ABSTRACT
A spectre haunts the analysis of the working class: the spectre of its ‘making’ under the uncompromising gaze of E.P. Thompson, whose magisterial work The Making o f the English Working Class (1968) has had such an enormous impact. Its reception has been limited not only to Britain. One notes, for instance the evocation of this work in contemporary US (Gutman, 1976) and Australian (Connell and Irving, 1980) accounts of class formation. To write of a spectre in this way is to identify the influence of Thompson as in some way baneful. At one level, as we shall argue, such an interpretation is singularly apposite. This level would be that at which class analysis has been subsumed by the enormous undertaking of providing accounts of national class formation, in which the categorical imperative has been yielded to the rich panorama of densely textured narrative peopled with fragments of the relived experiences of men and women of the times.
