Historiography: Venice Stream (Week 17)

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Historiography: Venice Stream (Week 17)

Edward Thompson: Commitment and Culture

The interesting thing about dealing with Edward Thompson now, at this stage of things, is that you can place him in a history of twentieth-century history in a way that the Modern Stream students couldn’t, at the end of last term. Your view of Thompson and his work is enhanced by knowing about the new cultural history, women’s history and gender history, and by modern `theory’ as it impacted on his work. It’s easier for you perhaps, to understand Thompson’s contemporary critics, especially feminist critics, and the argument that in all of his writing on class and class relations, he gendered class as male.

In this lecture I am assuming that `the new social history’ marks the same developments as does `history from below’, and `people’s history’. And I am taking a largely biographical approach, in order to allow you to explore the proposition that Thompson’s writing about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, was also a writing of his own political and cultural times. If the historian does that - explores his or her own circumstances when writing about the past - then it’s not something that Thompson uniquely did. The consensus of post-modernist commentators on the historical enterprise is that all history-writing does that: there is nowhere but the historian’s present from which to write. If you want to explore that argument further, look at Alan Munslow’s The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies. If that is what historians do, then their choice of historical material and topics becomes particularly interesting. I’m not claiming that Thompson was unique; I am suggesting that his career as an intellectual, historian, and political activist provides us with examples of the historian making choices about topics, themes, methods, and sources for the study of late eighteenth-century England, in the light of Cold War politics in the West.

A biographical approach then. And there is no shortage of biographies of E. P. Thompson, on the Web, and elsewhere. And no shortage of photographs. He has, of course, achieved an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is a very classy setting indeed: entry here is a mark of status (intellectual, political, historical status) , and perceived national importance. The great modernist poet, W. H. Auden pondered this kind of modernist biographical enterprise telling in his poem `Who’s Who’, written in the 1930s, though he had something rather cheaper in mind than the Dictionary of National Biography: `shilling lives’ (10p lives), massed produced stories of `great lives’ which, Auden seems to be saying, trace adult activity and achievement back to childhood. Auden also ponders the purpose of these biographies: to make heroes and great men (and women, presumably) seem just `like you and me’: `Some of his last researchers even write/ Love made him weep his pints like you and me’. What is biography for, here and now in this lecture, or in the DNB entry for Thompson? I hope I have made it clear why I am using it today. I don’t believe my purpose is either to make a hero of Thomson, or to say that really, he was just like everyone else ... .

Edward Palmer Thompson was born in Oxford in 1924, to parents whose background was Methodist. (Link: religious influences on the historian? The Methodist Ethic and the Spirit of the Historian? What then about E. P. Thompson’s attack on Methodism, in The Making of the English Working Class?) The father (Edward John Thompson) had in fact recently returned from West Bengal, where he had worked as a Methodist missionary. At the time of his second son’s birth he was teaching Bengali at Oxford University. Later in life, in various interviews, E. P. Thompson said that from a very early age, his parents fostered in him the belief that all governments were `mendacious and imperialist’, and that `one’s stance ought to be hostile to government’.

In his teens, Edward Thompson was enrolled at a Methodist-founded school in the West country. Later, he recalled that in the sixth form (this was in 1940) they all read the early work of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill on the English Civil War. From reading Hill, Thompson went on to read the seventeenth-century Leveller tracts that were Hill’s sources. This was his moment of political ‘breakthrough’ (he used that word much later). At eighteen he followed the example of his older brother and joined the Communist Party.

At Cambridge University he started a degree in history. His studies were interrupted in 1942 when he enlisted in the army. He served as a tank commander in North Africa, Italy and France. He returned to Cambridge after the war and completed his degree - in 1946. His brother Frank had died in 1939, at the hand of Bulgarian fascists. Frank Thompson had been recruited by Special Operations Executive and dropped into Bulgaria to work with the partisans. He was shot with the Bulgarians he was leading. Depending on which biographical account you read, and which political trajectory the biographer or historian is attempting to trace, this was the defining experience of E. P. Thompson’s political life. His dead bother’s vision of a united socialist Europe stayed with him. After the war, he visited Bulgaria with his mother. Together they wrote There is a Spirit in Europe: a Memoir of Major Frank Thompson. In the year the book was published (1947) he and his wife Dorothy started work in Bulgaria, leading the British Youth Brigade in building a 150-mile railway across the devastated countryside. (His last political campaigns and commitments have been traced back to these war-torn European years, and the Bulgarian experience.) He founded the Campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament (END) in 1980. It aimed to bring together the peace movements of a then deeply divided eastern and western Europe.

