David Kynaston’s new social history of 1965 and 1966 contains a number of references to E P Thompson. I extract below some lines from a passage in the Times Literary Supplement Maundy Thursday 1966 where Keith Thomas introduced a piece on ‘New Ways in History’ which called for a move away from empiricism and engagement with the Annales school of history.
Hobsbawm’s comments aside from appearing to suggest that historians were men- they mostly were in the mid-sixties- might also be seen as a rebuke to Thompson whose lengthy Making of the English Working Class had been published before he was forty.
Thompson’s call for history to engage beyond the academy was a constant theme in his work
Eric Hobsbawm warned that the current publishing boom in history could lead to ‘debasement through over production’ indeed ‘that there are already cases of young historians who have been tempted to write too fast and too much before a man’s fortieth year’ and E P Thompson’s ‘History From Below’ called on historians of the working class to continue broadening their ambitions to avoid ‘a prodigious proliferation of pretentious jargon’ and if possible to ‘remain somewhat dis-established with an extra-mural audience still in mind’
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