6
(caesura: a break or sense pause, usually near the middle of a verse, marked in scansion by a double line: //)
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
… Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
… So many questions.1
Students of history are routinely advised about the uses of literature – not at length; but they are advised – as in John Tosh’s guide to historical theory and method, The Pursuit of History. When treating literature as historical source material, he says, it is obvious that ‘novels and plays cannot … be treated as factual reports … Nor, needless to say, do historical novels – or Shakespeare’s history plays for that matter – carry any authority as historical statements about the periods to which they refer.’2 Nevertheless, creative literature is valuable for the insight it offers into a writer’s intellectual and social context; the popularity of authors in the past and the longevity of their work may be because they successfully articulated ‘the values and preoccupations of literary contemporaries’. This knowledge is deemed useful to the young or aspiring historian. There is no account of form or style as constituting historical evidence in these recommendations, though in the early days of the journal Literature and History, inaugurated to explore the relationship between the two disciplines, there were valiant attempts explore ‘literature’ as a type of documentary evidence. Sometimes these explorations could only tell the story of the historical profession growing suspicious of literature during the nineteenth century. Literary scholars pointed yet again to historians’ sad incapacities: we almost always respond to ‘a formal discourse which expresses directly or indirectly the values, ideology, or socio-psychological tensions of a given society’; we are ‘unable to come to grips with the past as it is embodied in the … language and structure … of a piece of literature’; we restrict ourselves to the ‘content or surface meaning’ of whatever text we use. In short, historians are not very good at using the evidence of form and style.3
All of this was a long time ago of course (though in the same country). Search BBIH (Bibliography of British and Irish History On-line) and you will find many historians using poetry, fiction, hybrid-forms, letters, diaries, and autobiography as source material, in inventive and exhilarating ways. Not much attention to the forms of poetry though. The novel is an extraordinarily difficult – impossible – form to recruit for evidence, yet it is widely employed. When the epistolary form of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is used, there is perceived to be no problem at all, for the very structure dictated by the exchange of (fictional) letters, is both form and meaning itself. But the nineteenth-century novel is shaped to such a sagging and joyously disjointed scaffolding, that you could spend a lifetime and ten volumes accounting for the tone, rhythm, and organisation of just one of them, if you were to adduce structure to historical argument. All of this was the 1980s, when the exhortations of literary theorists (literary historians? literary-historical theorists?) like Raymond Williams and Franco Moretti were heeded. Williams eschewed the term ‘literature’, what with its high-cultural connotations of aesthetic value and discrimination; he also eschewed ‘genre’ in favour of ‘form’. ‘Writing in society’ was his preferred term for ‘literature’, because it allows us to read, not so much between the lines of poetry, novels, and other written forms, but to read the lines as social acts of performance and communication.4 In 1975, he read the metre, rhythm, and the larger structures of pastoral and labouring-class poetry as political and cultural text (though to be sure, most of his examples for his thinking on the transition to industrial modernity in Britain were taken from novels).5 Franco Moretti has been enduringly insightful – wonderful – in giving answers to questions about why different forms (epic, novel, crime fiction, bildungsroman, ‘Childhood’, murder mystery …) have been chosen by writers and desired by readers in different historical epochs: he inaugurated a sociology of literary forms.6
