E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is among the twentieth century's most influential works of historical scholarship, and the fiftieth anniversary of its publication occasioned a flurry of stock-taking conferences. Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and “The Making of the English Working Class” represents the fruits of one such event, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2013. With the exception of a brief new preface by editors Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado, its constituent parts were originally published in a 2015 special issue of Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.
Burton and Fortado wrote their preface in June 2020, amid the dislocations of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests occasioned by a Minneapolis police officer's killing of George Floyd. Of what use, they ask, can a book about a subset of the working population in a particular time and place that does not substantively engage with a host of issues—the role of race and gender in shaping workers’ experiences, the global dimensions of socioeconomic change, and so forth—be in helping us diagnose and oppose the injustices of our own historical moment? Furthermore, who has “the time or the patience to read big books now”? (vii).
The contributors to Histories of a Radical Book reflect on these questions to varying degrees. In her introduction, Burton recounts the motivation for organizing the 2013 symposium and wonders how reader engagement with a “hefty, adamantine object” such as The Making of the English Working Class will change in the digital era (3). Some contributors are primarily concerned with the book's reception. Ann Curthoys situates The Making of the English Working Class's uneven Australian impact against the questions and political currents that animated Marxist, feminist, and Aboriginal historians in the years after its publication, raising questions about the degree to which Thompson's analysis can speak to politically minded scholars working in other national (and transnational) contexts. Isabel Hofmeyr considers how generations of South African readers—particularly university students—have engaged with “radical” texts by comparing marginalia in library copies of The Making of the English Working Class and Steve Biko's I Write What I Like (1978). James Barrett examines The Making of the English Working Class's impact on the “new” labor history in the United States. After sketching the relative weaknesses of Thompson's analysis comparatively and on its own terms, Barrett suggests one aspect merits further reflection: namely, the notion that class consciousness “involved not only social and political aspirations, but also . . . hurt, resentment, and anger” (14). Lara Kriegel likewise considers the role that feelings such as loss, defeat, and anomie play in both The Making of the English Working Class and in the representations of British working-class life offered by the “kitchen sink” dramas of the 1950s and 1960s.
Other contributors use The Making of the English Working Class (and its omissions) as foundations from which to build their own analyses. Christopher Boyer rereads Thompson's account of proletarianization and class formation against agrarian struggles in early twentieth-century Mexico, exploring the factors that resulted in the emergence of a cohesive campesino consciousness in the postrevolutionary period. Caroline Bressey reconstructs strands of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black British radicalism and antiracist and anticolonial activism and thought that either received passing attention or were neglected entirely in The Making of the English Working Class; her analysis of the work undertaken by British antiracist campaigners Caroline Impey and Celestine Edwards for the journal Anti-caste demonstrates the role that international networks played in such activism in the late nineteenth century. Zach Sell uses W. E. B. DuBois's notion of “correspondences” to examine forms of colonial and racial exploitation in India and the southern United States, as well as their relationship to the phenomena with which Thompson was concerned (56). Utathya Chattopadhyaya brings things forward in time with a consideration of Talking History, the wide-ranging 1983 conversation between Thompson and C. L. R. James that was filmed and edited by H. O. Nazareth. It is here, Chattopadhyaya suggests, rather than in The Making of the English Working Class, that we should look for insights into Thompson's internationalist thinking.
Burton and Fortado ask whether “big books” are relevant to political struggles, particularly in “our TLDR/too long didn't read world” (vii). The Making of the English Working Class, of course, has a considerable amount to say about this. In Thompson's account, reading—coupled with experience—played a key role in the formation of working-class consciousness. Reading enabled laboring people to become political thinkers, providing them with tools to critique the world and their place within it. Such knowledge was not given. Rather, it was won in the face of “almost overwhelming difficulties—the lack of leisure, the cost of candles (or spectacles), as well as educational deprivation” (Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [1966], 713). Here, to be sure, Thompson was discussing a particular subset of the working-class: those “articulate” male artisans who were given pride of place in his narrative. Nonetheless, the point holds. For all the limitations of its analysis, and despite—or perhaps because of—its length, The Making of the English Working Class continues to repay the attention of those who are willing to take the time to read it.
