The Making of the English Working Class

by E.P. Thompson

10 Hour Bill which was only won after three decades of intensive agitation and in the...

The difficulty lay, not (as Professor Smelser has it) in the “dominant value-system of the day”, but in the strong opposition of a minority of masters, and in the mood of Parliament (which Professor Smelser commends for its success in “handling” and “channelling” the weavers’ “unjustified disturbance symptoms”).

“the effect of the measure would be to withdraw from the worst-paying masters the power which they now possess of regulating wages”.

The response of the weavers to machinery was, as these resolutions indicate, more discriminating than is often supposed. Direct destruction of power-looms rarely took place except when their introduction coincided with extreme distress and unemployment (West Houghton, 1812: Bradford, 1826).

There had been a time when factories had been thought of as kinds of workhouses for pauper children; and even when this prejudice passed, to enter the mill was to fall in status from a self-motivated man, however poor, to a servant or “hand”.

The story of the hand-loom weavers impinges at a score of points upon the general question of living standards during the Industrial Revolution. In its first stages it appears to provide evidence on the “optimistic” side: the spinning-mills are the multipliers which attract thousands of outworkers and raise their standards. But as their standards are raised, so their status and defences are lowered; and from 1800 to 1840 the record is almost unrelievedly “pessimistic”. If we are to assess standards in these years, not in “futuristic” terms, but in terms of the living generations who experienced them, then we must see the weavers as a group who not only did not “share in the benefits” of economic progress but who suffered a drastic decline. Since

textiles were the staple industries of the Industrial Revolution, and since there were far more adults involved in the weaving than in the spinning branches, this would seem as valid a way of describing the experience of these years as any. The customary story, perhaps for reasons of dramatic style, fastens attention upon the multiplier (the mule, the mill, and steam): we have looked at the people who were multiplied.

In the weavers’ history we have a paradigm case of the operation of a repressive and exploitive system upon a section of workers without trade union defences. Government not only intervened actively against their political organisations and trade unions; it also inflicted upon the weavers the negative dogma of the freedom of capital as intransigently as it was to do upon the victims of the Irish famine.

But, as we have seen, for the power-loom masters it was not a “battle” but a great convenience to have an auxiliary cheap labour force, as a stand-by in good times and as a means of keeping down the wages of the women and girls (8s. to 12s. Manchester, 1832) who minded the power-looms. Moreover, there was scarcely no “transfer to the factory”. If the introduction of power had been swifter, then—all other things being equal—its consequences would have been even more catastrophic.

Some economic historians appear to be unwilling (perhaps because of a concealed “progressivism”, which equates human

progress with economic growth) to face the evident fact that technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution, until the railway age, did displace (except in the metal industries) adult skilled labour. Labour so displaced swelled the limitless supply of cheap labour for the arduous work of sheer human muscle in which the times were so spendthrift. There was little or no mechanisation in the mines; ...

It suggests that it is the skilled trades which are exceptional, and that conditions in unskilled manual labour or in outwork industries, so far from being “specially unhappy”, were characteristic of a system designed by employers, legislators and ideologists to cheapen human labour in every way.

The Factory Movement, in its early stages, represented less a growth of middle-class humanitarianism than an affirmation of human rights by the workers themselves.

The Blue Books (at least until we came to the great sanitary enquiries) were not the product of “an age” or the fruit of “a generation”, but a battle-ground in which reformers and obstructionists fought; and in which humanitarian causes, as often as not, were buried.

Nothing more confirms this atrophy, and the profound moral alienation of classes, than the manner of the real “awakening” when it came. Scores of gentlemen and professional men, who gave some support to humanitarian causes in the 1830s and 1840s, appear to have been living in the 1820s in the midst of populous manufacturing districts, oblivious to abuses a few hundred yards from their gates.

But the younger leaders of Methodism were not only guilty of complicity in the fact of child labour by default. They weakened the poor from within, by adding to them the active ingredient of submission; and they fostered within the Methodist Church those elements most suited to make up the psychic component of the work-discipline of which the manufacturers stood most in need.

religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world.… How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state?

For it is exactly at this time that Methodism obtained its greatest success in serving simultaneously as the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie (although here it shared the field with other Nonconformist sects) and of wide sections of the proletariat.

How then should such a religion appeal to the forming proletariat in a period of exceptional hardship, whose multitudes did not dispose them to any sense of group calling, whose experiences at work and in their communities favoured collectivist rather than individualist values, and whose frugality, discipline or acquisitive virtues brought profit to their masters

rather than success to themselves?

The labourer must be turned “into his own slave driver”.

Throughout the 18th century there is a never-ending chorus of complaint from all the Churches and most employers as to the idleness, profligacy, improvidence and thriftlessness of labour.

the deep-rooted folk memory of a “golden age” or of “Merrie England” derives not from the notion that material goods were more plentiful in 1780 than in 1840 but from nostalgia for the pattern of work and leisure which obtained before the outer and inner disciplines of industrialism settled upon the working man.

