On World Book Night I’m dipping into E P Thompson’s 1963 classic The Making of the English Working Class.
A long book,full of stories of struggle, the development of a radical working class culture, battles with the Government, not always successful.
In times like these I find myself turning to the book itself full of accounts but historically referenced ones,and often researched around WEA classes he taught in Yorkshire in the 1950s.
For example he references the example of the Sheffield radical Wolstenholme,jailed without charge for months in 1817, who wrote to his wife with some difficulty because ‘have broke my specttacles’. Such instances of persistence and resilience speak across the centuries
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