"The Freeborn Englishman" Forty Years On.
E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class revisited.
Saturday 10th May 2003, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1
Keynote speakers include Dorothy Thompson and Bryan Palmer
Robert Poole (St Martin's College, Lancaster), "The Manchester Rising of 1817"
This episode features largely in The Making of the English Working Class as a central episode in the insurrectionary wave of 1817 which Thompson identifies as "one of the first attempts in history to mount a wholly proletarian insurrection". I have gone through all the Home Office papers of the period, uncovering much new material and unravelling at last the tangle of rebels, reformers, spies and informers which has caused so much controversy and confusion. I believe I have at last sorted out what was going, both in detail and in context, advancing our wider understanding of the making of the English working class. I also think it helps to explain the authorities' action at Peterloo - on which I have found what eluded Thompson (p.750 note) the smoking gun that incriminates central government in the massacre.
All this arises from a biography in progress of the radical Samuel Bamford, whose diaries I co-edited with Martin Hewitt (Sutton, 2000).