But I am getting ahead of myself. After the war, after Bulgaria, after graduating, the Thompsons moved to Halifax in West Yorkshire. E. P. had been offered a lectureship in Leeds University Extra-Mural Department (what Departments of Continuing Studies used to be called), to teach English and History. Halifax was a good centre for what was essentially peripatetic work: driving the Yorkshire Dales to get to adult education classes in Bingley, Batley, Huddersfield ... and beyond. This was adult education, often undertaken with working-class men and women who had left school at 14, or even 12, and who fitted a further education into working lives. His DNB says that Thompson was a committed and successful teacher of working-class adults. (He did, however, sometimes complain about the number of `housewives’ in his classes - who would rather be learning flower-arranging than about eighteenth-century working conditions in the West Riding woollen trades. He wanted miners in his classes! Or other types of Working-class hero.) But he believed that he had learned enormously his working-class students: from their experience of life and labour. He dedicated his most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) to his students from these years. (Link, and query: is current experience of class relations and class consciousness any guide to `class’ in the past? The whole tenor of The Making of the English Working Class, suggests that for Thompson, West Yorkshire in the 1950s was a guide to understanding Halifax and region in the 1790s.)

The Making of the English Working Class was one of the two monumental (enormously long) books that he produced during the Halifax/Leeds years. Initially, he seems to have had no plans to become a research historian. But whilst teaching literature to his adult education classes, he was `seized’ (his word) by the nineteenth-century poet and socialist, William Morris. He published William Morris. Romantic to Revolutionary in 1955. In it, Thompson portrayed (wrote a life) that made the English socialist Morris into a revolutionary Marxist who used art, design and architecture to convey his ideas. This was not the conventional story told about Morris. A member of the British Communist Party wrote a nineteenth-century life. William Morris’s dream of beautiful workshops for the production of beautiful things by the workers, was connected by Thompson to the contemporary Soviet Union. `Today visitors return from the Soviet Union with stories of the poet’s dream fulfilled’, he wrote in the preface to the first edition. In the revised edition of 1977, Thompson eliminated this celebration of Stalinism.

He and Dorothy Thomson belonged to the Communist Party Historian’s Group. . The Group (CPHG) was a circle of historians who belonged to the Communist Party of Great Britain. From 1946-1956 this highly influential network, which included Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and a very young Raphael Samuel, contributed to the new `history from below’: history written from the perspective of the marginalised and subordinated. 1956 was a decisive year for the Group and the Party: Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s reign of terror, and the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, led many to dissociate themselves from communism. Thompson left the CPGB. Along with other former members of the Historian’s Group, Thompson founded a journal called the New Reasoner, to debate questions of moral rights and socialism. In fact, Thompson and others were expelled from the Party for doing this. This is the origin of `The New Left’ in Britain: revolted by the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, with increasing doubts about Stalinism, tens of thousands of left-leaning men and women (including those expelled from the CPGB) attempted to create a new `socialist humanism’: a morally-conscious version of Marxism. In 1959 the New Reasoner merged with other left-wing journals to become the New Left Review. Soon, Thompson was ousted from the editorial board of the new journal. His Marxism, he said - his socialism - was not of the high-theoretical type being promulgated by NLR editors. In 1960 he wrote a famous article called `Outside the Whale’, in which he furiously condemned a bunch of theoretical Marxists, like NLR contributors, who seemed to believe that ordinary working-class and middle-class socialists were in need of Marxist intellectuals to tell them how to undertake political action. Ordinary people had taken political action in the past, and shown themselves perfectly capable of bringing about radical social change. (Much later, in 1978, Thompson revisited this point, in his condemnation of varieties of `Continental Marxism’ or `Theoretical Marxism’, symbolised for Thompson by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. Thompson’s humanist counterblast to many forms of Theory, was telling entitled The Poverty of Theory [1978])

