The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (Victor Gollancz, 1963)
This isn’t a light read, clocking in at 864 densely printed pages. But it’s worth the investment. It’s a history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England – decades defined by the upheavals of the French and industrial revolutions – as told from the perspective of the printers, weavers and other assorted artisans who lived through those tumultuous events.
Thompson argues that, under the influence of the writings of Thomas Paine and the autodidact culture of Methodism, and in reaction to technological change and government repression, these artisans gained a new sense of their relationship to the social structure in the early 19th century, becoming conscious of themselves as a working class. It was through this emergent consciousness, and not as an
a priori
consequence of their socioeconomic position, that the English working class was made.