When a contract was signed between myself and Victor Gollancz Ltd, in August 1959, it was for a book on ‘Working-Class Politics, 1790–1921’, to be ‘approximately 60,000 words in length’. This is, I suppose, the first chapter of such a book, and I am grateful to the publishers for the good-humoured and encouraging way in which they received my large and untidy manuscript. Looking back, I am puzzled to know when and how the book got itself written, since in 1959–62 I was also heavily engaged in the work of the first New Left, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and so on. The writing was only possible because some part of the research had already been laid down during the previous ten years in the course of my work as a tutor in extra-mural classes in the West Riding. Discussion in these classes, as well as practical political activity of several kinds, undoubtedly prompted me to see the problems of political consciousness and organization in certain ways.
Many readers have noted that the book is structured by a double-sided critique: on the one hand, of the positivist orthodoxies then dominant in the more conservative academic schools of economic history – orthodoxies more recently marketed under the name of ‘modernization theory’; on the other hand, of a certain ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy (then waning in influence in this country), which supposed that the working class was the more-or-less spontaneous generation of new productive forces and relations. Some critics of the first persuasion found the book to be a matter of scandal, and I replied to certain of their criticisms in a postscript to the Pelican edition of 1968 (reprinted here), not because I suppose that my work should be beyond criticism but because important matters of principle are involved. As regards critics of the second persuasion, I have been engaged in a running argument of a more theoretical kind for some years, culminating in The Poverty of Theory (Merlin Press, 1978).
I do not intend to write a further postscript, reviewing the new work of the past decade. This book has been generously received and has passed into historical discourse, and it would be self-important to try and adjudicate between other scholars in the light of my own findings. However, my own research was continuing while this book went through the press – as the galley-proofs testified – and in work on the crowd and customary consciousness in the eighteenth century I have myself extended and revised some of the material in the first four chapters. Meanwhile much new and important work has been published, and more lies in theses or is forthcoming. Work on the 1790s has been reopened, as can be seen from the bibliography to Professor Albert Goodwin’s weighty study, The Friends of Liberty (Hutchinson, 1979). The prophetic roles of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott have now been fully examined in J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Most important revisions and additions to my account of London artisans, London radical politics, and the Queen Caroline affair, are made in Dr Iorwerth Prothero’s study of John Gast, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Dawsons, 1979). I am happy to say that my note that the struggle of the unstamped press ‘has not yet found its historian’ has now been overtaken by two admirable studies: Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press (Oxford University Press, 1970) and Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped (Cornell University Press, 1969).
Other areas remain more controversial. I should, perhaps, briefly indicate that I remain unrepentant as to my treatment of Methodism; that, despite criticisms, I maintain my view as to a small ‘underground’ Jacobin presence in the war years; that several works by Dr Malcolm Thomis on the Luddite movement have not led me to alter my own interpretation; and that Dr Duncan Bythell’s study of The Handloom Weavers (Cambridge University Press, 1969), some part of which is structured around a critique of my Chapter 9, seems to me to be at fault in general arguments and in matters of detail. But to follow up any one of these questions would require close and prolonged attention to evidence.
The work of research and of critique will continue, and if I have passed by important work without mention, this is only for fear of being drawn into a bibliography. I wish only to indicate that, for its author, the major theses of this book still stand as hypotheses which, in their turn, must never be petrified into orthodoxies.
Worcester, October 1979