The Making of the English Working Class

by E. P. Thompson

Overview

"Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency and the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary

"Mr. Thompson's deeply human imagination and controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms and illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--London Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504022170
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	848
Sales rank:	512,170
File size:	4 MB

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The Making of the English Working Class

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By E. P. Thompson

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1963 E. P. Thompson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2217-0

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CHAPTER 1

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. 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)....

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 ...".

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. 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, 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 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. On such terms, "Liberty may be had and property not be destroyed."

For 100 years after 1688 this compromise — the oligarchy of landed and commercial property — remained unchallenged, although with a thickening texture of corruption, purchase, and interest whose complexities have been lovingly chronicled by Sir Lewis Namier and his school. The Leveller challenge was altogether dispersed — although the spectre of a Leveller revival was often conjured up, as the Scylla to the Charybdis of Papists and Jacobites between which the good ship Constitution must steer her course. But until the last quarter of the 18th century the temperate republican and libertarian impulses of the "Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthsman" seem to be transfixed within the limits of Ireton's definition. To read the controversies between reformers and authority, and between different reforming groups, in the 1790s is to see the Putney Debates come to life once again. The "poorest he" in England, the man with a "birthright", becomes the Rights of Man: while the agitation of "unlimited" members was seen by Burke as the threat of the "swinish multitude". The great semi-official agency for the intimidation of reformers was called the Association for "Protecting Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers". The moderate Yorkshire reformer, the Reverend Christopher Wyvill, as to whose devotion there can be no question, nevertheless believed that a reform on the principle of universal suffrage "could not be effected without a Civil War":

In times of warm political debate, the Right of Suffrage communicated to an ignorant and ferocious Populace would lead to tumult and confusion. ... After a series of Elections disgraced by the most shameful corruption, or disturbed by the most furious commotion, we expect that the turbulence or venality of the English Populace would at last disgust the Nation so greatly, that to get rid of the intolerable evils of a profligate Democracy, they would take refuge ... under the protection of Despotic Power.

"If Mr Paine should be able to rouze up the lower classes," he wrote in 1792, "their interference will probably be marked by wild work, and all we now possess, whether in private property or public liberty, will be at the mercy of a lawless and furious rabble."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson. Copyright © 1963 E. P. Thompson. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: The Liberty Tree
  • I Members Unlimited
  • II Christian and Apollyon
  • III “Satan’s Strongholds”
  • IV The Free-born Englishman
  • V Planting the Liberty Tree
• Part Two: The Curse of Adam
  • VI Exploitation
  • VII The Field Labourers
  • VIII Artisans and Others
  • IX The Weavers
  • X Standards and Experiences
    • i. Goods
    • ii. Homes
    • iii. Life
    • iv. Childhood
  • XI The Transforming Power of the Cross
    • i. Moral Machinery
    • ii. The Chiliasm of Despair
  • XII Community
    • i. Leisure and Personal Relations
    • ii. The Rituals of Mutuality
    • iii. The Irish
    • iv. Myriads of Eternity
• Part Three: The Working-Glass Presence
  • XIII Radical Westminster
  • XIV An Army of Redressers
    • i. The Black Lamp
    • ii. The Opaque Society
    • iii. The Laws against Combination
    • iv. Croppers and Stockingers
    • v. Sherwood Lads
    • vi. By Order of the Trade
  • XV Demagogues and Martyrs
    • i. Disaffection
    • ii. Problems of Leadership
    • iii. Hampden Clubs
    • iv. Brandreth and Oliver
    • v. Peterloo
    • vi. The Cato Street Conspiracy
  • XVI Class Consciousness
    • i. The Radical Culture
    • ii. William Cobbett
    • iii. Carlile, Wade and Gast
    • iv. Owenism
    • v. “A Sort of Machine”
• Bibliographical Note
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright Page