The Making of the English Working Class

In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Apollyon appears as a cunning monster that represents government power. The title of the second chapter of The Making of the English Working Class, “Christian and Apollyon,” reflects Thompson’s view that the character helped shape the inner consciousness of the English working man.

An apprenticeship is a term of employment, often unpaid, in which an unskilled apprentice learns a trade from a master. While the apprentice develops new skills under the master’s tutelage, the master in turn benefits from the apprentice’s labor. When the apprenticeship ends, the apprentice enters the trade and often becomes a master. Before the existence of trade schools, apprenticeship was the primary method of instruction in most crafts, protecting masters from unskilled frauds whose shoddy work cheapened their products, and from an influx of craftsmen who would flood the market and devalue the masters’ skill. The English government’s repeal of centuries-old apprenticeship laws constituted a major grievance among the skilled artisans. Thompson views the abandonment of apprenticeship protections as a form of industrial-capitalist exploitation and a factor in the making of the English working class.