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The Making Of The English Working Class




Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface:
:"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott , from the enormous condescension of posterity."

Thompson attempts to add a societies. Thompson makes great effort to recreate the life-experience of the working class(es), which is what often marks it out as such an influential work.

Thompson uses the term "working class" rather than "classes" throughout, to emphasis the growth of a working-class consciousness. He claims in the Preface that "in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers."

Thompson's re-evaluation of the Luddite movement, and his (unsympathetic) treatment of the influence of the early Methodist movement on working class aspirations are also particularly memorable. (Thompson's parents were Methodist missionaries.)