by such a class of men.

Eight of the nine present became founder-members that night (the ninth thought it over and joined the next week) and paid their first weekly subscription of one penny. Hardy (who was also Treasurer) went back to his home at No. 9 Piccadilly with the entire funds of the organisation in his pocket: 8d. towards paper for the purpose of corresponding with like-minded groups in the country.

Within a fortnight twenty-five members were enrolled and the sum in the Treasurer’s hands was 4s. 1d. (Six months later more than 2,000 members were claimed.) Admission to membership was simple, the test being an affirmative reply to three questions, of which the most important was:

Are you thoroughly persuaded that the welfare of these kingdoms require that every adult person, in possession of his reason, and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament?

In the first month of its existence the society debated for five nights in succession the question—“Have we, who are Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Mechanics, any right to obtain a Parliamentary Reform?”—turning it over “in every point of view in which we were capable of presenting the subject to our minds”. They decided that they had.

Two years later, on 12 May 1794, the King’s Messenger, two Bow Street Runners, the private secretary to Home Secretary Dundas, and other dignitaries arrived at No. 9 Piccadilly to arrest Thomas Hardy, shoemaker, on a charge of high treason. The Hardys watched while the officers ransacked the room, broke open a bureau, rummaged among Mrs. Hardy’s clothes (she was pregnant and remained in bed), filled four large silk handkerchiefs with letters and a corn-sack with pamphlets, books and manuscripts. On the same day a special message from the King was brought to the House of Commons, concerning the seditious practices of the Corresponding Societies; and two days later a Committee of Secrecy of the House was appointed to examine the shoemaker’s papers.

The shoemaker was examined several times by the Privy Council itself. Hardy left little record of these encounters; but one of his fellow prisoners entertained his readers with a dramatic reconstruction of his own interrogation by the highest council in the land. “I was called in,” related John Thelwall, “and beheld the whole Dramatis Personae intrenched chin deep in Lectures and manuscripts … all scattered about in the utmost confusion.” The Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary, and the Prime Minister (Pitt) were all present:

Attorney-General (piano). Mr. Thelwall, what is your Christian name?

T. (somewhat sullenly). John.

Att. Gen. (piano still)… With two l’s at the end or with one?

T. With two—but it does not signify. (Carelessly, but rather sullen, or so.) You need not give yourself any trouble. I do not intend to answer any questions.

Pitt. What does he say? (Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the Chancellor.)

Lord Chancellor (with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper). He does not mean to answer any questions.

Pitt. What is it?—What is it?—What? (fiercely).…¹

John Thelwall then turned his back on the august company and “began to contemplate a drawing in water-colours”. The Prime Minister dismissed him and summoned for interrogation a fourteen-year-old lad, Henry Eaton, who had been living with the Thelwalls. But the boy stood his ground and “entered into a political harangue, in which he used very harsh language against Mr. Pitt; upbraiding him with having taxed the people to an enormous extent …”.¹

By the standards of the next 100 years the antagonists appear to be strangely amateurish and uncertain of their rôles, rehearsing in curiously personal encounters the massive impersonal encounters of the future.² Civility and venom are mixed together; there is still room for acts of personal kindness alongside the malice of class hatred. Thelwall, Hardy, and ten other prisoners were committed to the Tower and later to Newgate. While there, Thelwall was for a time confined in the charnel-house; and Mrs. Hardy died in childbirth as a result of shock sustained when her home was besieged by a “Church and King” mob. The Privy Council determined to press through with the charge of high treason: and the full penalty for a traitor was that he should be hanged by the neck, cut down while still alive, disembowelled (and his entrails burned before his face) and then beheaded and quartered. A Grand Jury of respectable London citizens had no stomach for this. After a nine-day trial, Hardy was acquitted (on Guy Fawkes Day, 1794). The Foreman of the Jury fainted after delivering his “Not Guilty”, while the London crowd went wild with enthusiasm and dragged Hardy in triumph through the streets. Acquittals for Horne Tooke and Thelwall (and the dismissal of the other cases) followed. But the celebrations of the crowd were premature. For in the next year the steady repression of reformers—or “Jacobins”—was redoubled. And by the end of the decade it seemed as if the entire agitation had been dispersed. The London Corresponding Society had been outlawed. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man was banned. Meetings were prohibited. Hardy was running a shoe-shop near Covent Garden, appealing to old reformers to patronise him in tribute to his past services. John Thelwall had retired to an isolated farm in South Wales. It seemed, after all, that “tradesmen, shopkeepers, and mechanics” had no right to obtain a Parliamentary Reform.

The London Corresponding Society has often been claimed as the first definitely working-class political organisation formed in Britain. Pedantry apart (the Sheffield, Derby and Manchester societies were formed before the Society in London) this judgement requires definition. On the one hand, debating societies in which working men took part existed sporadically in London from the time of the American War. On the other hand, it may be more accurate to think of the L.C.S. as a “popular Radical” society than as “working-class”.