“every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”. Methodism in no way challenged this doctrine; indeed, it reinforced it with the conventional teaching of the blessedness of poverty. What it did was to provide an inner compulsion as well.

Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized, and its labour lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands. After struggling for a while to conquer their listless or restive habits, they either renounce the employment spontaneously, or are dismissed by the overlookers on account of inattention.

The argument is thus complete. The factory system demands a transformation of human nature, the “working paroxysms” of the artisan or outworker must be methodised until the man is adapted to the discipline of the machine.

It can only be by inculcating “the first and great lesson … that man must expect his chief happiness, not in the present, but in a future state”. Work must be undertaken as a “pure act of virtue … inspired by the love of a transcendent

Being, operating … on our will and affections

But Methodist theology, by virtue of its promiscuous opportunism, was better suited than any other to serve as the religion of a proletariat whose members had not the least reason, in social experience, to feel themselves to be “elected

Dr. Ure indicates the point of junction, in his advice to the mill-owner “to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles with his mechanical”. From this aspect, Methodism was the

desolate inner landscape of Utilitarianism in an era of transition to the work-discipline of industrial capitalism.

Here, indeed, is Ure’s “transforming power”. It is a phenomenon, almost diabolic in its penetration into the very sources of human personality, directed towards the repression of emotional and spiritual energies.

The box-like, blackening chapels stood in the industrial districts like great traps for the human psyche. Within the Church itself there was a constant emotional drama of

backsliders, confessions, forays against Satan, lost sheep; one suspects that the pious sisterhood, in particular, found in this one of the great “consolations” of religion.

But so drastic a redirection of impulses could not be effected without a central disorganisation of the human personality. We can see why Hazlitt described the Methodists as “a collection of religious invalids.”

Since joy was associated with sin and guilt, and pain (Christ’s wounds) with goodness and love, so every impulse became twisted into the reverse, and it became natural to suppose that man or child only found grace in God’s eyes when performing painful, laborious or self-denying tasks.

How was it that Methodism could perform with such success this dual role as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited?

Southcottianism was scarcely a form of revolutionary Chiliasm; it did not inspire men to effective social action, and scarcely engaged with the real world; its apocalyptic fervour was closely akin to the fervours of Methodism—it brought to a point of hysterical intensity the desire for personal salvation.

Rising graphs of Church membership are misleading; what we have, rather, is a revivalist pulsation, or an oscillation between periods of hope and periods of despair and spiritual anguish. After 1795 the poor had once again entered into the Valley of Humiliation. But they entered it unwillingly, with many backward looks; and whenever hope revived, religious revivalism was set aside, only to reappear with renewed fervour upon the ruins of the political messianism which had been overthrown. In this sense, the great Methodist recruitment between 1790 and 1830 may be seen as the Chiliasm of despair.

Thus we might almost offer a spiritual graph, commencing with the far-reaching emotional disturbances associated with the French Revolution and Rights of Man. In the early 1790s we find secular Jacobinism and the millennarial hopes of Richard Brothers: in the late 1790s and the

1800s, Methodist revivalism and the frenzy of the “Johannas”, which more than one contemporary witness saw as being part of the same stock, and appealing to the same audience;4 in the aftermath of Luddism (1811–12) a renewed wave of revivalism, giving way to the political revival of the winter of 1816–17.

On the other hand, as if to baffle expectation, Methodist working men, and, indeed, local preachers, repeatedly emerged in the 19th century—in handfuls here and there—as active workers in

different fields of working-class politics. There were a few Methodist Jacobins, more Methodist Luddites, many Methodist weavers demonstrating at Peterloo, Methodist trade unionists and Chartists.

Just as the repressive inhibitions upon sexuality carried the continual danger of provoking the opposite—either in the form of the characteristic Puritan rebel (the forerunner of Lawrence) or in the form of Antinomianism; so the authoritarian doctrines of Methodism at times bred a libertarian antithesis.

But in the 1790s there is a drastic reorientation of hatred; the Pope was displaced from the seat of commination and in his place was elevated Tom Paine.

Methodism”, Bunting declared, “hates

democracy as much as it h...

In the Old Testament working people found more than a vengeful authoritarian God; they also found an allegory of their own tribulations. It is this body of symbolism (together with Pilgrim’s Progress) which was held in common by Chiliasts, “Johannas”, “Jumpers” and orthodox Wesleyans. No ideology is wholly absorbed by its adherents: it breaks down in practice in a thousand ways under the criticism of impulse and of experience: the working-class community injected into the chapels its own values of mutual aid, neighbourliness and solidarity.

the Methodist political rebel carried through into his radical or

revolutionary activity a profound moral earnestness, a sense of righteousness and of “calling”, a “Methodist” capacity for sustained organisational dedication and (at its best) a high degree of personal responsibility.