Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:29:02.362Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Condescension of Posterity:” The Recent Historiography of the English Working Class

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Harold Perkin
Harold Perkin*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Lancaster
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, Edward Thompson set out in The Making of the English Working Class “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete* hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian* artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” It is no criticism of that great, rugged, sprawling, big-hearted book to say that what the English working class most needs to be rescued from is the enormous condescension of middle-class intellectuals. Ever since Marx and Engels, if not indeed James Mill and Andrew Ure, English working people have not, at least until very recently, been allowed to have their own history but have had it imposed upon them from above by self-appointed champions and apologists from the “higher” classes.

Thompson himself is something of an exception, more an old fashioned independent country gentleman than a middle-class intellectual, living in a mansion in Worcestershire and exhibiting in his concern for the long dead poor the traditional paternalism which he decries in the eighteenth-century squire.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Social Science History , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Fall 1978 , pp. 87 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1978 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 12Google Scholar.

2 He is not above the academic malpractice of tendentiously selective quotation, however. In Thompson, E.P., “Eighteenth-Century English Society: class struggle without class?” Social History, 3 (May 1978), 135–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, he quotes my Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969) on what he presents as a condescending description of eighteenth-century social relations “as they may be seen from above.” He does not quote the succeeding paragraph (42-43) on the disciplinary social control exercised by the landlord and the harsh treatment of those who opposed his will. As it happens, my whole argument about eighteenth-century paternalism is that it was Janus-headed and had a harsh, disciplinary face for the “insubordinate” as well as a benevolent one for the deferential, and that class protest, always latent, was brutally suppressed whenever it became overt.

3 Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957; Penguin, ed. 1971), 16Google Scholar.

4 Althusser, Louis, For Marx (English trans. London, 1969), 24Google Scholar; in fact, Lenin did not “follow Kautsky,” whom he repeatedly denounces in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917, revised and translated, London, 1933), the main source for Lenin’s views on the English working class, and elsewhere.

5 The Communist Manifesto (1848).

6 Cf. Maclntyre, A., Marcuse (London, 1970), chap. 8Google Scholar.

7 Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969), 237–52Google Scholar.

8 Marx, Karl, Capital (Everyman, ed., London, 1942), 1:529Google Scholar; Engels, Frederick, The Condition of the Working Class in England in Marx and Engels on Britain (Moscow, 1962), 36Google Scholar.

9 Hobsbawm, E.J. Cf., “Karl Marx’s Contribution to Historiography,” in Blackburn, Robin, ed., Ideology in Social Science (London, 1972), esp. 270–73Google Scholar.

10 Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Societys,” 148.

11 Thompson, E.P., Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975), 258–60Google Scholar.

12 Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926)Google Scholar; Sidney, Beatrice and Webb, Beatrice, Soviet Communism: a New Civilization, 2 vols. (London, 1935)Google Scholar.

13 “Was Mrs. Webb ‘ruthless’? A Niece’s impressions,” letter from Konradin Hobhouse, Manchester Guardian, 4 February 1958: “Aunt Bo …despised the working classes with all the zest of her admirable middle-class Victorian upbringing.”

14 Barnett, Samuel, “A Scheme for the Unemployed,” Nineteenth Century 24 (1888), 753–54Google Scholar; Booth, William, In Darkest England, and the Way out (London, 1890), 93Google Scholar; Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People of London, 17 vols. (London, 1902), 1:154, 166–68Google Scholar. The penchant of many middle-class Victorians for compulsory labour, “state slavery,” or “semi-servitude” as a solution to the threat of the “demoralized poor” is admirably cataglogued in G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971), esp. chaps. 15 and 16.

