Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class 49
E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working
Class
In the Preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson states:
This book has a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose. Making, because
it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning.
The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at
its own making (1980: 8).
The English working class, like any class, is for Thompson ‘a historical phenomenon’;
it is not a ‘structure’ or a ‘category’, but the coming together of ‘a number of disparate
and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in
consciousness’; it is ‘something which in fact happens (and can be shown to happen)
in human relationships’ (ibid.). Moreover, class is not a ‘thing’, it is always a historical
relationship of unity and difference: uniting one class as against another class or
classes. As he explains: ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually
opposed to) theirs’ (8–9). The common experience of class ‘is largely determined by
the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily’ (9). However,
the consciousness of class, the translation of experience into culture, ‘is defined by
men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’ (10). Class
is for Thompson, then, ‘a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which
can be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period’ (11).
The Making of the English Working Class details the political and cultural formation
of the English working class by approaching its subject from three different but related
perspectives. First, it reconstructs the political and cultural traditions of English radicalism
in the late eighteenth century: religious dissent, popular discontent, and the
influence of the French Revolution. Second, it focuses on the social and cultural experience
of the Industrial Revolution as it was lived by different working groups: weavers,
field labourers, cotton spinners, artisans, etc. Finally, it analyses the growth of workingclass
consciousness evidenced in the corresponding growth in a range of political,
social and cultural, ‘strongly based and self conscious working-class institutions’
(212–13). As he insists: ‘The working class made itself as much as it was made’ (213).
He draws two conclusions from his research. First, ‘when every caution has been made,
the outstanding fact of the period between 1790 and 1830 is the formation of “the
working class”’ (212). Second, he claims that ‘this was, perhaps, the most distinguished
popular culture England has known’ (914).
The Making of the English Working Class is the classic example of ‘history from below’.
Thompson’s aim is to place the ‘experience’ of the English working class as central to
any understanding of the formation of an industrial capitalist society in the decades
leading up to the 1830s. It is a history from below in the double sense suggested by