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PARTISAN REVIEW
been to explain the nature of the English working classes - both their
passivity and their occasional militancy. The major figure in this ef–
fort has been the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In his influen–
tial book,
The Making of the English Working Class,
1
which appeared
in 1963, Thompson granted that "by 1840 most people were 'better
off than their forerunners had been fifty years before," but added
that now "they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight im–
provement as a catastrophic experience." And, then, like Hobsbawm
earlier, he proceeded to discuss working-class life in cultural terms .
For two decades, Thompson and his followers have dominated the
field. Now the views of Thompson are being challenged, most
notably by Gertrude Himmelfarb who, for many years, made her
mark in intellectual history but with her recent book
The Idea of Pov–
erty,2
the first of two volumes, has sought to provide a more complex
picture of English social history. A contrast of these views tells us
much about the writing of history today.
"The working class made itself as much as it was made," E. P.
Thompson argued in 1963. And a generation of social historians
emulated his efforts to recover eighteenth and nineteenth century
working-class life and culture and little-known proletarian heroes
and heroines. With few exceptions, orthodox Marxists had, up to
then, pictured the workers as relatively passive individuals molded
by great historical forces. Thompson's Marxism was not "scientific"
and determinist, but of a romantic free will variety. His work was a
bildungsroman
of the English proletariat, the preindustrial artisan
beset by an emasculating industrialism and the terrors of evangelical
religion, attempting to construct a new culture and class conscious–
ness from the remnants of traditional society. This effort of will, for
Thompson, was not merely a defense against the intrusion of the
new capitalism, but at its core a vision of a more just society.
A Communist Party member before the Soviet invasion of
Hungary in 1956, Thompson embraced the opposition to industrial
society of the romantic utopian poet and artist William Morris, the
subject of his first book (published in 1955).3 He joined Morris in the
1.
The Making
of
the English Working Class.
By E. P . Thompson . Vintage Books.
$11.95.
2. The Irka
of
Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age.
By Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00.
3. William Morris: Romantic Revolutionary.
By E. P. Thompson . Lawrence and
Wishart. $17.95.
