Ep thompson biography

On the centenary of Thompson’s birth, Dominic Alexander celebrates his monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class

Edward Palmer Thompson, born a century ago on 3 February 1924, was not only one of the most important British Marxist historians but was also among the most important internationally.

He is surely best remembered for his monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which in charting the development of a political class consciousness among workers in England during the Industrial Revolution from the end of the eighteenth century through to the 1830s, has been praised and attacked in equal measure ever since.

Given all this argument, it is worth establishing just what the book’s core contribution was to the story of the working class, and to the history of political radicalism.

The book begins with the English Jacobins of the 1790s and explores the religious and political traditions the r