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Back to the future: E. P. Thompson,Eric Hobsbawm and the remaking ofnineteenth-century British historyRohan McWilliama

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To cite this article: Rohan McWilliam (2014) Back to the future: E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawmand the remaking of nineteenth-century British history, Social History, 39:2, 149-159, DOI:10.1080/03071022.2014.905274

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Rohan McWilliam

Back to the future: E. P. Thompson,Eric Hobsbawm and the remaking ofnineteenth-century British history

‘Minds which thirst for a tidy platonism very soon become impatient withactual history.’

E. P. Thompson1

THOMPSBAWM?

The passing of Eric Hobsbawm in October 2012 and the fiftieth anniversary of E. P.Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in 2013 seems an appropriatemoment for stocktaking.2 Few historians mattered as deeply to their contemporaries asdid Thompson and Hobsbawm. Both were shaped by political allegiances formed in the1930s and 1940s. Both were role models who combined research with politicalcommitment in ways that many sought to emulate. Both analysed issues about working-class agency and the possibilities and limitations of popular politics. Both showed how theworld, examined through plebeian eyes, looked very different from the perspective of themiddle class: this was the essence of what became ‘history from below’.

It is not a rash bet that the scholarship on both figures will increase in the decade ahead.But will they be studied in the way we study the great Victorian historians such asMacaulay? In other words, will they be explored as guides to the intellectual history of thepast, or will they continue to be integral to future research (and, perhaps moreimportantly, future politics)? Much of Thompson’s and Hobsbawm’s work wasinfluenced by the Cold War, which shaped intellectual categories and debates in a starkway. For example, in his important article on the labour aristocracy (first published in

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

1E. P. Thompson, ‘The peculiarities of theEnglish’ in The Poverty of Theory, and OtherEssays (London, 1978), 47. I would like tothank the following for their comments on this

article: Kelly Boyd, Jim Obelkevich, TonyTaylor and Pamela Walker.2E. P. Thompson, The Making of the EnglishWorking Class (London, 1968 [1963]).

Social History, 2014

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1954), Hobsbawm wrote that, from the 1890s onwards, we enter ‘the period of thepermanent crisis of the British capitalist economy’.3 Even following the financial crisis of2008, this view (with its failure to understand the capacity of capitalism to renew itself)looks very suspect. Do their histories still work in a very different, post-Cold Warpolitical context? Class is no longer the driver of historical enquiry it once was. Socialhistorians are nowmore likely to be interested in gender, race, sexuality, the environmentor material culture (all examples of the cultural turn in history). Even Edward Thompsondeclared in 1993, ‘“Class” was perhaps overworked in the 1960s and 1970s and it hasbecome merely boring.’4 Given the demise of the Marxist political world and, to someextent, the Marxist intellectual world, it is not unreasonable to ask whether the historiesof Thompson and Hobsbawm have reached their sell-by date.

This is particularly important for the study of nineteenth-century Britain, where theirinfluence was profound. The present article explores the relevance of Thompson andHobsbawm to current debates about the political culture of the period. The twohistorians believed that any engagement with the politics of modern Britain required anunderstanding of the era that gave rise to the critique of Karl Marx.

The discussion here focuses on Toryism, liberalism and the wider question of culturalcapital. Thompson and Hobsbawm offer histories that are, in one sense, a rebuke to thecultural turn (which frequently neglects the economic dimension) but which can enrichand empower it at the same time. Aspects of their work retain their importance, althoughthey sometimes need to be read against the grain of their ideology. This may be adisservice to the Marxism about which they cared so much but, at the same time, itdemonstrates the continuing importance of their research and arguments. What we learnfrom these two historians is that Marxism is best employed as a device for askingquestions about the way society works rather than one that offers set answers; the bestMarxist history has never been dogmatic or reductive.

Before embarking on this enquiry, a number of caveats are in order. Thompson andHobsbawm were very different historians, and bringing them together only serves toremind us how varied the Marxist tradition actually is. The indignation that pulsatesthrough Thompson’s pages differs from the forensic approach of Hobsbawm. Thompsonis often considered a romantic but Hobsbawm was an anti-romantic (although bothstatements require some qualification). Thompson was an activist (particularly in thepeace movement) whereas Hobsbawm’s political interventions after 1956 were mainlyrestricted to his role as a public intellectual.