When Antoinette Blum wrote her dispiriting account of historians’ inabilities with literature in 1985, she did have some kind words for Marxist historians. Christopher Hill was ‘the first historian we have encountered to have attempted a thorough analysis of a literary text from a historical perspective’. There was ‘some subtlety in his approach’, she said, for in Puritanism and Revolution (1958) he did not use Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) to acquire historical knowledge of his themes and topics, but rather employed its structure to ‘acquire factual knowledge that cannot be gathered from more conventional sources’.7 She praised E. P. Thompson as well, for his vision of literature as a symbolic expression of the values through which a class is both defined and defines itself; as a source for understanding mentalité in the past. She mentions Thompson’s analysis of images and imagery in Pilgrim’s Progress and many nineteenth-century novels; she wishes he had brought his analysis of charivari to bear on a the actual analysis of an actual literary text; she concludes that ‘Thompson displays a keen sensitivity to literature, but unfortunately does not carry his perceptiveness into detailed analysis of … literary text’.8 She did not mention poetry – as a form, or otherwise – in her discussion of historians who did better than others with literature. She does not mention ‘poetry’ as literature at all. But the case of Edward Thompson and poetry is an interesting one, for even when writing, much later on and extensively and exhilaratingly about a poet in his posthumous book about William Blake (Witness to the Beast), he does not, on my reading, once discuss Blake’s use of verse form, metrical structure, or stress patterns, though he had a lot to say about Blake’s imagery, as Blum noted of his work from twenty years before.9 Blum’s was a doubly interesting observation about the opaqueness of the poetic for Thompson, for (though she was not to know this) it has recently been claimed that his primary identity was as poet, not as historian, at least up until 1960.10 He certainly wrote poetry and published a few of his poems in his lifetime; there are 125 in the Collected Poems (1999). Sometimes he ‘published’ by the device of insertion in his prose writing, as in ‘I will cite one crude line of a poem which I find among my own notes of 1956. The poem is “In Praise of Hangmen” …’11 His editor has not much to say about his poems as poetry: ‘the poet, the man, and the style are one’; ‘an aesthetics in which poetry is the best … the sanest, plainest and most affirmative speech of a free citizen …’; and finally, perhaps a bit desperately: ‘there are surely many echoes of T. S. Eliot’.12
As is well known, Thompson was very hard on Auden. He had taught Auden with a joyous heart at a weekend school for adult learners in 1950; in 1960 he produced a detailed reading of ‘Spain’, declaring that the excisions and alteration that Auden made in the 1950s compromised not only this one poem, but ‘Auden’s whole achievement as a poet’.13 For Thompson, Auden’s earlier achievement (whatever it was) had not been an achievement in verse; the point he made was not a point of poetics; for Thompson, Auden’s poem was the play of ideas. But Luke Spencer has pointed out the influences of Auden on Thompson, and his conscious use of an ‘audenesque’ voice.14 In his analysis of Thompson’s writing, the historian/poet’s ‘voice’ incorporates Auden’s tone, mood, and style; but poetic structure and metre are not part of it, no matter where it comes from.
What might we Rosa Bassett girls have made of Thompson’s ‘Chemical Works, Part II, The Girls’ if, in some other universe, we had been presented with it between 1962 and 1965? Parallel and impossible world: designated one of the ‘Early Poems: 1940–1947’ in the Collected Poems, it was not published until 1999. We could have mapped it on to Auden’s Night Mail (1936) which in auditory memory, at least, was one of the heart-beats of a post-War childhood. A short film produced at the GPO Film Unit with Auden’s verse as voice commentary, Night Mail was relentlessly anthologised. I have always known it – heard on the Home Service? Read at primary school? Learned by heart at primary school? Perhaps the film itself was shown at Saturday Morning Pictures at the Astoria, Streatham Hill: I had always already seen it, at least since 1955.15 We could have recognised the rhythm of Auden’s verse commentary to ‘Night Mail’, in Thompson’s ‘Chemical Works’: ‘There’s Jean in Woolworth’s, Sally at the mill,/Trams and cosmetics, the conquest of skill/In setting your hair or minding a machine/’. We might have enjoyed the 16-year-old worker’s longing for ‘a tall man at the gates, O, with cream in his hair/And a tight two-seater’. We would not have noticed the (unconscious?) joke of the tight two-seater, and anyway, men’s bums were not yet erogenous zones, at least not in Streatham Hill; indeed, you’d never seen one, as men almost universally wore loosely hanging high-waisted bags, more like skirts than trousers. We could have found the idea of cream in the seducer’s hair irresistibly funny. What sort of cream? Single or double? Whipped? Top of the milk? Why not ‘Brylcreem in his hair’, Miss R____? Then at least it would scan.16 Could we have thought that the break in the iambic feet was … deliberate?
