Making of the English working class

This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century, for Edward Thompson sees the ordinary people of England not as statistical fodder, nor merely as passive victims of political repression and industrial alienation. 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 the genesis of parliamentary reform. He also includes radically new interpretations of underground traditions usually ignored by historians, from clandestine Jacobin societies and millenarian movements to the Luddites.

But the most impressive feature of this exceptional book is its re-creation of the whole life-experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.