For reasons of length, the discussion is heavily selective. Key issues such as the labouraristocracy or religion are not explored. Discussing Thompson’s interpretation ofnineteenth-century Britain is problematic because he barely wrote about a large part ofthe period. He commenced his scholarly life dealing with the late Victorian era beforeexploring the period between 1790 and 1830 in The Making of the English Working Class.5

3E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The labour aristocracy innineteenth-century Britain’ in Labouring Men:Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964),272–3.4E. P. Thompson, ‘Which Britons?’ in Personsand Polemics (London, 1994), 328. For a

productive approach to class, see Geoff Eleyand Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History:What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor, 2007).5E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic toRevolutionary (London, 1955), and ‘Homage to

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Apart from an article on Mayhew, a large part of the Victorian age was not treated byhim.6After 1963, he moved back into the eighteenth century where, arguably, he had hisgreatest impact on scholarship.7 On the other hand, much of nineteenth-centuryhistoriography after the 1960s was about trying to fill in the blanks left by Thompson andto explain what happened to working-class politics after 1830. The Making cast a longshadow.

There is also a problem in discussing Eric Hobsbawm’s work on nineteenth-centuryBritain in that so much of it was comparative. He was as much a European or even aglobal historian. His histories of capitalism (the ‘Age of’ series) anticipate the movetowards trans-national histories at the present time.8 This article emerges in part from adissatisfaction with the commentaries that followed Hobsbawm’s death, which focusedlargely on the issue of why he never left the Communist Party while ignoring thescholarship on which his reputation ultimately rests.9 We need to go back to works suchas Labouring Men and Worlds of Labour (US title: Workers), not least because they containanalysis that holds up in some respects better than that of Edward Thompson.10

There was, in any case, no Thompson–Hobsbawm view of the nineteenth century (noone talks about ‘Thompsbawm’). A more robust and polemical author than the presentone would no doubt argue that Thompson and Hobsbawm should be consigned tohistory. Just because they meant a lot to one generation is no reason why they shouldinfluence the next. A strategy that merely advocates going back to Thompson andHobsbawm is one that carries its intellectual fatigue on its sleeve. I argue, on the contrary,that these two figures still provide us with something we would not wish to be without,even if we want to move in other directions.

THE FLAG-SALUTING, FOREIGNER-HATING, PEERRESPECTING SIDE OF THE

PLEBEIAN MIND

One of the admirable characteristics of Edward Thompson’s work was that he providedpostscripts to subsequent editions of his books, in which he responded to criticism inreviews when the volume first appeared. By and large, it is advisable for scholars not todo this as it smacks of sour grapes. However, in Thompson’s case, it demonstrated a deepintellectual seriousness and some of his best insights come from his engagement withother scholars in this form. In the postscript to the 1968 edition of The Making,Thompson responded to Geoffrey Best’s review, which noted that the book contained

Tom Maguire’ in Persons and Polemics, op. cit.,23–65.6E. P. Thompson, ‘Mayhew and the MorningChronicle’ in Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson(eds), The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the‘Morning Chronicle’, 1849–1850 (London, 1971),11–50.7E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: TheOrigins of the Black Act (London, 1975); E. P.Thompson, Customs in Common (London,1991).

8E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962); The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975); The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London, 1987); Age of Extremes: The ShortTwentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994).9In fairness, this issue dominates Hobsbawm’sown autobiography: Interesting Times: ATwentieth-Century Life (London, 2002).10E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, op. cit.; E. J.Hobsbawm,Worlds of Labour: Further Studies inthe History of Labour (London, 1984).

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very little about the ‘flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer respecting side of the plebeianmind’.11 Thompson generously admitted that he had not said much about this and thatfurther research was necessary. However, he countered that more discussion of popularconservatism would make no difference to his portrait of a class-conscious movement.This will not do. Explaining why takes us into some of the issues about the ways we canand cannot use Thompson and Hobsbawm today. Both had little to say about thedevelopment of popular loyalties to Westminster-based political parties. This was, insome respects, a strength as they pointed to areas of life that could not be defined bypolitical allegiances handed down from on high. At the same time, the emergence ofmodern party political identities is an important part of the history of British society. Thenext two sections explore issues that raise problems for their analysis of class and politics.

