A Major Work in Radical History

The Making of the English Working Class
by E. P. Thompson
Pantheon Books, 1964, 848 pp., $15.00

Industrial society was born in Great Britain in the years between 1780 and 1832; E. P. Thompson’s brilliant new
work is the best single account of the effects of that remarkable transformation on the common people of England. Thompson writes in opposition to a host of prevailing orthodoxies—the orthodoxy of empirical economic historians who reject the very notion that a cataclysmic social transformation occurred during these years on the grounds that the statistical indices fail to register it, the Fabian orthodoxy which sees only peaceful evolutionary change under the far-sighted guidance of respectable trade unionists, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” orthodoxy “in which the period is sacked or forerunners—pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Comm...