Volume 2, Number 5 · April 16, 1964
Hard Times
By John Gross
The Making of the English Working Class
by E.P. Thompson
Pantheon, 848 pp., $15.00
The years between 1790 and 1832, the terminal dates of this study, saw Britain transformed into the first effectively industrialized economy in the world. With incredible harshness farm workers and artisans were hammered into a proletariat. They were also years of diehard political repression. The course of the French Revolution after 1792 turned William Pitt from a cautious reformer into a reactionary who was ready to attack civil liberties; his successors held out grimly against political change for over a generation. As a result, the period has all the confusion of a threesided contest, between workers, middle class, and aristocratic landed interest. Alliances shift, and economic antagonisms are muffled by the general rhetoric of liberty and parliamentary reform. Nothing brings out the complexity of the situation more clearly than the way in which both middle-class and working-class reformers were able to call themselves Radicals; by 1832, as Mr. Thompson says, there were two Radical publics, one pointing towards the Anti-Corn Law League and the other towards Chartism. The Reform Act of that year represented, of course, the triumph of the middle class. It was the end of an era which had opened with the fall of the Bastille—'how much the greatest event that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!' A new era was opening with a new kind of Bastille going up: the workhouse, which a generation reared on Malthus and Political Economy devised as an instrument to terrorize the poor. The abstract praise of freedom had given way to the propaganda of Free Trade.
Review, 3132 words
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