Forget about the orange-blossom, never mind the priest
But give me a chance. They’ve done for my skin
But my figure’s still OK. O give me at least
An ordinary fellow with average pay
Here was all we had escaped, though we did not know it; nor that we, too, were set to meet the Last Seducer, despite all our knowledge of prosody:
O grant me only this, O grant me, heaven,
Not any unpossible love, no, no unlikely bliss
But something somehow to get me out of this
Before the final suitor with his dark proposal comes.17
I am more puzzled by the timing of the poem now than I could have possibly been in 1963. With its partner, ‘Chemical Works I. The Machines’, ‘The Girls’ is a study of working-class love and labour, which appears, to my historian’s tedious little mind, to be a product of the Thompsons’ Halifax years (1948–1965). They moved to the city late in 1948 after Edward Thompson had been appointed staff tutor in the Leeds University Extra-Mural Department.18 The poem is dated no later than 1947, and of course there is no reason for Thompson’s not visiting a chemical works before the move to Halifax, though the region was particularly crowded with them, supplying the fulling and dying parts of the woollen manufacture. Industrial psychology, which gave access to the mental life of the workers, flourished in the post-War year; Thompson’s poem could be read as a contribution to a developing field.19 ‘Chemical Works I’ attempts a psychology of labour; it is a song of what happens to men and women’s souls and psyches drowned in a relentless barrage of noise:
murderers
henchmen
hooligans
howlings
menacing and pummellings locking interlocking
hubbub of driving belts grouse of gearing
pelting
cheering
Knocking at nerves
beyond endurance …
Pauses
Settles respectably into the subconscious …
The voice moves between the stranger from outside walking the floor, stunned in his observation and – very briefly and only perhaps – the interior voice of the worker. Thompson did not attempt occupying the heads of the male workers as he did with The Girls at the chemical plant who, after all, have other things on their mind and, maybe, space for a poet. Working-class women were more legible to the poet than were the men, as was the case with a short story of 1965, which also emerged from Thompson’s Halifax period.20 We sixth-form girls wouldn’t much have minded this assumption about the transparency of women, for all of them, all writers, from Shakespeare to the most up-to-date poet on our reading lists, assumed to know women’s minds better than they did themselves. Men were the impenetrable, dark heart of all texts. We may, however (and remember, we’re dealing with the never-happened here), have been pretty offended at another Thompson poem of the same era, ‘New Fashions’, which just can’t help equating the way in which during the War years the grander of the Paris fashion houses ‘designed the panties, zips and perms/ To re-invade the women’s world’, with women’s own complicity in – what? Occupation? Capitalism? Fascism? The verse interpellates its readers (which we were not) as idiot girls:
Modom must suit this style of hair –
‘La Libération du Caen’;
This hat, à petites gouttes de sang.