Thompson and Hobsbawm, for all their differences, both interpreted nineteenth-century Britain as shaped by industrial capitalism and by class. This meant that the bigthemes they emphasized concerned protest and social conflict. More recently, thesignificance of class conflict has been fiercely contested by historians; what mattered forthe Victorian working class was, apparently, respectability, not radicalism. Unlike inmainland Europe (some of which did experience revolution in the nineteenth century),Britain’s social order never really broke down. For that reason, much recent writingemphasizes consensus rather than conflict.12 The focus has increasingly been on the tiesthat bind: patriotism, the belief in the constitution, status, consumerism, religion,deference, separate spheres, self-help, the civic spirit, the voluntary principle and thehegemonic characteristics of liberalism.13 These cut across class identities and sometimeseffaced them. The developing literature on working-class conservatism is part of this newemphasis.

Such was the shadow of Thompson and Hobsbawm that historians were at one timeresistant to discussing or even acknowledging popular conservatism (by the latter Iinclude not only Toryism, but all popular mentalities that were sceptical of the claims ofradicalism and that viewed British institutions as imbued with some measure oflegitimacy). Popular conservatism did not make sense. It was a form of deviance. Surely,workers had a natural inclination towards socialism? If acknowledged, conservatism hadto be considered a kind of eccentric aberration or even as false consciousness. Hobsbawmbriefly acknowledged the ‘substantial’ numbers of Tory working men but dismissed themby saying that their votes had virtually no impact on the policies of the ConservativeParty.14

Yet popular conservatism encourages us to view the political culture of the workingclasses in more complex ways. Marxist historians of the nineteenth century focused on thealienation generated by the experience of industrial capitalism. But what, then, to sayabout workers who, however disgruntled, feel some kind of stake in the system? Are

11E. P. Thompson, The Making, op. cit., 916.12F. M. L.Thompson, The Rise of RespectableSociety: A Social History of Victorian Britain,1830–1900 (London, 1988).13For example, Linda Colley, Britons: Forgingthe Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992);Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian

Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the EnglishIndustrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000);Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise andFall of the Victorian City (London, 2004).14E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Notes on class consciousness’in Worlds of Labour, op. cit., 27–8.

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workers, we might ask, really always in struggle? Or, if they are, is that all that is goingon in their lives? This is increasingly where the research agenda stands now.

In the age of Thatcherism, this lack of interest in conservatism began to change.Whatever the feelings of the historian, it became clearer that conservatism was a way ofmaking sense of the world, one which frequently validated the dignity of working-classpeople. Identities based around patriotism, monarchy and national heritage helped definethe cultural landscape of modern Britain.15 Parts of Lancashire, Birmingham and the EastEnd of London (among other places) responded to the appeal of Toryism in the laternineteenth century. The focus of Thompson and Hobsbawm was on the ways workersgenerated cultural forms that had a tendency towards some version of collectivism orsocialism. Class societies, in their view, have an in-built tendency to produce this kind ofoutcome. However, the literature on nineteenth-century popular conservatism suggeststhat workers could be suspicious of metropolitan liberalism, find little to identify with inthe language of radicalism, and feel their lip quiver when the National Anthem wasplayed. Taking popular conservatism seriously certainly provides a contrast to the historyof working-class consciousness that we get in histories inspired by Marxism (even if thesetake different forms). However, it is not enough to ‘add Toryism and stir’. Popularconservatism should make us rethink how we approach political mentalities.

The point here is not to replace a (so-called) radical working class with a conservativeone but to emphasize complexity and ambiguity. Social change in the nineteenth centurycertainly did produce radicalism and, ultimately, socialism; however, it produced otherresponses as well. We desperately need accounts of Victorian lives high and low that aretruly three-dimensional. The instability of political and personal identities should be atthe centre of the modern investigation of popular politics. The language of ‘left’ and‘right’ (which is essentially a twentieth-century vocabulary despite its origins in theFrench Revolution) does not map well on to the nineteenth century. Describing peoplein the past simply as ‘radical’ or ‘Tory’ is to employ enlightening, but often misleading,categories. What strikes us now about the political language that Thompson wrote aboutis its essential ambivalence. The key words in this vocabulary, such as ‘the people’, ‘theconstitution’, the ‘nation’, and even ‘class’, could be used to bolster conservatism as well asradicalism.