Political and teaching circumstances then, inflected the second monumental book that came out of the West Yorkshire years. In Thompson’s DNB entry, historian John Rule says that `the appearance of The Making of the English Working Class was a transforming event in twentieth-century historiography ... By 1968 when it appeared in its first British paperback edition, it had already become an established classic. In a work which has come to be seen as the single most influential work of English history of the post-war period’. These are huge claims; I want you to think about whether we encounter any other work of history on this course, that has such claims made for it. Above all I want you to get the measure of a seismic publication event, and the idea that a historian’s book can shape a generation of historians. The idea of The Making is this: between about 1780 and 1840, there was political reaction to structural changes in the English local and national economy, which became inextricably bound up with revolutionary events in France and government repression at home. In these circumstances and over these years, the English working class made itself, out of its own experience of life, labour and counter-revolutionary state action. The social existence of a working class by the mid nineteenth century was no mere effect of structural change; this class - the English working class - was present at its own making. He evidence is all about that presence: men and women (I am being kind in suggesting that he uses much evidence from women) saw what was happening to them: the news from revolutionary France, the militia stationed at Halifax, short pay, wool combers forced from workshop to home; dearth now, this week, in Huddersfield. These things happened; they were experienced; men and women reflected on them, worked out what was going on. They came to political consciousness, and, Thompson, claimed, consciousness of themselves as belonging to a class: as working class. Thus was the category of `experience’ introduced to historical analysis in the UK; there is no getting away from it now - or at least I contend that there is no getting away from it. This by the way, is the image used on the first paperback edition in 1968 (like many of my generation, I still have my copy). The image does not say everything about the thesis of the book: the individual worker is thrown into relief by symbols of the new machine and industrial age; they are his background. But the collective articulation of experience and political understanding, the central thesis of the book, is not figured. This worker is an individual alone.

After Halifax, after Hungary, after the publication of The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson moved to the University of Warwick. He was here between

1965 and 1972, as Director of the now-defunct Centre for Social History (a graduate teaching centre). Whilst at Warwick he wrote `The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (this appeared in the journal Past and Present in 1971; along with other ex-Communist Party Historians, he founded this journal); he produced many essays (some of them written with the Centre’s graduate students) on eighteenth-century crime, protest and resistance. It was here that the focus of his history-writing moved further back into the eighteenth century. (These articles and chapters were collected together in Customs in Common in 1991.) He also engaged in University politics. That’s the bland and polite way of putting it. In 1970, Warwick students occupied Senate House (this was two years after the Student Revolution of 1968, but is usually read as part of late 1960s student protest, and all the social movements of the late 1960s). The students found files that revealed a close and secret involvement of the university with prominent Midlands industrialists, which included spying upon and informing on the activities of students and academics viewed as political dissidents. Thompson publicised these revelations, at first in an article in the weekly New Society (`The Business University’, 19 Feb 1970), and then in a book put together and edited by Thompson with astonishing speed: Warwick University Limited (1970). No image available! its says everywhere on the internet that I’ve looked. If you look at the University Library’s copy, you’ll find that it doesn’t have its original Penguin Education Special cover. Education Special was a series planned by Penguin Press to explore current educational and political issues. Warwick University Ltd described Warwick University as a symbol of a much wider threat to higher education, in which `the idea of the University’ - its values and freedoms - were increasingly sacrificed to the requirements of industrial capitalism. Thompson left Warwick in 1972 to become a full-time writer (or `independent scholar’); he had the income to do this. He went on with his research on eighteenth-century England; - on the uses of the law in society; - and he wrote a good deal of journalism. I have already mentioned his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As he put it, in 1980 he put aside his `trade as a historian’ (note that word `trade’!) in favour of the political activism he thought essential in the face of almost-inevitable nuclear conflict. Protest and Survive (1980) is credited with reviving the Pace Movement in the UK. The `independent scholar’ now became `a public intellectual’ whose trademark was analysis of the Reagan-Thatcher alliance as a new phase of the Cold War. After 1989 (the formal end to the Cold War?) he remarked that he had no regrets at all about having abandoned historical research and writing. He was `convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the Cold War, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and intellectual life.’ (He says that in the Preface to Customs in Common.) His last book, published in 1994 (a year after his death) was the amazing, moving, odd, Witness Against the Beast. The Witness was William Blake, poet, radical, visionary of the later eighteenth-century (Songs of Innocence and Experience - ?); his Witnessing was not only the visionary political poetry he wrote about Old Corruption (aka pre-Reform England), but also to do with his membership of obscure, radical, religious sects in 1790s London (Link! And note well: religious formation as a pathway to political radicalism?). The Beast was what the radical journalist William Cobbett was also to call `It’: state power; the awful and awe-ful edifice of English law, the courts, the judges, the agents of physical force (the army) that suppressed and repressed so many lives. Thompson’s very last words were these: In Blake there `is never the least sign of submission to “Satan’s Kingdom”. Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast’. They are, to say the least, wonderful words to go out on.