Programme Details

Night Waves: Landmarks celebrates classic works of art, literature and performance, described by practitioners rather than by critics. In today's programme Susan Hitch talks to the historians Joanna Bourke and Sander L. Gilman about a book which, they claim, completely changed the way we write, use and remember history.

E.P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class in Yorkshire in 1963. In it he describes the lives of working people between 1780 and 1832 as a clearly defined class emerged for the first time with collective class interests to protect. Thompson was a notable 'new left' historian and was also well known for his campaigning with CND. He sought to "rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver and the utopian artisan from the enormous condescension of history". He put the lives of working class people on the page for perhaps the first time and set about describing the turbulent moral and economic climate of the times.

In tonight Night Waves: Landmarks, Susan Hitch asks if The Making of the English Working Class still resonates after over forty years and explores its meaning for historians today, both home and abroad.

Night Waves: Landmarks, at 9.30pm, here on BBC Radio 3.


Presenter: Susan Hitch
Producer: Anthony Denselow