Such ambivalence explains the character of the Labour Party. Even after 1929, whenthe working classes constituted the majority of the electorate, Labour’s electoral successwas patchy. Labour’s peculiarities owed a great deal to the need to function within aconservative popular culture; the party could only break through when it found ways ofrelating to it.16 For that reason, Labour never committed itself to republicanism. Tory

15Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: TheCulture of the Factory in Late Victorian England(Brighton, 1980); Martin Pugh, The Tories andthe People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985); JonLawrence, Speaking for the People: Party,Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998); Alex Windscheffel,Popular Conservatism in Imperial London, 1868–1906 (London, 2007); Andrej Olechnowicz

(ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation,1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007).16Martin Pugh, ‘The rise of Labour and thepolitical culture of conservatism, 1890–1945’,History, LXXXVII, 288 (2002), 514–37; see alsoPaul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack:Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left,1881–1924 (Woodbridge, 1998).

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invocations of empire and nation in the later nineteenth century could be linked to pridein working-class ways. Assisted by the suspicion that socialism was an alien force (andindeed that all foreigners were suspect), Toryism made sense to a lot of workers. RossMcKibbin even argues that, in the 1930s, it was the Conservative Party (in the form of theNational Government) that had greater claim, in electoral terms, to be the party of theworking class.17

For a time, scholars dealt with this by invoking the idea of ‘populism’ to explain theways in which popular politics failed to conform to the Marxist rulebook.18 ‘Populism’describes forms of politics which validated the common sense of the people and thedefence of their way of life. The word exemplified the untheorized and emotional, evensentimental, nature of much popular political thought.19 Populism proved a rathernebulous concept (all democratic politics have to be populist at some level), but itscontinued usage indicates that we have some way to go in understanding the realcomplexity of popular culture and political identities.

Robert Roberts recalled the following about his youth in working-class Salford at thebeginning of the twentieth century:

Marxist ‘ranters’ . . . who paid fleeting visits to our street end insisted that we,the proletariat, stood locked in titanic struggle with some wicked master class.We were battling, they told us (from a vinegar barrel borrowed from onecorner shop), to cast off our chains and win a whole world. Most people passedby: a few stood to listen, but not for long: the problems of the ‘proletariat’, theyfelt, had little to do with them.20

In the 1960s and 1970s, the implicit research question was ‘Why did Britain notexperience a revolution in the nineteenth century?’ Now that has been turned around:‘Why would anyone, who knows about Victorian society, think that revolution mighthave been possible?’

The revisionist spirit was well captured by Mike Savage and AndrewMiles when theyacknowledged that ‘there is . . . no automatic relationship between the social structureand political movements’.21 From this, it follows that when we talk about a working-class movement, this is not the same thing as a movement of the whole of the workingclass. There were many things about the radical platform that could put people off, notleast the irreligion of some adherents. One of the best aspects of recent historiography hasbeen the attempt to write about different kinds of workers, especially those who did not

17Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England,1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010), 95–6.18Michael Roe, Kenealy and the TichborneCause: A Study in Mid-Victorian Populism(Melbourne, 1974); Craig Calhoun, TheQuestion of Class Struggle: Social Foundations ofPopular Radicalism during the IndustrialRevolution (Oxford, 1982); Patrick Joyce,Visions of the People: Industrial England and theQuestion of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge,1991); Craig Calhoun, The Roots ofRadicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and

Early Nineteenth Century Social Movements(Chicago, 2012).19Rohan McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant:A Victorian Sensation (London, 2007) is anattempt to explore some of these ambiguities inpopular politics.20Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: SalfordLife in the First Quarter of the Century (London,1973 [1971]), 28.21Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, TheRemaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London, 1994) 17.

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feature in earlier labour history because they were not politically active, for example,servants who constituted a large part of the labour force.22 The patterns of women’swork, more generally, and their complex relationship to formal politics reveal how maleand therefore how partial Thompson’s account was in some respects. Thompson makesthe case for talking about a ‘working class’ in the singular, the consequences of dramaticchanges in the early industrial period. But his own descriptions of the diversity of popularexperiences and reactions shows how it is more profitable to talk of ‘working classes’ inthe plural. The same is true of the middle classes.

