Anglia Ruskin University

Programme
(Please note that the organisers reserve the right to change the programme without notice)

10.00-10.30 Registration and coffee

10.30 'The Making of The Making of English Working Class'
David Goodway

This paper explores the threefold origins of The Making of English Working Class. First, there is Thompson's revision of Marxism in his first great book, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, published in 1955. Then came the crisis in the Communist Party of Great Britain and Thompson's resignation, his untiring activity as the principal figure in the British New Left and equal commitment to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Particular attention, though, will be paid to the history classes he taught for the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Leeds, where he was employed from 1948 to 1965.

David Goodway taught sociology, history and Victorian studies to mainly adult students from 1969 until the University of Leeds closed its School of Continuing Education in 2005. He was then, in 2006-7, Helen Cam Visiting Fellow in History at Girton College, Cambridge. For twenty years he has written principally on anarchism and libertarian socialism, including Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (2007), reissued in a second edition in 2012. But his first book was London Chartism 1838-1848 (1982); and he is currently working on an edition of George Julian Harney's late journalism (1890-97).

11.30 The Dark Myth of the British Industrial Revolution.
Emma Griffin

E.P. Thompson, like most historians of his generation, viewed the industrial revolution in bleak terms. In a series of influential books and essays, Thompson argued that industrialisation reduced wages, increased working hours, dehumanised the experience of work, In this paper, I turn to working-class autobiography to reconsider these claims. I argue that if we listen to the words of workers themselves, we will find that many experienced this period as one of empowerment not oppression.

Emma Griffin is senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia and works on the social and economic history of Britain from 1700 to 1870. She is the author of several books including A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (Palgrave, 2010), Blood Sport. A History of Hunting in Britain (Yale University Press, 2007), England's Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660- 1800 (Oxford University Press, 2005). Her most recent book is Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (Yale, 2013).

12.30-13.45 Lunch (There are several pubs and cafes nearby)

13.45 'Watchwords from the walls of Zion': Edward Thompson and religious dissent
John Seed

Organized religion figured prominently in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson's provocative attack on Wesleyan Methodism has attracted most attention but he had things to say in its pages about other forms of organized religion, such as Old Dissent and Irish Catholicism. Religion faded into the background during the 1970s in his work on eighteenth-century crime and the law. However, it returned to prominence in his last book on William Blake, Witness Against the Beast - a rethinking of some of the arguments of The Making. I will explore some of these varied and changing perspectives.

John Seed is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London and a superannuated gentleman-scholar. Recent publications include Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of memory in Eighteenth-Century England, (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010); and The Gordon Riots. Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, coedited with Ian Haywood, (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

14.45 coffee

15.00 Continuing After Defeat; 'Radical Anger' and the Established Church
John Gardner

In The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson notes that Britain came closer to having a revolution in 1819 than at any time since the 1640s. However by 1821 the prospect seemed distant. Why did it all end so quickly, why did thirty years of radical organisation so suddenly collapse within two short years of a radical high point? Thompson offers an economic explanation. He points to 'the onset of the years of general prosperity, from 1820 to 1825' and draws the conclusion that 'falling prices and fuller employment took the edge off Radical anger.' Thompson also subscribes to the explanation first advanced by Halévy, that Revolution in Britain was averted by the growth of Methodism, which reached a peak in the twenties and thirties and encouraged in its adherents sobriety, discipline, and political quietism. In this paper I will argue that radicalism did not go away. Instead radical ideas now had to be disseminated through new routes, rather than the traditional ones of protest, rebellion and patronage.

John Gardner has lectured at Anglia Ruskin since 2004, having previously taught at the University of Glasgow. He has also taught sessions at the Universities of Delhi, Huelva, and Cambridge. He teaches literature from Chaucer to the present day, but his research has so far been mainly focussed on C. 18 and C. 19 literature and culture. His last book, Poetry and Popular Protest (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), examined poetic reactions to the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and the Queen Caroline divorce controversy. He has since been publishing articles on William Cobbett, Charles Lamb, Robert Southey and Scottish radicalism. His next book will be on the 1820s.

16.00-17.15 Plenary - What does it mean to be a Thompsonian today?

Also taking part in the plenary session will be Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge University), Jeremy Krikler (Essex University) and Andy Wood (University of East Anglia).