The Making of the English Working Class

Chapter 5 describes the English Jacobin movement and the events of the 1790s, in particular the English response to Paine’s Rights of Man and the French Revolution. Thompson explains the unprecedented and revolutionary political circumstances that developed in England between the LCS’s first meeting in January 1792 and the arrest of its principal members in May 1794. Crowds of working men gathered all over the country to proclaim the rights of man, prompting a “counter-revolutionary offensive” (107) from England’s propertied class. After French revolutionaries executed their king, proclaimed a republic, and then declared war on Great Britain in early 1793, English government authorities marshaled all available resources and used every means of intimidation, including spies and hired thugs, in an effort to silence English Jacobins. A demonstrable surge of millenarian enthusiasm, coupled with the resilience of popular societies such as the LCS in the face of official persecution, suggest that English aristocrats and their allies had good reason to suspect a general ferment within the lower class. Nevertheless, societies like the LCS struggled to withstand relentless government persecution, and their numbers dwindled as a result.

After the 1794 trial and acquittal of LCS founder Thomas Hardy and his associates on charges of treason, and the brutal winter and ensuing famine of 1795, however, those numbers swelled once more, highlighted by a June 1795 demonstration in London that drew tens of thousands. As the Jacobin movement reached its peak in late 1795, the government responded with the Two Acts, which criminalized anti-government speech as treasonous and prohibited meetings of 50 or more without prior approval from a government official. The Two Acts triggered additional arrests and sent the Jacobin movement underground. Based on what is known of the composition of the LCS and one of its counterpart organizations in Sheffield, the English Jacobins were numerous and overwhelmingly working-class.

The Jacobins produced only a handful of intellectuals, including John Thelwall, who had working-class connections, and Thomas Spence, a teacher who argued for the abolition of private property in land. The movement was doomed to disenchantment. Literary figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake saw their hopes dashed by the counter-revolutionary repression of the late 1790s. There is substantial evidence of Jacobin influence, however, in the naval mutinies of 1797 and the Irish Rebellion of 1798. On the whole, Thompson views the 1790s as the formative decade for English Radicalism.