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The Long Con

Jackson Lears: Techno-Austerity, 16 July 2015

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organised Wealth and Power 
by Steve Fraser.
Little, Brown, 466 pp., £21.99, February 2015, 978 0 316 18543 1
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... ways of life, or memories of that life. This wasn’t only an American pattern. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), rescued the Luddites and other artisans from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ by showing that their apparently reactionary attachments to custom and tradition created the leading edge of ...

Hope in the Desert

Eric Foner: Democratic Party Blues, 12 May 2022

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party 
by Michael Kazin.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, March, 978 0 374 20023 7
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... Jennings Bryan, published in 2006, which attempted to rescue its protagonist from what E.P. Thompson in a different context called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. (Condescension regarding Bryan emanates from secular urban liberals who know him only from his condemnation of the theory of evolution in the notorious Scopes Trial of 1925, not ...

Unruly Sweet Peas

Alison Light: Working-Class Gardens, 18 December 2014

The Gardens of the British Working Class 
by Margaret Willes.
Yale, 413 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 300 18784 7
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... The fondness for botanising among independent artisans was also discussed fifty years ago by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (1963); he saw the loss of this thriving culture as a prompt for the formation of class consciousness. The ‘golden age’ of the florists, he argued, together with artisans’ other educational pursuits, was ...

Gloomy Pageant

Jeremy Harding: Britain Comma Now, 31 July 2014

Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now 
by David Marquand.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 1 84614 672 5
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... the ‘moral economy’, a term he borrows from The Making of the English Working Class. In E.P. Thompson the moral economy is in play once the seller’s price and the buyer’s ability to pay become irreconcilable – what follows is unrest. Among other things the moral economy regulates prices according to human need – when, for example, protesters ...

Lachrymatics

Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015

Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears 
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 19 967605 7
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... appeal of Methodism to the emotions horrified its critics then and since, from Dickens to E.P. Thompson. The undoubted star here was George Whitefield rather than John Wesley. Whitefield never finished one of his open-air sermons without dissolving into tears, and he was always gratified to see thousands of his audience in tears too, for example at the ...

Stiffed

David Runciman: Occupy, 25 October 2012

The Occupy Handbook 
edited by Janet Byrne.
Back Bay, 535 pp., $15.99, April 2012, 978 0 316 22021 7
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... of articulating “the identity of their interests”’ (the phrase is taken from E.P. Thompson). There is absolutely no evidence for this. It relies on a wishful view of the 99 per cent and an absurd caricature of the 1 per cent, who are described as having been revealed ‘as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly ...

The Potter, the Priest and the Stick in the Mud

David A. Bell: Spain v. Napoleon, 6 November 2008

Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War 
by Ronald Fraser.
Verso, 587 pp., £29.99, April 2008, 978 1 84467 082 6
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... the sharply increased death rates of 1808-9, and then of 1812. Without mentioning E.P. Thompson by name, he invokes his theory of the ‘moral economy’ to explain the actions of the Spanish common people. They were ‘never deeply penetrated’ by the Enlightenment, Fraser explains, but instead fought to protect their traditional rights and ...

No Place for Grumblers

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Ready for the Bomb?, 27 July 2023

Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War 
by Julie McDowall.
Bodley Head, 246 pp., £22, April, 978 1 84792 621 0
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... parts of the country ‘will not help you with food, accommodation or other essentials’. As E.P. Thompson wrote in his anti-nuclear counterblast Protest and Survive (1980), ‘many thousands of nuclear families’ would be ‘baked, crushed or suffocated to death’ in their tiny refuges.McDowall sees Protect and Survive as emblematic of the ‘new era of ...

Little Englander Histories

Linda Colley: Little Englandism, 22 July 2010

A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 
by Boyd Hilton.
Oxford, 757 pp., £21, June 2008, 978 0 19 921891 2
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Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780-1939 
by James Belich.
Oxford, 573 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 19 929727 6
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... Only in the penultimate chapter do the overwhelming majority of men and women, those whom E.P. Thompson chose to style for this era the ‘English working class’, receive concentrated attention. This format allows Hilton to focus mainly on London and the Home Counties. It also shapes his prime overall argument. Despite the ...

Bardicide

Gary Taylor, 9 January 1992

... aren’t they? Are they? A generation ago, the historians E.J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E.P. Thompson demonstrated that even rioting crowds are ‘not fickle, peculiarly irrational, or generally given to bloody attacks on persons’. Their conclusions have been confirmed by three decades of historical case-studies of violent crowds in England, Europe and ...

With Bit and Bridle

Matthew Kelly: 18th-Century Ireland, 5 August 2010

Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves 
by Ian McBride.
Gill and Macmillan, 563 pp., £19.99, October 2009, 978 0 7171 1627 0
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... rights and customs, the Boys regarded themselves as upholding the law or restoring, as E.P. Thompson might have put it, the ‘moral economy’. McBride offers two responses to these arguments. First, he emphasises the difficulty the Whelan thesis has in accommodating large-scale Presbyterian agrarian protest, questioning the degree to which opposition ...

Much like the 1950s

David Edgar: The Sixties, 7 June 2007

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Little, Brown, 878 pp., £22.50, August 2006, 0 316 72452 1
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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Abacus, 892 pp., £19.99, May 2006, 0 349 11530 3
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... that were to emerge out of the late 1960s, or connect the thinking of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall et al with other strains of thought that also challenged the accepted borders between the political and the personal. So, while Sandbrook has considerable fun with the chaotic Albert Hall poetry festival of June 1965 (the poetry mostly ...

Old Verities

Brian Harrison, 19 June 1986

The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 
by Catherine Gallagher.
Chicago, 320 pp., £23.25, September 1985, 0 226 27932 4
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Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830-1914 
by Philip Priestley.
Methuen, 311 pp., £14.85, October 1985, 0 416 34770 3
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The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England 
by Coral Lansbury.
University of Wisconsin Press, 212 pp., £23.50, November 1985, 0 299 10250 5
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‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism 
by John Belchem.
Oxford, 304 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 19 822759 0
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... Economic History Review, and the Sixties saw controversy carried to new heights of fervour by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and by bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs. By the mid-Seventies Victorian values were becoming a political football. The Labour movement ‘came into being’, Michael Foot wrote in 1983, ‘to ...

Shades of Peterloo

Ferdinand Mount: Indecent Government, 7 July 2022

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London 
by Vic Gatrell.
Cambridge, 451 pp., £25, May 2022, 978 1 108 83848 1
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... the history of British espionage can senior ministers have got their hands quite so dirty. As E.P. Thompson grudgingly conceded in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, ...

The Matter of India

John Bayley, 19 March 1987

... the calm-of-mind, all-passion-spent vision of India found years ago in the gentle novels of Edward Thompson (father of E.P. Thompson) such as An Indian Day and The End of the Hours.One of the best summings-up of how things were and are is given in the deceptively simple concluding sentence of The Siege of Krishnapur. The ...

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