The Mort à Pucheau brassière …
Any road up, or whatever which way, our critical response to Thompson’s poetry would have been as naive and uninformed as that of the Reverend Old Rector, at whom Elizabeth Hands had such a good laugh at in 1789, in her satiric commentary on her own bourgeois readers; at their want of a workable poetics, and their naive critical principles: ‘That “Amnon”you can’t call it poetry neither,/There’s no flights of fancy, nor imagery either;/You may style it prosaic, blank verse at the best;/Some pointed reflections, indeed, are expressed;/The narrative lines are exceedingly poor’.21
But a historian who was also a poet is a rare bird, at least in modern times. Could being a poet make you as competent a reader of plebeian poetry as Brecht’s worker is of history? Was this the case? In the 1980s, Thompson edited Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730) and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739). The poems had appeared together in print for the first time only a few years before Thompson’s edition, even though Mary Collier had intended hers as a sardonic response to Duck, ‘in Answer to his late Poem’, 250 years before.22 It was a ‘so-what?’ and more to Duck’s account of village field hands who were called on at particularly intense times of the agricultural year. Collier’s riposte details the female labourer’s double burden: the children fed and dressed, the beds made, the clothes mended, the dinner cooked against the thresher’s return, for she has left the field early to get the bacon and dumplings on the fire – all of this as well as the reaping and haymaking she undertakes for cash. Thompson recognised that her poem was ‘sharper’ than Duck’s; he was highly sensible of the sheer hard work Collier described, said she showed no resentment of the farmer who called on the village women’s labour, and further that, ‘one suspects[,] that she rather enjoys the sociable weeks of harvest, despite the heavy work’.23
Among worker writers, poetical servants were the most fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, as has been observed; but Duck was an agricultural labourer, not a domestic worker. We have seen some elite voices opining that ‘natural poets’ like he were splendid additions to a household, able to fawn on their employers in verse. They often had in mind the Thresher-Poet when they made disparaging remarks like this.24 But Stephen Duck was rather better thought of by his fellow workers than by contemporary poets and modern critics. He had the reputation of being a bit of a wag, with a nice line in the edgy hilarity of class relations.25 And Thompson has recently been taken to task for his dismissal of Duck’s achievements: ‘From the moment that he left the thresher’s barn it was downhill all the way’, said he.26 William Christmas challenges Thompson’s ‘narrative of deracination and corrupted authenticity’. He points out that in Thompson’s 1980s view, Duck was only ‘authentic’ – could only be ‘authentic’ – when he wrote about his labour experience. Thompson, it is now said, believed that experience of toil should be valued above all the other things Duck did and thought in his life. This perspective came from ‘a post-Romantic definition of what counts as true poetry’ – poetry as the authentic expression of lived experience. Christmas does all of this – performs his critique – by placing Duck in a transhistorical context of working-class intellectualism; by reading him as a working-class intellectual.27 He is thus able to discuss Duck’s considerable achievements of mind as well as the poetic forms he used – and his thinking about metre.28 You would not learn from Thompson’s much earlier discussion that both Duck and Collier used perfectly regular iambic (‘heroick’) couplets to structure their poems, in 1730 and 1739; he was thus unable to provide insight into what this form might mean, or might have meant to the poets themselves.
Thompson had more and more interesting things to say about Collier’s work because she said more about her labour, detailing as she did the travails of a woman with two jobs as well as a house to look after; much of Collier’s poem is taken up detailing her charring work. Early on a winter’s morning, the village women rise by prior arrangement (‘our Work appointed’) and go up to the Big House for the wash. It takes all day. The mistress appears at noon, perhaps with a mug of ale for the women, but mainly to nag about being gentle with ruffles and lace, sparing with fire and soap, and to complain about items lost in the last wash. The women work until dusk, sometimes having to ‘piece the Summer’s day with Candle-light’; by now ‘Blood runs trickling down/Our wrists and fingers’. Then, as the women sit in the farmhouse back kitchen rubbing away at the pewter (all part of the job of charring), more ‘Trumpery’ is brought in ‘to make complete our Slavery’, as Thompson points out. He noted these details because Collier’s language ‘implies questions as to the humanity of class divisions, and as to the rationality of luxuries which depend upon the degrading labour of others’. Collier’s poem is preferable to Duck’s because she was ‘writing irreverently about the oppressions and sensibilities of class’.29