This is where a comparison with the approach of Hobsbawm comes in handy. Some ofHobsbawm’s work covered similar areas (even if the two critiqued each other incomradely ways). Like Thompson, Hobsbawm took an avowedly pessimistic stance onthe debate about standards of living in the early industrial revolution, and class experienceis a major theme in all his work. He argues that Britain ‘developed the characteristiccombination of a revolutionary social base . . . with an apparently traditionalist and slow-changing institutional superstructure’.23 The ruling class could never afford to forget,from the late nineteenth century onwards, that manual workers were in the majority andhad to adjust their policies accordingly.

Yet Hobsbawm’s work differs from that of Thompson. He rightly saw that the natureof class relationships was fluid and uneven for much of the nineteenth century. Up to the1840s, he argues ‘[i]t is even doubtful whether we can speak of a proletariat in thedeveloped sense at all, for this class was still in the process of emerging from the mass ofpetty producers, small masters, countrymen, etc. of pre-industrial society, though incertain regions and industries it had already taken fairly definite shape’.24 It was only inthe later nineteenth century that the economy had matured enough for workers toorganize collectively and effectively. The era of mass production had commenced andtrade unions learned the ‘rules of the game’.25 They assimilated the ways in whichcapitalism operated and constructed institutions to represent their interests. The result inthe 1880s was both the expansion of unskilled trade unionism and the growth ofsocialism. In one of his most stimulating articles, Hobsbawm argued that the ‘workingclass of the 1820s and 1830s . . . was patently very different from the so-called“traditional” working class’ which developed in the later nineteenth century. He went onto say, ‘In this sense the working class is not “made” until long after Thompson’s bookends.’26

It was in the 1880s that the working-class world emerged that would later be analysedby Richard Hoggart.27 A culture shaped by the fall in living costs during the Great

22Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: DomesticService and the Making of Modern England(Cambridge, 2009).23E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: AnEconomic History of Britain since 1750 (London,1968), 4.24E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The labour aristocracy innineteenth-century Britain’ in Labouring Men,op. cit., 276. See also Hobsbawm’s ‘The

formation of British working-class culture’ inWorlds of Labour, op. cit., 176–93.25E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Custom, wages and work-load in nineteenth-century industry’ inLabouring Men, op. cit., 344–70.26E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The making of theworking class, 1870–1914’ in Worlds ofLabour, op. cit., 194, 196.27Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy(Harmondsworth, 1957).

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Depression (1873–96), it created a stable working-class identity that would not changeuntil the 1950s. Hobsbawm’s analysis of the fluidity of class relations is more persuasive inmaking sense of the Victorian political landscape than Thompson’s argument that theworking class was made by 1830 (a point on which Thompson was in fact ratherambiguous, despite the title of his book). It is this fluidity which explains the shifting andambiguous nature of Victorian popular politics.

LIBERALISM

If Thompson and Hobsbawm had problems with conservatism they had even greaterproblems with liberalism and the issues around it. Their intellectual project contested thecomfortable view that Victorian liberalism and social reform healed the ills of society.Liberalism, in their view, was part of the vehicle through which the middle class becamedominant. Thompson complains that the prevalent tone in theWest Riding of Yorkshirein the early 1880s was ‘one of surfeited, self-satisfied Liberalism’, presumably awaiting thechallenge of socialism.28 Yet one of the most significant dimensions of Victorianhistoriography since the mid-1980s has involved a re-examination of liberalism as acomplex phenomenon. We are aware of the tensions and contradictions within it andyet also cannot ignore its cross-class appeal.29 Many radicals ended up becoming liberalsof one sort or another. Liberalism was a powerful force generating its own distinctivesubjectivities, which could not be simply reduced to class.30

Thompson was disdainful of attempts at liberal social reform. His assessment ofMayhew presents him as breaking with the delusions of early Victorian liberalismthrough his encounters with the poor.31 Few would suggest that reformers of the post-1830 period solved all problems of distress and exploitation (they most certainly did not).Nevertheless, a combination of reform, changing forms of political economy andimproved standards of living did alter the political landscape. When Asa Briggs writes ofan ‘age of improvement’ (1783–1867), he was neither reactionary nor off the mark.32

What Thompson did accomplish was the identification of the dominant strand inEnglish radicalism: a cluster of arguments that was democratic, opposed to parasiticalelites (especially the aristocracy), employed the labour theory of value, championed theunwritten English constitution and sought to protect ‘the people’ from unwelcomeoutside interference whether in the form of the state, the new Poor Law or indirecttaxation. These kinds of arguments (evoked by the figure of the free-born Englishman)married Paineite artisan radicalism with the Whig Commonwealthman tradition.A number of historians have argued that this form of radicalism (which shaped Chartism)enjoyed a considerable continuity after 1848 when it began to be absorbed by the moreradical elements of the Liberal Party. Significantly, many histories of radicalism

28E. P. Thompson, ‘Homage to TomMaguire’,op. cit., 27.29Rohan McWilliam, ‘Liberalism lite?’,Victorian Studies, XVVIII, 1 (2005), 103–11.30Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalismand the Modern City (London, 2003).

31E. P. Thompson, ‘Mayhew and the MorningChronicle’, op. cit.32Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 1959).

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ultimately become studies of the creation of the Victorian liberal consensus.33 Thompsonunwittingly provided evidence for this when he recorded an 1885 meeting of Chartistveterans in the Halifax Temperance Hotel. They gave thanks to Gladstone for ‘passinginto law those principles which we have endeavoured during a long life to enjoy’.34 Theseradicals viewed Gladstonian liberalism as part of their political project. Thompson wassardonic about this, but revisionist work on popular liberalism suggests this was notunusual.35 Thompson’s increase in class consciousness in the early nineteenth centuryreally led to the demotic liberalism of the Victorian period.

Hobsbawm was aware of liberal dominance. In his critique of the Fabian Society henoted that much of the intellectual work, performed on the continent by socialistthinkers, was accomplished in Britain by figures attached to some form of liberalism;social reform in the twentieth century would thus be driven by Liberals like Marshall,Keynes and Beveridge.36 While Hobsbawm recognizes the strength of liberalism he doesnot really follow this through because, for a Marxist, liberalism is a problem. Thisapproach is dated. Today, we might want to read this work against the grain and arguethat what Hobsbawm is documenting is the emergence of a viable social democraticpolitics.37

The failure of Thompson and Hobsbawm to think deeply about Victorian liberalismremains the biggest problem with their research today. While they were aware ofhistorical difference, there is always the sense (natural in a Marxist perspective) that thedevelopment of radicalism was being read through the lens of twentieth-centurysocialism.

CAPACITIES AND CAPABILITIES

If this sounds as if Thompson and Hobsbawm have little to say in the Britain of DavidCameron and Ed Miliband, that is not the case. In many ways, their focus on the realitiesof working-class experience continues to ring true. Their suspicious attitude towardspower also has much to commend it. They challenge the current literature on thenineteenth century in important ways. Employing a ‘consensus’ interpretation fails toexplain why that consensus about politics, society and economy began to come unstuckin the later Victorian period. Increasingly, liberalism, which had been a kind of social gluein the mid-Victorian years, was challenged and, in many ways, transformed during theEdwardian era. The last two decades of the nineteenth century were, as Hobsbawm has

33Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class andNation in English Radical Politics, 1825–50(Cambridge, 1993); Peter Taylor, PopularPolitics in Early Industrial Britain: Bolton, 1825–50 (Keele, 1995).34E. P. Thompson, ‘Homage to TomMaguire’,op. cit., 27.35Eugenio Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds),Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism,Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain,1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991).

36E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Fabians reconsidered’in Labouring Men, op. cit., 256.37Peter Clarke, ‘The social democratic theoryof the class struggle’ in Jay Winter (ed.), TheWorking Class in Modern British History: Essaysin Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge, 1983),3–18. It is ironic that Hobsbawm became animportant intellectual influence in therebuilding of the Labour Party in the 1980s.

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always maintained, Labour’s turning point (although the ways in which Labour became amass party were down to political as much as social factors). The development of thecapitalist economy created sharp social differences that in turn produced a set of coherentworking-class identities that would sustain the labour movement from the 1880s to the1950s. Hobsbawm remains our best guide here.

