“Through a Glass Darkly”

Extract

The question that springs to mind at the start of this brief résumé of my career is, how did I come to be employed by the British Economic and Social Research Council, when my research training seemed so much against it? Memory is at best a fallible guide, but, as I remember, 1965 saw the appearance of The World We Have Lost, by Peter Laslett, which sought to describe the structure of English society before the Industrial Revolution. I had known Laslett as a lecturer in the Cambridge History Faculty who gave a course of general lectures on the history of political thought in the ancient world; he was also more generally known as the man who had researched the late-seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. But here he was, writing a different kind of book altogether, with a first chapter called “The Passing of the Patriarchal Household: Parents and Children, Masters and Servants,” and further chapters on such topics as whether the peasants really starved. What was this political analyst up to? Not to anything good, or so I was told in a leading article in the Times Literary Supplement for 9 December 1965. In a scabrous attack entitled “The Book of Numbers,” E. P. Thompson (for it was he, hiding behind the cloak of anonymity that was generally assumed by the authors of leading articles) did everything to undermine Laslett’s version of the new history. “It is to be hoped that the cause will survive Mr Laslett’s advocacy,” he concluded. He succeeded with me; I let the book pass me by on the other side.