Another Voice

I'd forgotten, if I'd ever realised before, the quiet power of the ending of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The extraordinary resilience of those at the bottom end of English society is obvious throughout the book, but it needs stating, and the great historian does so memorably in its final pages: They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture. No reader will quarrel with incomparable given the mass of evidence Thompson puts together over 800+ packed pages. And the idea that a culture can be in some sense heroic also convinces.

And this is only one of two endings. My edition, published originally in 1968, has the lengthy postscript added to the first edition of 1963 - happily so. Although much of this is dedicated to Thompson answering back some of the criticisms of his early reviewers, the inclusion of an extract from a note found in the pocket of a young 'reformer' in March 1817 is inspired: All the way we have come we have been Garded by the Soldiers and a Grate Many have gon back agen... We se very plane the are Determined to stop us, a great many of us as been put in prison in nearly all the towns we have come throw - thear sordes gliter round our heades but the thing is as it is... Tell all the men that I ham in good spirets as ever tho I do not know but I may be in prison ten minetes from now. I ham a trew Reformer yet and I do not Care who knows it.

It's reassuring to know that through intelligent listeners like Thompson we can still half-hear the voices of others giving access to worlds not quite beyond our understanding, which allow us a better, richer understanding of our own.