Thompson, E P

▪ 1994

      British historian (b. Feb. 3, 1924—d. Aug. 28, 1993, Upper Wick, Worcester, England), held academic posts early in his career but beginning in the late 1970s devoted much of his time to the antinuclear peace movement. His particular interest was the role of common people and the working class in the making of history. Thompson was the son of Methodist missionaries. He served in Italy in World War II and attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (B.A., 1946). He taught in the extramural department of the University of Leeds from 1948 to 1965 and at the Centre for Social History at the University of Warwick from 1965 to 1971. A Marxist from his student days, he left the Communist Party in 1956 when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising, but he remained a socialist for the rest of his life. Thompson's first book was a 1955 study of William Morris, the 19th-century socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His best-known work is The Making of the English Working Class (1963), a study of the period 1780-1832; in Thompson's words, his aim was to save English workers "from the enormous condescension of posterity." He published several other books, including Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975), and with his wife, Dorothy, also a historian, he founded and contributed to political journals of dissent. At the time of his death he had completed a book on William Blake—Witness Against the Beast—which was published posthumously.

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