Hardy was certainly an artisan. Born in 1752, he had been apprenticed as a shoe maker in Stirlingshire: had seen something of the new industrialism as a bricklayer at the Carron Iron Works (he was nearly killed when the scaffolding collapsed when he was at work on ironmaster Roebuck’s house); and had come to London as a young man, shortly before the American War. Here he worked in one of those numerous trades where a journeyman looked forward to becoming independent, with luck to becoming a master himself—as Hardy eventually became. He married the daughter of a carpenter and builder. One of his colleagues, a Chairman of the L.C.S., was Francis Place, on his way to becoming a master-tailor. The line between the journeymen and the small masters was often crossed—the Journeymen Boot and Shoemakers struck against Hardy in his new rôle as a small employer in 1795, while Francis Place, before becoming a master-tailor, helped to organise a strike of Journeymen Breeches-makers in 1793. And the line between the artisan of independent status (whose workroom was also his “shop”) and the small shopkeeper or tradesman was even fainter. From here it was another step to the world of self-employed engravers, like William Sharp and William Blake, of printers and apothecaries, teachers and journalists, surgeons and Dissenting clergy.

At one end, then, the London Corresponding Society reached out to the coffee-houses, taverns and Dissenting Churches off Piccadilly, Fleet Street and the Strand, where the self-educated journeyman might rub shoulders with the printer, the shopkeeper, the engraver or the young attorney. At the other end, to the east, and south of the river, it touched those older working-class communities—the waterside workers of Wapping, the silk-weavers of Spitalfields, the old Dissenting stronghold of Southwark. For 200 years “Radical London” has always been more heterogeneous and fluid in its social and occupational definition than the Midlands or Northern centres grouped around two or three staple industries. Popular movements in London have often lacked the coherence and stamina which results from the involvement of an entire community in common occupational and social tensions. On the other hand, they have generally been more subject to intellectual and “ideal” motivations. A propaganda of ideas has had a larger audience than in the North. London Radicalism early acquired a greater sophistication from the need to knit diverse agitations into a common movement. New theories, new arguments, have generally first effected a junction with the popular movement in London, and travelled outwards from London to the provincial centres.

The L.C.S. was a junction-point of this sort. And we must remember that its first organiser lived in Piccadilly, not in Wapping or in Southwark. But there are features, in even the brief description of its first meetings, which indicate that a new kind of organisation had come into being—features which help us to define (in the context of 1790–1850) the nature of a “working-class organisation”. There is the, working man as Secretary. There is the low weekly subscription. There is the intermingling of economic and political themes—“the hardness of the times” and Parliamentary Reform. There is the function of the meeting, both as a social occasion and as a centre for political activity. There is the realistic attention to procedural formalities. Above all, there is the determination to propagate opinions and to organise the converted, embodied in the leading rule: “That the number of our Members be unlimited.”

Today we might pass over such a rule as a commonplace: and yet it is one of the hinges upon which history turns. It signified the end to any notion of exclusiveness, of politics as the preserve of any hereditary élite or property group. Assent to this rule meant that the L.C.S. was turning its back upon the century-old identification of political with property-rights—turning its back also upon the Radicalism of the days of “Wilkes and Liberty”, when “the Mob” did not organise itself in pursuance of its own ends but was called into spasmodic action by a faction—even a Radical faction—to strengthen its hand and frighten the authorities. To throw open the doors to propaganda and agitation in this “unlimited” way implied a new notion of democracy, which cast aside ancient inhibitions and trusted to self-activating and self-organising processes among the common people. Such a revolutionary challenge was bound to lead on to the charge of high treason.

The challenge had, of course, been voiced before—by the 17th-century Levellers. And the matter had been argued out between Cromwell’s officers and the Army agitators in terms which look forward to the conflicts of the 1790s. In the crucial debate, at Putney,¹ the representatives of the soldiers argued that since they had won the victory they should benefit by being admitted to a greatly extended popular franchise. The claim of the Leveller Colonel Rainborough is well known:

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.… I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of these things.

The reply of Cromwell’s son-in-law, General Ireton—the spokesman of the “Grandees”—was that “no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom … that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” When Rainborough pressed him, Ireton grew warm in return:

All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come to contend for victory—but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that.

“If you admit any man that hath a breath and being,” he continued, a majority of the Commons might be elected who had no “local and permanent interest”. “Why may not those men vote against all property?… Show me what you will stop at; wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.”

This unqualified identification of political and property rights brought angry expostulations. From Sexby—

There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little propriety in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright. But it seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right … I wonder we were so much deceived.

And Rainborough broke in ironically:

Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If it be laid down for a rule … it must be so. But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.

To which Ireton and Cromwell replied with arguments which seem like prescient apologetics for the compromise of 1688. The common soldier had fought for three things: the limitation of th...