56th anniversary of the publication of the Making of the English Working Class EP Thompson on William Blake, Beast & Whore
The historian EP Thompson wrote extensively about William Blake and the religious traditions he stood in. There is a review of his Witness Against the Beast from a Blake related website which gives a flavour in overview of what he was looking at:
http://bq.blakearchive.org/28.2.paley
In another age these minority traditions were perhaps better understood. The paperback edition of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was published as the 1000th Pelican book in September 1968. To mark the occasion the Guardian published a special supplement to which Thompson himself contributed a piece headlined ‘Beast and Whore’. In Blakeian terms the reference was to Church and State but wonders if such a piece could appear now without attracting the attentions of Guido..
Below is a letter I wrote in 1993 to the London Review of Books defending Thompson’s treatment of Blake. Sadly he died later the same year.
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It is thirty years since Edward Thompson first published The Making of the English Working Class, and while the phrase he uses to criticise what Post-Modernism has tried to do to William Blake, ‘the somewhat attenuated discourse of analytic academicism’, is perhaps not quite on a level with ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, we may give thanks that Thompson’s brain is razor sharp still and that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he has never been bought off by academic life or cheap fame in the press. Where, however, are the Edward Thompsons for the Nineties and beyond?
Keith Flett
London N17
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