Anastasia Nikolopoulou (University of Cyprus), "E.P. Thompson and Artisan Theatre Audiences, 1790-1830".

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A major argument of historians against E. P. Thompson is that his book The Making of the English Working Class is a history of artisans but not a history of the working class. For Eric Hobsbawm, for example, the economic formation of the working class did not occur until the late 1830s, long after Thompson's book ends. Other historians, including Thompson's critics, argue that riots, artisan radicalism, and personal experiences-all of which Thompson uses as source material-are not legitimate evidence to rely upon for an analysis of working class discourse.

In this paper I will show how Thompson's analysis of artisan radicalism as part of The Making of the English Working Class is crucial in explaining the ideological complexities of the popular (artisan) theatre in the period 1790-1830 and how the emergence of a popular theatrical culture validates fully Thompson's use of daily experience and personal narratives as indispensable to understanding the formation of working class discourses. In the pre-1830s period, there were about 30 popular theatres operating in the West End and East End areas of London alone, and numerous others in Birmingham, Manchester, Bath, Dublin, and Edinburgh. For William Hazlitt and Harriet Martineau, popular theatre and culture offered an alternative way of schooling, historical interpretation, and political critique. Theatre audiences, comprised primarily of artisans, clerks, linendrapers, upholsterers, students, jewellers, printers, and others, demonstrated a strong political presence in the theatre through riots and protests whenever they felt their rights were being infringed upon, such as in the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden, in 1809.

As John Goode suggests, Thompson's literary pursuit in the writing of The Making of the English Working Classlead him not simply to provide a social context in which to understand radical literature, as did Thelwall, but also to demonstrate the active struggle that the writers were waging against capitalist ideology. This active role of the writer is clearly manifested in the production of melodramas, the most popular theatrical genre of the period, which were often attacked by the Anti-Jacobin press as immoral, Jacobin, atheist, and subversive. Unlike Hazlitt and Martineau, later marxist critics such as Lukacs, Raymond Williams, and Adorno, dismissed popular culture by arguing that it lacked the potential for the emergence of social consciousness. It is against such critical misprisions that Thompson's method offers a way to reinterpret how representations of personal narratives contributed to the making of broader political discourses and their interconnectedness with languages of the working class.