Thompson’s comparison between Duck and Collier was inflected by his having noted class feelings in kitchens, washhouses, and brew houses, around things and between women. Duck does inscribe the capitalist wage relationship in his poem – knows that each sheaf of corn represents the farmer’s greater or lesser profit for the year; yet at the same time, as Thompson points out, his view of the labour process – from cutting, through threshing, though storing, to harvest feast – is framed by the master’s perspective. The farmer, rent-day looming, inaugurates the harvest and he rejoices in his profit with a feast for the workers. The master’s language becomes the threshers’ consciousness: ‘These words, or words like these, disclose his Mind:/So dry the Corn was carried from the Fields,/ So easily ‘twill thresh, so well ‘twill yield./Sure large day’s Work I may well hope for now;/Come, strip, and try, let’s see what you can do’. Nothing marks a boundary between the master’s words and the thresher’s thoughts. This is a far cry from Collier’s brisk assessment of the wage relationship, made in her own voice: ‘And after all our Toil and Labour past,/ Sixpence or Eightpence pays us off at last’. She not only mentions cash payment, but also suggests that it isn’t enough. That’s why Thompson liked Collier more than Duck (as do I; as do I). But for all Thompson’s analysis, she might as well have written … oh, a letter (threatening, or informative), or a little tract, or an essay, not a poem.30
More recently, questions have been asked about the poetic form these worker-poets chose and the class condescension of not asking about it in the first place. Peggy Thompson (no relation) reminds us that even Raymond Williams claimed it ‘easy to feel the strain of this labourer’s voice as it adapts, slowly, to the available models in verse’.31 But surely, ‘[i]f scholars of the couplet can find tension between Dryden’s intentions and his poetic form, and between Pope’s state of mind and his form, what kind of conflict will we discern between two laborers’ most subversive poems and a verse form overwhelmingly favored by the educated elite and allegedly inseparable from “an authoritative and fixed universe”?’ she asks, in ‘Duck, Collier, and the ideology of verse forms’. Is a verse form ideological? ‘What evidence can we find, in short, for or against an ideology of the heroic couplet?’ In answer, Peggy Thompson details the ‘interrogation, condescension, and ridicule’ that both Collier and Duck endured at the very idea that they might write poetry. This, she says wedged a painful ‘dissonance between Duck’s and Collier’s identities as poets and their identities as laborers and, in Collier’s case, as a woman’. Her conclusions are that whilst we must remain sceptical about an essential meaning or ideology of form, forms – Duck’s and Collier’s heroick couplets – can support ‘powerful tendencies and patterns’. The meanings of a verse form must be found in actual practice, as in Collier’s more consistent success in sustaining the heroick. Duck implies his unhappiness at the socio-economic regime he inhabits at the same time as he confirms it. Yet, in his better moments, she says, ‘Duck uses the couplet to convey rather than betray his class-based anguish, to unmask the master’s order as a cheat, and to contrast it to the endless sameness of his own life’.
Neither Collier nor Duck appeared to think, any more than Elizabeth Hands thought, that ‘heroick’ verse was not for them, or an irreducibly elite form.32 Poetry offers historical evidence, says Roy Harris, that in pre-literate cultures there was awareness of subtle patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and assonance among poets and their audiences.33 A charwoman’s, a field labourer’s, and a domestic servant’s poetry offers evidence of a related kind: that in a culture in transition to mass literacy, as was the one they inhabited; in a partially literate society in which the oral and the literate had been so long entangled that they could not be divided from each other – choice of form, its resonances with individual histories and ways of learning to read, allowed these poets and their audiences (or at least this part of an audience, here, now, writing these words) briefly to hear said, and see, how it was in Warwickshire in 1789 (Hands), in Hampshire in 1739 (Collier), and in Wiltshire in 1730 (Duck).
Thompson was criticised by some for his inabilities in reading poetry (no one criticised his writing of it, for few can have laid eyes on it before 1999).34 John Goode thought that he – perhaps – found it difficult to understand what kind of thing literature was, its beingness in the word; its quiddity. And Goode was ‘disappointed’ at Thompson’s hierarchy of the disciplines, his assertion of the virtues of History – that Queen of the Humanities – over all others.35 Perhaps for Thompson, poetry was merely a way of saying what had already been said, over and over again. ‘It is not always clear … what the passages of poetry in the “Open Letter” and “The Poverty of Theory” achieve’, muses Scott Hamilton in ‘The Poetry and Poetics of E. P. Thompson’; when Thompson selected lines other than his own, they ‘seem merely to embroider meaning already present in the prose passage preceding them’.36 This is salutary warning to those of us with a tendency to drop a line of Auden’s verse into any space that seems big enough to hold it; but it does not solve the mystery of why a historian wanted poetry: to have it, I think, by writing or quoting it, but blind to the labours of any worker but himself. But then, reading poetry is hard, and takes something out of you. Reading history is so much easier, as Brecht’s Worker knew, because it raises blindingly obvious questions, which you can labour to answer. Poetry has no answers; it’s what Auden said it was: its own self, its own self-containment, clattering away like the threshing machine that was soon to obviate the labour of men like Duck, and its rewards. Which observation must really make us contemplate Auden’s preference for broken, rusted, and abandoned agricultural machinery, over anything that actually worked, and made someone a living. But in fact, the threshing machine would not affect the labour supplied by men like Stephen Duck or their earnings yet awhile; it was an early nineteenth-century problem.37 And all this waving around of a falsely obtained poetic licence at border control between the land of history and the realm of poesie is what gives any historian invoking a poet a very bad name.
1 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters’ (1935), trans. H. R. Hays, ‘A Worker Reads History’, Selected Poems, Grove Press, New York NY, 1947; Compact Poets: Bertolt Brecht, Denys Thompson (ed.), trans. H. R. Hays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1972. The poem is also translated as ‘Questions From a Worker Who Reads’, Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, trans. M. Hamburger, Methuen, New York NY and London, 1976. There are minor variations in wording, spacing and the size of indentation between the two translations. The second translation ends with a double space between the last two lines: ‘So many reports.//So many questions’. www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/brecht/ (accessed 16 October 2017).
2 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History. Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (1984), 5th edn, Pearson, Harlow, 2010, p. 98.
3 Antoinette Blum, ‘The uses of literature in nineteenth and twentieth-century British historiography’, Literature & History, 11:2 (1985) pp. 176–203.
4 Raymond Williams, Writing in Society, Verso, London, 1983. Also Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, pp. 145–150, 180–192; Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Fontana, London, 1983, entries for ‘Culture’ and ‘Literature’.
5 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), Paladin, St Albans, 1975.
6 Moretti’s enormous project is measured out by what came between Signs Taken for Wonders. Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983) and The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature. Brooklyn (2013) taking in The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), The Modern Epic. The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996), and The Novel (2006) along the way. His form of historical choice has to be seen as the novel: ‘Style, Inc.: Reflections on seven thousand titles (British novels, 1740–1850)’, Critical Inquiry, 36:1 (2009), pp. 134–158.
7 Blum, ‘Uses of Literature’, p. 186.
8 Blum, ‘Uses of Literature’, pp. 187–188.
9 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast. William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
10 Scott Hamilton, ‘Between Zhdanov and Bloomsbury. The poetry and poetics of E. P. Thompson’, Thesis Eleven, 95 (2008), pp. 95–112; The Crisis of Theory. E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2011, pp. 49–52; Terry Eagleton, ‘The poetry of E. P. Thompson’, Literature and History, 5:2 (1979), pp. 142–145; Roland Boer, ‘Apocalyptic and apocalypticism in the poetry of E. P. Thompson’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 7 (2009), pp. 34–53, http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/7488.pdf (accessed 16 October 2017); E. P. Thompson, Collected Poems, Fred Inglis (ed.), Bloodaxe, Hexham, 1999.
11 E. P. Thompson, ‘An Open Letter to Lesek Kolakowski’, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin, London, 1976, pp. 93–192; 131. ‘Hangman’, Collected Poems, No. 75.
12 Thompson, Collected Poems, pp. 22–23.
13 Hamilton, Crisis of Theory, p. 66; Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’ (1960), Poverty of Theory, pp. 1–33; Luke Spencer, ‘The Uses of Literature: Thompson as Writer, Reader and Critic’, Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds), E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013, pp. 96–117; 42–43.