15 Ball, Sidney, “The Moral Aspects of Socialism,” Fabian Tract No. 72 (London, 18), 5Google Scholar.

16 Gilbert, B.B., The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (London, 1966), 92Google Scholar.

17 Rosenberg, J.D., The Darkening Glass (London, 1961), 140Google Scholar.

18 Morton, A.L., “AFrench View of William Morris,” Marxism Today (1913), 152Google Scholar.

19 Kynaston, David, King Labour: the British Working Class, 1850-1914 (London, 1976), 64Google Scholar.

20 Jones, G.S., Outcast London, 349Google Scholar.

21 Place, Francis, The Improvement of the Working People (London, 1834), 10Google Scholar.

22 Moorhouse, H.F., “The Marxist theory of the labour aristocracy,” Social History, 3 (January 1978), 82Google Scholar.

23 The origin of Engels’s ideas seems to be his article “England in 1845 and in 1885” in The Commonweal (London, 1 March 1885), extensively quoted in his Preface to the 1892 English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England; Lenin, V.I., Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London, 1933)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E.J., “The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century Britain,” Labouring Men (London, 1964)Google Scholar; and “Lenin and the Aristocracy of Labour,” Marxism Today (1970).

24 Foster, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974)Google Scholar, esp. Introduction and chap. 7.

25 Ibid., 238.

26 Gadian, D.S., “Class Consciousness in Oldham and other North-West Industrial Towns,” HistoricalJournal, 21 (1978), 161–72Google Scholar.

27 Jones, G.S., “Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution,” New Left Review, 90 (1975), 61–69Google Scholar.

28 Hinton, J., “The Labour Aristocracy,” New Left Review, 31 (1965), 72–77Google Scholar.

29 Gray, R.Q., The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Bauman, Zygmunt, Between Class and Elite: the Evolution of the British Labour Movement (Manchester, 1972)Google Scholar.

30 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, passim.

31 Perkin, H.J. Cf., “The Origins of the Popular Press,” History Today (July 1957)Google Scholar.

32 Davies, C. Stella, North County Bred: A Working-Class Family Chronicle (London, 1963), 1Google Scholar.

33 Toynbee, Philip in The Observer (London), 27 October 1963Google Scholar, and private correspondence.

34 Thale, Mary, ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place (Cambridge, 1972)Google Scholar.

35 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 36.

36 Thale, Francis Place, 116.

37 Burnett, John, ed., Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1974), 14Google Scholar; see also Vincent, David, ed., Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-class Politicians, 1790-1885 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

38 Thompson, Flora, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford, 1945)Google Scholar; Ashby, Mabel K., Joseph Ashby of Tysoe (Cambridge, 1961)Google Scholar; Roberts, Robert, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the first quarter of the century (Manchester, 1971)Google Scholar; see also A Ragged Schooling (Manchester, 1976).

39 Roberts, Classic Slum, 1.

40 The earliest exponent of “oral history” was probably Henry Mayhew, whose vivid interviews with the street folk of London are recorded in London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1861) which began life as much fuller articles on the working class in the Morning Chronicle, 1849-1851; see Thompson, E.P. and Yeo, Eileen, eds., The Unknown Mayhew Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1971), and Razzell, P.E. and Wainwright, P.W., eds., The Victorian Working Class: Sections from Letters to the Morning Chronicle (London, 1973)Google Scholar. Modern oral listory has been pioneered by, amongst others, Paul Thompson and Thea Vigne and their journal Oral History (University of Essex, Colchester, 1973 onward).

41 Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), 110, 162–64, 179Google Scholar; Roberts, Elizabeth, “The Working-class Family in Barrow and Lancaster, 1890-1930” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, submitted 1978)Google Scholar.

42 Gittins, Diana, “Married Life and Birth Control between the Wars,” Oral History, 3 1975), 53–64Google Scholar.

43 Thompson, Paul, “Memory and History”, S.S.R.C. Newsletter, No. 6 (London, 1969), 18, and The Edwardians (London, 1975), 125–34Google Scholar.

44 See their new journal, History Workshop and the History Workshop Series published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London.

45 Samuel, Raphael, ed., Village Life and Labour (London, 1975)Google Scholar, parts 3 and 4.

46 Meacham, Standish, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 8Google Scholar.

47 Tholfsen, Trygve, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid- Victorian England (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

48 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 109.