Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Fifty years of the English Working Class


H-Canada takes note of a forthcoming symposium Harvard University is hosting on the fiftieth anniversary of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963.

I didn't read it when it was new.  But it still seemed pretty new when I read it, so I had one of those, "Aaagh, fifty years!" reactions. The book deserves to live, I would say, for that sentence about the "enormous condescension of posterity" (google it) alone.

I recall a symposium a few years ago in Montreal, "Twenty Years after Habitants et Marchands de Montreal by Louise Dechene."  I wonder what other Canadian histories have, or deserve to have, retrospectives twenty or fifty years on.

Still in print from Random House, evidentlly, though I'm not crazy about that cover on a book about the early nineteenth century.
 
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