E.P. Thompson was nursed on a mother's milk of transatlantic missionary work and writings on the Middle East that reached back to the last half of the nineteenth century. Fathered on Bengali literature, the poetry of the Great War, cricket with the likes of Nehru, and the struggle for Indian independence, Thompson was born into a highly literate and deeply politicized global village. Small wonder that at seventeen he was an anti-fascist and a soldier. But he took a wide Left turn, following in a brother's footsteps, to become a Marxist and a Communist in his twenties, only to find himself, by 1956, donning dissident dress, leading an exodus from the Communist Party of Great Britain, building a revolutionary New Left in the seemingly unpropitious climate of the late 1950s.

By this time, Thompson had spent almost a decade in the adult education movement, where he learned a profound respect for the experience of working people. A writer whose passion for the poetic and willingness to immerse himself in sources that cut against the grain of various scholasticisms, Thompson's first books (a 1955 political resurrection of the revolutionary romanticism of William Morris, followed by a volcano of a book, The Making of the English Working Class, in 1963) established him as perhaps the most influential advocate of a new working-class history. It accented the agency of laboring people, and refused to shy away from the class struggles that promised a better world, whatever their failings.

For a time an influential teacher and founder of the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick University, Thompson rested uneasily in traditional academic life. He made his exit from it in the 1970s to devote full time to his writing, both popular and scholarly. But he was never a man of fashion, and he railed against the Parisian theory so prominent in Left academic circles, attacking relentlessly the oeuvre of Louis Althusser and relating its mechanical structuralism to the Stalinism Thompson had pilloried in 1956. All of this was obviously linked to what Thompson considered of value in Marx, not only the questions that the founder of historical materialism had posed, but the purpose in asking them: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It was his refusal to suffer much foolishness that flew in the face of this commitment gladly that often isolated Thompson. But it elevated him as well.

At a time when most historians are producing their best work, in their fifties, Thompson shelved his notebooks and his beloved trips to archives and provincial libraries, and took to the global hustings, beating back the threat of nuclear war and the possible annihilation of the species. Never one to do anything by halves; he sacrificed not only a decade of his now precious time, but his health as well. A powerfully theatrical orator, he galvanized audiences East and West, reviving the old Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in which he had marched in the late 1950s, into a European Nuclear Disarmament movement that actually reached from London, Paris, Oslo, Prague, and Berlin to Calcutta, Sydney, New York, and Toronto. Edward Thompson made history in this period rather than researching it.

The price, however, was to be a high one. This last mobilization exhausted Thompson, and a bug that he picked up in his world travels left him debilitated and undermined his immune system. He was left vulnerable to a range of afflictions, among them a death-threatening encounter with what he thought was Legionnaire's Disease and a nasty bout of shingles (passed on to him unknowingly by my five-year old daughter, who a day or two after playing with Edward broke out in a case of chicken pox). By the 1990s, the political landscape of world politics, forever altered by the implosion of the Soviet Union and the reconfiguration of Eastern Europe, Thompson was racing against the obviously ticking clock of death to finish many writing projects, none of which, whatever their brilliance, came up to the truly exceptional standards of scholarship and analytic acuteness that would have been reached had Thompson been at the height of his powers.

Almost all of what E.P. Thompson produced in the 1990s owed an immense debt to Dorothy Thompson, his life partner since the 1940s, and an historian and political activist of considerable stature in her own right. The list of works, amazingly enough, included three major studies: a long-awaited account of eighteenth-century plebeian culture, Customs in Common (1991); an evocative reconsideration of William Blake, Witness Against the Beast (1993); and Alien Homage (1993), an elaboration of Thompson's father's relations and encounter with the Bengali poet/philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. But beyond this were also four posthumously-published volumes, collections of essays and poems, as well as an excavation of the politics behind the death of Thompson's brother, Frank, a communist partisan killed by fascists in the Second World War, but possibly also abandoned by his own military command while leading a failed Bulgarian mission.

Much of Dorothy Thompson's 1990s was spent helping Edward and, following his death, preparing his unfinished work for various presses. The Essential E.P. Thompson is probably the last of these efforts. And it is a masterful job, one designed to introduce future generations to the pivotal pieces of Thompson's perspective. Hard choices no doubt kept Dorothy thinking for many months which works must be included, and how they were to be excerpted. Given Thompson's range and shifting concerns, capturing “the essential Thompson” must have taken considerable thought, proving no mean feat.

