“The Condescension of Posterity:” The Recent Historiography of the English Working Class

Abstract

In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, Edward Thompson set out in The Making of the English Working Class “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete* hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian* artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” It is no criticism of that great, rugged, sprawling, big-hearted book to say that what the English working class most needs to be rescued from is the enormous condescension of middle-class intellectuals. Ever since Marx and Engels, if not indeed James Mill and Andrew Ure, English working people have not, at least until very recently, been allowed to have their own history but have had it imposed upon them from above by self-appointed champions and apologists from the “higher” classes.Thompson himself is something of an exception, more an old fashioned independent country gentleman than a middle-class intellectual, living in a mansion in Worcestershire and exhibiting in his concern for the long dead poor the traditional paternalism which he decries in the eighteenth-century squire.