Night Waves - Landmarks: The Making of the English Working Class
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2013
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Dodd explores one of the classics of social history, The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson. Ground breaking and passionately engaged it changed the way we thought about the Industrial Revolution and the men, women and children whose hard labour drove it. Even fifty years after its publication modern historians are in dialogue with the book --arguing with its thesis, qualifying its messages and, in the case of the very bold, claiming to have improved on it. To discuss its status as a landmark of our culture Philip is joined by Maurice Glassman, the political theoretician and erstwhile guru of Ed Miliband's Labour and the historians, Alison Light, Miles Taylor and Emma Griffin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. This is a download |
| 0:32.8 | from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:40.3 | I bought my copy in 1968, much battered now. |
| 0:45.7 | By then, this 900-page slab of a book was already a classic, even though only published in 1963. |
| 0:54.4 | Odd, really, that a study of the life of the forgotten working class |
| 0:58.2 | should be so well regarded during the swinging 60s, |
| 1:01.9 | a study of class so revered when Harold Wilson's Labour government |
| 1:05.6 | was so keen on meritocracy, |
| 1:07.8 | and a book marinated in England so popular at a time when French thought was all the rage. |
| 1:15.9 | E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The subject of this evening's landmark is 50 years old this year, |
| 1:24.3 | and it's been translated into many languages including Chinese, Turkish, Japanese and |
| 1:31.0 | French. It's both a formidable account of the emergence of an English working class during the late |
| 1:38.0 | 18th and early 19th century, and a contribution to the political arguments of the 1950s and early 1960s when E.P. Thompson was |
| 1:48.0 | writing the book while living in Halifax. By the time of the publishing of the making of the |
| 1:54.1 | English working class, E.P. Thompson was already a significant presence in political circles. |
| 2:00.2 | An author of a biography of William Morris, |
| 2:02.7 | the co-founder of the New Reasoner, |
| 2:04.8 | a magazine devoted to democratic socialism, |
| 2:07.6 | a former member of the Communist Party |
| 2:09.5 | who'd left after the suppressed Hungarian uprising in 1956, |
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