14 Spencer, ‘Uses of Literature’, pp. 105, 108.
15 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography, Faber and Faber, London, 2010, pp. 181–183; Jennifer R. Doctor, ‘The Wonders of Industrial Britain, Coal Face, Night Mail and the British Documentary Film Movement’, Christa Brüstle and Guido Heldt (eds), Music as a Bridge. Musikalische Beziehungen zwischen England und Deutschland 1920–1950, Georg Olms, Hildesheim, 2005; Scott Anthony and James Mansell, The Projection of Britain. A History of the GPO Film Unit, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011.
16 In the sixth form, our history and English teachers both had names beginning with ‘R’. They were not one and the same, as p. 136 above might suggest.
17 Thompson, Collected Poems, pp. 50–51.
18 Dorothy Thompson, The Dignity of Chartism. Essays by Dorothy Thompson, Stephen Roberts (ed.), Verso, London, 2013; Spencer, ‘Uses of Literature’, pp. 26–27.
19 Brooke Emma Whitelaw, ‘Industry and the Interior Life. Industrial “Experts” and the Mental World of Workers in Twentieth Century Britain’, PhD, University of Warwick, 2009.
20 E. P. Thompson, ‘The rising cost of righteousness’, Views, 7 (1965), pp. 76–79; Carolyn Steedman, ‘A weekend with Elektra’, Literature and History, 6:1 (1997), pp. 17–42. See also Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, pp. 342–344 where the whole of the Althusserian project is challenged by the woman factory worker (invented by Thompson) who flings her copy of – what? For Marx? Reading Capital? – at the foreman, yells ‘”I’m not a bloody THING!” ’ and calls The Girls out on strike.
21 See above, p. 46.
22 Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, The Thresher’s Labour by Stephen Duck, The Woman’s Labour by Mary Collier. Two Eighteenth-Century Poems, intro. E. P. Thompson, Merlin Press, London, 1989; The Thresher’s Labour and The Woman’s Labour, Augustan Reprint Society, N. 230, Andrews Clark, Memorial Library, Los Angeles CA, 1985.
23 Thresher’s Labour, pp. x–xii.
24 Betty Rizzo, ‘The patron as poet maker. The politics of benefaction’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990), pp. 241–242.
25 Peter Cunningham, Peter Cunningham’s New Jest Book; or, Modern High Life Below Stairs, Funny Joe, London, 1785, p. 43.
26 Thresher’s Labour, intro. p. vii.
27 William Christmas, ‘From threshing Corn, he turns to thresh his brains”. Stephen Duck as Labouring Class Intellectual’, Aruna Krishnamurthy (ed.), The Working-Class Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ashgate, Farnham, 2009, pp. 25–48.
28 Christmas, ‘ “From threshing Corn” ’, pp. 38–39.
29 Thresher’s Labour, intro. p. xii–xiii.
30 Workers, writing, poetry, and threatening letters are discussed in Carolyn Steedman, ‘Threatening letters. E. E. Dodd, E. P. Thompson, and the making of “The Crime of Anonymity” ’, History Workshop Journal, 82 (2016), pp. 50–82.
31 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Chatto, London, 1973, p. 88.
32 Peggy Thompson, ‘Duck, Collier, and the ideology of verse forms’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 44:3 (2004), pp. 505–523.
33 Roy Harris, Rethinking Writing, Athlone, London, 2000, pp. 210–211.
34 The whole of ‘Powers and Names’ (Collected Poems, pp. 105–125), appeared in the London Review of Books, 8:1 (23 January 1986), pp. 9–10. I cannot find any response to it, critical or otherwise.
35 John Goode, ‘Thompson and “the Significance of Literature” ’, Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson. Critical Perspectives, Polity, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 183–203; Spencer, ‘Thompson as Writer’, p. 102.
36 Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory, pp. 227–244.
37 For an indication of the enormous literature on the technologising of the agricultural sector, N. E. Fox, ‘The spread of the threshing machine in central southern England’, Agricultural History Review, 26 (1978), pp. 26–28. Also E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, ‘The Problem of the Threshing Machine’, Captain Swing, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969, pp. 359–365.