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The classic and imaginative account of the working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and recereates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and a political consciousness of great vitality.

"This book has a clumsy title, but it is one that meets its purpose. Making because it is a study of an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.

By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships."

Contents

Preface

Preface to the 1980 edition

PART ONE : THE LIBERTY TREE

1 Members Unlimited

2 Christian and Apollyon

3 'Satan's Strongholds'

4 The Free-born Englishman

5 Planting the Liberty Tree

PART TWO : THE CURSE OF ADAM

6 Exploitation

7 The Field Labourers

8 Artisans and Others

9 The Weavers

10 Standards and Experiences

I Goods

II Homes

III Life

IV Childhood

11 The Transforming Power of the Cross

I Moral Machinery

II The Chiliasm of Despair

12 Community

I Leisure and Personal Relations

II The Rituals of Mutuality

III The Irish

IV Myriads of Eternity

PART THREE : THE WORKING-CLASS PRESENCE

13 Radical Westminster

14 An Army of Redressers

I The Brick Lamp

II The Opaque Society

III The Laws Against Combination

IV Croppers and Stockingers

V The Sherwood Lads

VI By Order of the Trade

15 Demagogues and Martyrs

I Disaffection

II Problems of Leadership

III The Hampden Clubs

IV Brandreth and Oliver

V Peterloo

VI The Cato Street Conspiracy

16 Class Consciousness

I The Radical Culture

II William Cobbett

III Carlile, Wade and Gast

IV Owenism

V 'A Sort of Machine'

Postscript

Bibliographical Note

Acknowledgements

Index