The Making of the English Working Class

by E.P. Thompson

The London Corresponding Society has often been claimed as the first definitely working-class political organisation formed in Britain.

Assent to this rule meant that the L.C.S. was turning its back upon the century-old identification of political with property-rights

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 common soldier had fought for three things: the limitation of the prerogative of the Crown to infringe his personal rights and liberty of conscience: the right to be governed by representatives, even though he had no part in choosing them: and the “freedom of trading to get money, to get estates by”—and of entering upon political rights in this way.

I love to be in such places where there is no rattling with coaches, nor rumbling with wheels; methinks, here one may, without much molestation, be thinking what he is, whence he came, what he has done … here one may think, and break at heart, and melt in one’s spirit, until one’s eyes become like “the fishpools of Heshbon”. And

If Christ’s poor came to believe that their souls were as good as aristocratic or bougeois souls then it might lead them on to the arguments of the Rights of Man.

It is as though units of paranoia hitherto diffused through the population suddenly coalesce to form a new entity: a collective paranoiac fanaticism.

Indefinite as such a notion as “moral consensus” may be, this question of the limits beyond which the Englishman was not prepared to be “pushed around”, and the limits beyond which authority did not dare to go, is crucial to an understanding of this period.

For Locke, the chief ends of government were the maintenance of civil peace, and the security of the person and of property.

“My religion is to do good,” Paine wrote in Rights of Man, and left the matter there.

And the agitation of the 1790s, although it lasted only five years (1792–6) was extraordinarily intensive and far-reaching. It altered the sub-political attitudes of the people, affected class alignments, and initiated traditions which stretch forward into the present century. It was not an agitation about France, although French events both inspired and bedevilled it. It was an English agitation, of impressive dimensions, for an English democracy.2

Not the political institutions alone, but the social and economic structure of industrial capitalism, were brought into question by their spokesmen.

In order to explore this experience, out of which the political and cultural expression of working-class consciousness arose, we shall do these things. First, we shall examine the changing life-experience of three groups of workers: the field labourers, the urban artisans, and the hand-loom weavers.1 Second, we shall discuss some of the less “ponderable” elements in the people’s standard-of-life. Third, we shall discuss the inner compulsions of the industrial way of life, and the bearing upon them of Methodism. Finally, we shall examine some of the elements in the new working-class communities.

understood that this was the crux of the problem: In almost all occupations there is … a superfluity of labourers, and this alone would tend to render the employment of a vast number of the hands of a casual rather than a regular character.

The Act of 1834, and its subsequent administration by men like Chadwick and Kay, was perhaps the most sustained attempt to impose an ideological dogma, in defiance of the evidence of human need, in English history.

The view that the period before the Industrial Revolution was a sort of golden age is a myth. Many of the evils of the early factory age were no worse than those of an earlier period.

The capitalists “seem as if they were a privileged order of being, but I never knew why they were so”.

If we see the hand-loom weaver’s work in this light, it was certainly painful and obsolete, and any transition, however full of suffering, might be justified. But this is an argument which discounts the suffering of one generation against the gains of the future. For those who suffered, this retrospective comfort is cold.

Certainly, the unprecedented rate of population growth, and of concentration in industrial areas, would have created major problems in any known society, and most of all in a society whose rationale was to be found in profit-seeking and hostility to planning. We should see these as the problems of industrialism, aggravated by the predatory drives of laissez faire capitalism.

By the 1830s whole classes of work had passed almost entirely into the hands of Irishmen since the English either refused the menial, unpleasant tasks or could not keep up with the pace.1 Thus to an extraordinary degree the employers had the best of a labour supply from the pre-industrial and the industrialised worlds. The disciplined worker at heart disliked his work; the same character-structure which made for application and skill erected also barriers of self-respect which were not amenable to dirty or degrading tasks.

And, viewed from this aspect, we may see Luddism as a moment of transitional conflict. On the one hand, it looked backward to old customs and paternalist legislation which could never be revived; on the other hand, it tried to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents.

During the critical decades of the Industrial Revolution, working people suffered total exposure to one of the most humanly degrading dogmas in history—that of irresponsible and unlicensed competition—and generations of outworkers died under this exposure.

Henceforward, in Victorian England, the middle-class Radical and the idealist intellectual were forced to take sides between the “two nations”.

“The inequality with which wealth is distributed forces itself on everybody’s notice,” he lamented, while “the reasons which irrefragably proved this inequality to be necessary to the well-being of all classes are not equally obvious.”

Yet the working people should not be seen only as the lost myriads of eternity. They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture.