Page 95 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

84 Chapter Two

Two works of literature—Bunyan’s epic, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and
Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–92)—were foundational to the English
working class movement. The former provided English youth with their “first
adventure story,” depicting a quest by the humble for a future far better than
the present and a fate for the idle rich of eternal torment. The latter provided
both “a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism” and “a new framework” for
radicalism which condemned monarchical and hereditary principles. 139
Thompson’s seamless interweaving of media, culture, and political economy
is bountifully illustrated by his depictions of the treatment accorded The
Rights of Man, its author, and its readers. By the 1790s, he noted, the gentry
were so distraught at the sight of miners, potters, and cutlers reading The
Rights of Man, 140 that Paine had been driven into exile and his book banned
as seditious libel. 141 “I am contending for the rights of the living,” Paine had
written, claiming also that each generation ought not be bound by a musty
Constitution but rather should define anew its rights and its form of govern-
ment: “Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. . . . It re-
quires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a King, requires only
the animal figure of a man—a sort of breathing automaton.” 142
Thompson summarized: “Wherever Jacobin ideas persisted, and wherever
hidden copies of Rights of Man were cherished, men were no longer disposed
to wait upon the example of a Wilkes or a Wyvill before they commenced a
democratic agitation.” 143
Thompson provided a detailed analysis of the role of literacy in forming
working class consciousness. “The articulate consciousness of the self-taught
was above all a political consciousness,” 144 he declared. Laborers, shopkeep-
ers and clerks alike taught themselves individually or in groups to read and
write, and often the texts they used were by the radicals of the period. Work-
ingmen thereby came to see their own situation as part of a broader political
picture—“their own lives as part of a general history of conflict between the
loosely defined ‘industrious classes’ on the one hand, and the unreformed
House of Commons on the other.” 145
Initially, though, neither class consciousness nor the political culture were
entirely dependent on universal literacy: “The ballad-singers and ‘patterers,’”
for example, “had a thriving occupation, with their pavement farces and
street-corner parodies.” 146 As well, illiterate workers would have political pe-
riodicals read aloud to them by their workmates. Sometimes, Thompson
noted, abstract political principles were misconstrued, albeit in ways con-
forming to the prevailing principal of solidarity: “A ‘Provisional Govern-
ment’ [was thought to mean] a more plentiful supply of ‘provisions;’ while,
in one account . . . ‘universal Suffrage is understood . . . to mean universal
suffering. . . . If one member suffers, all must suffer.’” 147