Dorothy's first task was to appreciate that while Thompson never considered himself primarily a historian, it was as a writing researcher of the plebeian and radical past that he perhaps left his most lasting mark. Thompson changed the way we look at this obscured experience, and while it should never be forgotten that he did this by always being cognizant of the need to transform our presents and build better futures, his approach to the past was of course crucial. He was never one to sacrifice the integrity of historical research, moreover, on any easy altar of political expediency.

The selections from Thompson's writings chosen by Dorothy Thompson are appropriately gathered together in four sections.

Leading the way is a major compilation of extracts from, among other works, Thompson's pathbreaking early books, The Making of the English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955 and Postscript, 1976). Under the heading, “Politics and Culture,” these sections highlight the vision of Thompson, perhaps articulated most succinctly in the famous Preface to The Making of the English Working Class, arguably the most widely quoted brief statement on class formation in the last forty years. They are also indicative of Thompson's tone. For what marked Thompson as one of the greatest historians of the Left was his uniquely combative, polemical engagement with all writing that rubbed against his democratic and radical sensibilities. This is evident in the inclusion of chapters from The Making of the English Working Class on exploitation and the weavers, in which Thompson faced into the strong wind of 1950s conservative historiography by insisting that whatever the advances registered in the Industrial Revolution, it was also emphatically a history of loss. “For those who suffered,” Thompson wrote tellingly, “retrospective comfort is cold.” (68) Finally, in charting the character of radical culture and resistance in pre-Chartist class consciousness, and the role of gentleman leaders such as Carlisle, Cobbett, and Owen, Thompson's emphasis on agitation and commitment in history is brought to the fore. This, too, is central in the material extracted from his Morris studies.

A second section brings together crucial fragments of Thompson's exploration of the meanings of law and custom in plebeian life. Most of the segments chosen focus on the eighteenth-century experience, and include the justly famous ruminations on the rule of law that closed Whigs and Hunters (1975), as well as perhaps Thompson's most influential article, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1971), later to be a cornerstone of Customs in Common. Less well known is “The Grid of Inheritance,” a paper that came into being as a comment on a 1970s Past & Present conference addressing issues of common right and enclosure. It revealed what students and colleagues of Thompson's always valued highly, his capacity to offer critical readings of other's work that synthesized deeply and ranged broadly and suggestively over historical terrain, a characteristic evident as well in the famous essay, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (1967).

Thompson never made much self-conscious attempt to write as a theoretician. He preferred his historical works to carry their theory implicitly. Ironically, in the end he was perhaps the most theoretical (and theoretically innovative) of all of the so-called British Marxist historians. In the brief extracts from The Poverty of Theory (1978) included in this book, Thompson elaborates on his understanding of historical logic and the relationship of Marxism and history. Other essays, most emphatically the underappreciated “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context” (1972), writings on socialist humanism, the base-superstructure metaphor, or revolutionary practice that first appeared in the New Reasoner in the late 1950s and the earliest numbers of the New Left Review, as well as Thompson's engagement with Kolakowski, might usefully supplement these choices.

Closing The Essential E.P. Thompson are two remarkably prescient statements on writing radical history. The first, a little-known essay from The Times Literary Supplement (1966) titled by the editor, “History from Below” (it would not have been Thompson's choice of a heading, for he insisted that all history was made at the interface of top/bottom, with the middle not of inconsiderable importance), outlines a mid-1960s transformation in labor history, as it moved into areas associated with the influence of the French journal, Annales E.S.C., and the cultural turn associated with Thompson himself. But this essay also marks Thompson's genuine capacity to embrace the widening of historical inquiry, and endorses with enthusiasm venturing into new areas not in any way associated with Labor's official/approved evolution, including working-class apathy. But more pointedly, Thompson insisted that unless the new strains of radical and labor history steeled themselves in dissidence, continuing the project as “somewhat disestablished” and with “an extra-mural audience still partly in mind,” they could well “grow fat and adopt Norman habits.” (489)

This thought was in some ways reiterated gently in a 1985 discussion involving Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, and Christopher Hill, published in the Radical History Review (1986) and reprinted here. Thompson acknowledged how radical history faces many challenges as it confronts mainstream accommodations. “[O]ur radical impulses are really hemmed in in many ways. . . . we all know it. . . . in the last ten years in Britain I feel very much a closing down of the situation. A lack of originality. A playing safe.” (494) And this trend has of course continued, albeit in ways not always foreseen by Thompson.

