E P Thompson started academic life as someone who wrote about and taught not history but literature.
He published a science fiction novel, the Skyaos Papers and wrote occasional poetry that was eventually collected in one volume by Bloodaxe after his death.
He also produced a slim volume (long out of print) of Christmas related poems, written over the decades, title Infant and Emperor.
I don’t plan to go into a detailed textual deconstruction of the poems but they are interesting both in the sense that they represent something of Thompson’s personal background and how this is reflected in the Making and in the way they also indicate at outline level how Thompson’s political activity fed into his historical concerns.
The title infant and emperor refers to the baby born to Mary and Joseph as a representative of the oppressed masses, while the Emperor is the oppressor Herod. Thompson makes the point in several of the poems that the official church was closer to Herod than the baby and the poems were provoked by various moments of political crisis from Suez in 1956 through to various waves of anti-nuclear campaigning.
While Thompson rejected Methodism (a significant element in The Making) in 1968 he declared himself a Muggletonian Marxist reflecting a millennial world view associated with William Blake about whom Thompson wrote Witness Against the Beast.
The other theme of Infant and Emperor is the prospect of radical change seen in quite dramatic millennial imagery. This was without question part of the world outlook of elements of the early English working class, later pushed to the margins by the more mundane perspectives of labourism and the ability of Methodism to exert control in some working-class communities.
Again Thompson makes the point in the 1963 introduction to the hardback edition of The Making that battles lost in early nineteenth century England might yet be won elsewhere. Or perhaps in late industrial England return and reassert themselves again…
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