Kmflett's Blog

World Book Day: turnip pilferers, alehouse scroungers & poachers in E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class

I’d choose E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963 still in print on its 63rd anniversary) as my book for World Book Day. I’m conscious of the fact that the day is aimed at younger people and encouraging reading and Thompson’s book is a weighty tome, which might put some off.

That said it is full of characters who might spark interest and indeed passages that can be read aloud.

In fact Thompson compiled a good deal of the detail in the book and arguably some of the approaches to it while teaching WEA night classes in Yorkshire in the 1950s. His engagement with working-class students underlines the point he made in the 1968 postscript that the book is far from being a dry academic tome.

E P Thompson on what people ate in the 1790s

The southern rural labourer refused to abandon his diet of bread and cheese, even when near the point of starvation, and for nearly fifty years a regular dietary class war took place, with potatoes encroaching on bread in the south, and with oatmeal and potatoes encroaching in the north

Making of the English Working Class, Standards and Experiences

Thompson also noted that so low had labourers wages become that some were noted as ‘turnip pilferers, alehouse scroungers & poachers..’ (section on William Cobbett)