Thompson ended this statement on radical history with a homage to Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he recalled insisting that “mind has no sex.” This went against the grain of mid-1980s radical thought, which demanded that everything be recognized as gendered. It would be even more out of favor now. But Thompson, ever the dissident, suggested that Wollstonecraft looked to a wider radicalism, demanding entry into “the whole world of the mind” for herself and other women, at the same time as she refused to rest her case on her own, particular oppressed identity. Radical history, thought Thompson, must demand, and live up to, no less. It must excel as history, refusing to rely merely on the advocacy of the downtrodden and the righteousness of rhetorical platitudes addressed to “Comrades, brothers, sisters.”

I want to key on Mary Wollstonecraft to end this comment. One of Dorothy Thompson's selections for inclusion in the “Politics and Culture” section of The Essential E.P. Thompson is a seven-page review of Claire Tomlin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) that appeared in New Society. This will seem to many a strange piece to privilege in this collection, and of all the writings of Thompson between these covers, it is probably the least remembered and read, with the possible exception of “History from Below.” Yet Thompson always wanted to write on Wollstonecraft, and when teaching graduate students at Queen's University in the late 1980s he focused entirely on the 1790s, devoting considerable attention to this first Jacobin feminist.

His review of Tomlin is vintage Thompson. It refuses readings of Wollstonecraft, Right and Left, that incarcerate her in the category, “Extraordinary Woman.” It refuses to submerge Wollstonecraft in the condescension of either philistine sexism (which abounded in the anonymous anti-radical pamphleteering of the 1790s, bordering on hate literature, and has survived in our time, as an outrageous review of Tomlin's book by Richard Cobb confirms) or the accommodations of contemporary politics (whereby commitment to revolution and the demand that utopian possibility be imagined and grasped are treated as beyond the progressive pale). It refuses to hive off Wollstonecraft's life into an understatement of the immense accomplishment of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), or an overstatement, dripping with censoriousness, of Wollstonecraft's personal blunders, as if most of us, in our adherence to pristine human relationships, do not fall into our share of subjective holes. In short, Thompson refuses much of the mainstream cant of “Poor Mary”!?! He demands no special pleadings, just as he insists on historicized recognition of accomplishment. The closing paragraph of this review of Tomlin is the essential Thompson: politically demanding, historically situated, a side taken with passion, an insistence on what it is right to refuse and resist.

We have rarely seen her equal in our history. To Tomlin's mature assessment, I prefer infinitely the words of Virginia Woolf, where she speaks of ‘the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life'. And as Woolf well knew, high-handedness brings down its revenges. Wollstonecraft was prepared for these; but what she does not deserve is the revenge of “Poor Mary”! emblazoned across a complacent press. She needs no one's condescension. She was poor in nothing. She was never beaten. And the final evidence lies in that part of her which remained a child to the end of the chapter. For that part of her—the refusal to become careful and ‘knowing', the resilient assent to new experience is exactly that part which most of us are careful to cauterise, and then to protect with the callouses of our world-wise complicities. (191) And, of course, what Thompson said of Wollstonecraft could well, with a few adjustments here and there, be said of him.

He had the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in him, to be sure. It certainly brought down its revenges. Thompson was the object of much attack, and he accepted this, up to a point, with good grace. But when lines were crossed, when conservatives castigated his radicalism with oddly out of place reference to his “considerable wealth” or radical feminists charged him with exploiting his wife in his publication activities, he was rightly resentful, as was Dorothy. I have never understood the caricatures of Thompson on the Left, where one of Britain's great internationalists has often been dubbed a “Little Englander”. Jealousy explains much of this. But particularly irksome have been the carping of so many who, in abandoning radicalism to settle into some comfortable middle ground, find Thompson's conscience a burr under their forward-riding saddles, best removed with the tweezers of a superior, often postmodern, conceptual apparatus. But Thompson, like Wollstonecraft, has never been beaten, can never be understood as poor, and refused, to his end, to succumb to the temptations of the worldly-wise, to be complacent in the face of that which he knew to be repugnant, fake, or inflated with academic pomposity. Compared to his critics, and against any standard we would choose to employ, this was precisely why he was great, and remains so a decade past his death. It is why the essentials in this book still matter, some of them written fifty years ago.