Where their work continues to resonate is the way in which they illuminated issuesabout cultural capacities and the forms of cultural capital that became central to theworking classes. People will respond to moments of historical change differently, but weshould track the cultural resources and emotions that they brought to bear in situationssuch as the rise of industrialization. It is from Hobsbawm and (especially) Thompson thatcultural historians derive their project of tracing the different ways in which people find avoice. For that reason, women’s historians, while criticizing the lack of attention towomen and gender in Thompson and Hobsbawm, acknowledge their importance inshowing how history from below can be written. The same would be true of scholars ofrace and the ways in which empire shaped experience. Hobsbawm, furthermore,anticipated the way in which historians would come to rewrite nineteenth-centuryBritish history through the lens of empire. For that reason, his work has never been morerelevant.

Thompson’s scholarship appeals because it pushedMarxist thought away from an inertfocus on class in the abstract to confront at least some of the realities of what washappening at the time: ‘Class is defined by men as they live their own history.’38 There isnothing redundant about this formulation (apart from its gender bias), although wemight want to add that people living their own history will not always interpret thathistory through the lens of class. Thompson was himself aware of this, warning againstexcessively strict discussions of class and analysis that were not grounded in thepeculiarities of the historical record.

It does not pay to think of popular experience in narrowly economistic terms (and, byand large, Thompson and Hobsbawm avoided this). Instead, it may be more fruitful tothink not just about income but also about the quality of lives and the differentcapabilities and capacities those lives offered.39 This is the spirit in which we should readEmma Griffin’s recent Liberty’s Dawn, which offers an alternative account of the earlyindustrial revolution to that found in Thompson or Hobsbawm.Working-class life couldbe brutal, exhausting and hard but that does not mean it could not also be fulfilling incertain respects. Limits could be placed on people’s lives through environmental factorsand by money, but these lives were still capable of possibilities; of love, feeling, creativity.Working-class autobiographies (admittedly a complex and problematic source) givesome indication of the different forms of culture and selfhood that working-class livescould generate.40 While Thompson and (to some extent) Hobsbawm emphasized thebleak side of the nineteenth century, it is entirely in keeping with their approach toretrieve the creativity that existed in working-class lives. If we can combine an emphasis

38E. P. Thompson, The Making, op. cit., 11.39Amartya Sen, ‘Capability and well-being’ inMartha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds), TheQuality of Life (Oxford, 1993), 30–53.

40Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’sHistory of the Industrial Revolution (London,2013).

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on the inequalities and iniquities of nineteenth-century society with a focus on the ways inwhich people created lives that were meaningful for them, we are not only taking the bestof the Thompsonian approach but are truly engaging with the complexities of the lives ofthe poor. We need a way of writing about the Victorians that is complex and plural.

A post-Marxist age has its own forms of reductionism and issues it would rather notconsider. Those who have taken the cultural turn require a renewed engagement with theeconomic. The poverty of so much work in cultural studies and cultural history is that itlacks a meaningful (or, frankly, an interesting) way of incorporating the economicdimension. It is in this context that Thompson’s focus on class as something that is theproduct of men’s and women’s experiences holds good.41 People are aware of inequalityin their lives. However, the cultural forms they generate or which circulate around themare far more complex.

The relationship between society and politics should be seen as a matrix. The reasonThompson and Hobsbawm have an enduring quality is that their work accommodatesthis while also talking with clarity about the major structural factors that shape people’slives. The act of writing history is always political. However, there are dangers inallowing present-day political theory to interfere with writing history. Is this not true ofThompson and Hobsbawm? Up to a point. Both clearly felt that Marxism explains agreat deal about the past, but their work has the flavour of being engaged in a dialoguewith Marx rather than a slavish attempt to reduce everything to a pre-set formula. In thewake of the financial crisis of 2008, we need scholars who understand the human cost ofeconomic forces that people cannot control, are undeceived about the nature of politicalpower and, finally, can see through the pretensions of the super rich.

Thompson and Hobsbawm are not well served by followers who merely claim theywere always right. They were not. Nevertheless, there is a sophisticated body of workhere that, if ignored, distorts the history of the nineteenth century. Thompson andHobsbawm remain historians that we need to think with, even if we want to makearguments that are different and that substantially contest their accounts. In the twenty-first century, socialist challenges may be a thing of the past but Thompson andHobsbawm have a lot to contribute to left-wing social democracy, a position thatremains vibrant and alive. We will be learning from them for some time. They teach usthat there is a line from history to current politics, which is sometimes crooked but alwaysnecessary.

Anglia Ruskin University

41E. P. Thompson, The Making, op. cit., 9.

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