The Making Of The English Working Class

This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1760 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. For Edward Thompson sees the ordinary people of England not as passive victims of industrialization but as active agents in their own history. He shows that the working class took part in its own making.

Within the conventional framework of English history in the Industrial Revolution, Mr Thompson gives controversial assessments of the popular traditions of the eighteenth century: the cost of living controversy, the role of Methodism and of Jacobinism, and in particular presents radically new interpretations of underground traditions usually ignored by historians, from clandestine Jacobin societies and revolutionary conspiracies to Luddism and machine-breaking.

But the most impressive feature of this exceptional book is the extended consideration it gives to the men and women who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.