From E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
[In this selection from Thompsons magnum opus he explains exactly what he means by class consciousness and how the working class was created. This is the central theme of his entire book.]
1. Can you put Thompsons idea of class into your own words?

The point is of importance, because too much emphasis upon the newness of the cotton_mills can lead to an underestimation of the continuity of political and cultural traditions in the making of working_class communities. The factory hands, so far from being the "eldest children of the industrial revolution", were late arrivals. Many of their ideas and forms of organisation were anticipated by domestic workers, such as the woollen workers of Norwich and the West Country, or the small_ware weavers of Manchester. And it is questionable whether factory hands-except in the cotton districts-" formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement" at any time before the late 184os (and, in some northern and Midland towns, the years 1832_4, leading up to the great lock_outs). Jacobinism, as we have seen V struck root most deeply among artisans. Luddism was the work of skilled men in small workshops. From 1817 onwards t Chartism, the outworkers in the north and the Midlands were as prominent in every radical agitation as the factory hand. And in many towns the actual nucleus from which the labour movement derived ideas, organisation, and leadership, was made up of such men as shoemakers, weavers, saddlers and harnessmakers, booksellers, printers, building workers, small tradesmen, and the like. The vast area of Radical London between 1815 and 1850 drew its strength from no major heavy industries (shipbuilding was tending to decline, and the engineers only made their impact later in the century) but from the host of smaller trades and occupations.

        Such diversity of experiences has led some writers to question both the notions of an "industrial revolution" and of a "working class". The first discussion need not detain us here.3 The term is serviceable enough in its usual connotations. For the second, many writers prefer the term working classes, which emphasises the great disparity in status, acquisitions, skills, conditions, within the portmanteau phrase. And in this they echo the complaints of Francis Place:

If the character and conduct of the working_people are to be from reviews, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, reports of two Houses of Parliament and the Factory Commissioners, we sh find them all jumbled together as the `lower orders', the most skill.; and the most prudent workman, with the most ignorant and im. prudent labourers and paupers, though the difference is great indeed, and indeed in many cases will scarce admit of comparison Place is, of course, right: the Sunderland sailor, the Irish navvy, the Jewish costermonger, the inmate of an East Anglian village workhouse, the compositor on The Times -all might be seen by their "betters" as belonging to the "lower classes" while they themselves might scarcely understand each others' dialect. Nevertheless, when every caution has been made, the outstanding fact of the period between 1790 and 1830 is the formation of "the working class". This is revealed, first, in the growth of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes. And, second, in the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organisation. By 1832 there were strongly_based and self_conscious working_class institutions - trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organisations, periodicals-working_class intellectual traditions, working_class community_patterns, and a working_class structure of feeling.         The making of the working class is a fact of political and' cultural, as much as of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory_system. Nor should we think of an external force-the "industrial revolution"__ working upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity, and turning it out at the other end as a "fresh race of beings". The changing productive relations and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution were imposed, not upon raw material, but upon the free_born Englishman and the free_born Englishman as Paine had left him or as theme Methodists had moulded him. The factory hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was the object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of new political traditions. The working class made itself as much as it was made.