A Definitive ‘And fookin’ Amen to that!

In the fall of 1967, I was in my fourth year at the University of British Columbia and had enrolled in Jim Winter’s History 418 course – “modern Britain”. I was excited – and rather trepidatious – especially when I saw his reading list. The very first item was a massive book – published by Vintage in New York – that “everyone” had heard about, but only some had bought and very few had read. So it was that I first encountered The Making of the English Working Class.

I read the big orange/black tome diligently but did not really understand – or appreciate – much of what Thompson was arguing for and against. Some of that misunderstanding was due to my callowness but most of my incomprehension was due to the reality that the study of history is wasted on the young. I did not know the period and had no familiarity whatsoever with the nuances of the historical literature. Having read the book – and really struggled with the long final section on working-class intellectual life called “Class Consciousness” – I completed the assignment and promptly forgot most of what I had poured over.

Fast forward to 1975. Now I had a doctorate-in-hand and – against all odds – a job. My thesis was a study of the demographic implications of rural industrialization in England, using the then-novel technique of family reconstitution to explicate fertility, nuptiality, and mortality statistics with fine-toothed precision. My first course was inherited from Doug Myers – “Canadian Working-Class History and the Schools”. I did not know Myers or what he had used for his students’ reading assignments, but I was shocked to find that there was little available secondary-literature on Canadian working-class history beyond a few institutional studies of unions and labour organizations as well as a smattering of materials on working-class living standards in Montreal and Toronto, supplemented by Judith Fingard’s excellent article, “The Winter’s Tale: Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British America, 1815–1860,” published in 1974.

Remember, this was a time before Labour/Le Travailleur – nowadays, there is a rich literature on the subject of working-class history comprising scores of monographs and many hundreds of scholarly articles. Much of this writing has been quite self-conscious in appropriating a Thompsonian perspective on class, class formation, and class consciousness in the Great White North. Back then – in the mid-1970s – Canadian working-class history was a kind of terra incognita, waiting to be discovered. In any event, that course – oise 1425 – might have been the worst travesty ever perpetrated on a collection of graduate students.

Over the next dozen years, my teaching got better and it morphed – away from any Canadian focus, towards subjects for which I was better-prepared: the educational connections with family history and historical demography, popular cultural history, and English history. I still retained a focus on “working-class history” and, indeed, it was in that context that I purchased a new copy of the 1968 Penguin edition of The Making and re-read it several times – but, I have to confess, I never had the stomach to work through that long, dreary chapter on working-class intellectual life. In fact, the whole third section of The Making, “The Working-Class Presence,” had come to strike me as tendentious special-pleading, over-reaching in its claims for mass mobilization and widespread class-consciousness. So, for me and my students, the book was abridged – my focus was on the middle section concerned with “working class experience.”

For my own reasons, Thompson’s use (and misuse) of aggregated demographic statistics – the conventional method of the 1950s and 1960s which had been superseded by the more precise analyses provided by family reconstitution that distinguished the impact of radical declines in female ages at first marriage from a roughly-stable rate of age-specific marital fertility to combine unequally in producing a rising birth rate – came in for critical discussion. Over time, that Penguin-book became dog-eared and the “index” I created inside its front cover was a jumbled confusion of page-numbers...