Copyright 1999 Guardian Newspapers Limited

The Guardian (London)

April 6, 1999

SECTION: The Guardian Higher Education Page; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 364 words

HEADLINE: Don's delight; Frank Webster on Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class

BYLINE: FRANK WEBSTER

BODY:

I went up to an ancient university late in 1969. I had come from just down the road, but the ways of life were worlds apart. The pit village I had grown up in had been homogeneously working class, my father an active trade unionist and committed socialist all his life. My background seemed irrelevant, yet unquestionably inferior, to this new world of privileged conduct and aspiration.

It was at the end of a couple of uncomfortable years that I encountered Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It was centred on the period 1790-1832, but such is its flair and passion that I read it in a few days. Its effects have never left me.

Of course, I had no idea that this book was then playing an inspirational role in the invention of the discipline of social history. But I thrilled to read Thompson's message that working people were at the centre of the development of modern England. Against the 'enormous condescension of posterity', Thompson dedicated over 800 pages of scintillating prose to the promotion of a 'history from below'.

More than this, from Thompson I learned that ordinary people -weavers, agricultural labourers, printers and craftsmen - hadn't blindly responded to whatever circumstance had thrown at them, mindlessly rioting when food was scarce, or stupidly sabotaging machinery because the new technology put them out of a job. On the contrary, working people were possessed of moral and political imaginations which they strove to advance, usually in most unpropitious times. They were poor and inadequately schooled, but they still thought and worked for alternatives.

Thomson showed that, faced by reactionary governments, working people still struggled to change the world. After reading him I felt much more comfortable with the university, and closer still to my father and the legacy he continued in his life.

Frank Webster is professor of sociology at Birmingham University. Recent books are Times of the Technoculture: from the information society to the virtual life (Routledge), with Kevin Robins, and Theory and Society: Understanding the Present (Sage), with Abigail Halcli and Gary Browning.