HISTORIOGRAPHY LECTURE 9 Edward Thompson Commitment Culture Edward

HISTORIOGRAPHY LECTURE 9 Edward Thompson: Commitment & Culture

Edward Palmer Thompson (1924 -1993)

1989 Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924– 1993) historian, writer, and political activist by John Rule, ‘Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924– 1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2005 [http: //www. oxforddnb. com/view/article/40259, accessed 6 Nov 2009]

Who’s Who A shilling life will give you all the facts: How Father beat him, how he ran away, What were the struggles of his youth, what acts Made him the greatest figure of his day: Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night, Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea: Some of the last researchers even write Love made him weep his pints like you and me … (1933 -38) W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927 -1957, Faber & Faber, 1966.

View over Halifax in the 1960 s. www. absolutely-nothing. co. uk/. . . /959. jpg

George Walker, The Costumes of Yorkshire, 1814.

William Blake, `Behemoth and Leviathan’ (Plate 15) Illustrations of 'The Book of Job' 1823 -26 ` … There is never the least sign of submission to “Satan’s Kingdom”. Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast’.

E. P. Thompson, 1924 -1993 The great bustard has winged off, removing as he went one of the prime attractions of these shores, and one of The few remaining reasons for still proclaiming intellectual allegiance to them. Thompson liked to present himself as an earth-bound English creature incapable of much soaring. But he had enough of the lark in him to have died singing, as Blake is said to have done; and who knows but that he did in his own fashion, for he was of that spirit …. Kate Soper, Radical Philosophy, Spring 1994, `Obituaries and Profiles’. http: //www. radicalphilosophy. com/default. asp? channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9849