Alarmed, the English ruling class used the government to suppress revolutionary ferment. In the 1790s, English Jacobins embraced the ideas of Thomas Paine and derived inspiration from their French counterparts. Part 1, “The Liberty Tree,” sets the political context. The book’s structure advances Thompson’s argument that the English working class emerged in response to hostile political and economic forces, the combination of which made for an experience unique to England. Indeed, this phrase serves as one of the book’s major themes, highlighting Thompson’s critique of prevailing scholarly orthodoxies and his reading of historical evidence from a working-class perspective. Thompson, therefore, hopes to “rescue” the English working class from “ the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). Furthermore, economists and economic historians, in their haste to defend capitalism, too often downplay the Industrial Revolution’s destructive impact, which many working-class men, women, and children felt as a catastrophic change in the way they lived and especially in the way they worked. While economic statistics can be useful, Thompson argues that excessive reliance on measurable data obscures the actual experiences of people who once lived. Thompson’s emphasis on class as a “historical phenomenon” that “happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships” (9) distinguishes his approach from that of empiricists who analyze the past in quantitative terms. The book concludes with the Reform Act of 1832, by which time the English working class had been formed.
This guide follows Thompson in using 1792 as the publication date.
Whilst Paine published the first part of Rights of Man in 1791, the second part didn’t appear until early 1792. The book opens in 1792, a critical year in which Thomas Paine published Rights of Man and the French Revolution took a radical turn. This process occurred in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Making of the English Working Class (1963) describes the historical process by which the men and women of the English working class developed a consciousness of a distinct identity with distinct interests.
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