Vol. 15 No. 20 · 21 October 1993
pages 24-25 | 4030 words
Diary
Perry Anderson
Coming home one evening in the last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was working for New Left Review in London. After hours Edward and I would exchange notes on our day, and fence amiably about history and sociology. ‘Do you really think Weber is more important than Marc Bloch?’ he would ask me with an air of mischievous puzzlement. If we were more circumspect about politics, this was partly a question of tact – he didn’t want to lean on me too heavily, as a cub editor of the journal of which he was a founder. But there was also a trick of perception to which I was subject.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993
From Keith Flett
Perry Anderson (LRB, 21 October) surely gets to the nub of what Edward Thompson was all about when he notes of his ‘Peculiarities of the English’ that ‘what had astonished me were the corners he cut in representing the arguments he wanted to refute.’ It is interesting to note that thirty years after the split between himself and Thompson on the New Left Review, Anderson still does not seem to understand that while a finely honed academic argument might be acceptable for the lecture hall it will need to be much sharper if it is to inform working-class politics.
Keith Flett
London N17
Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
From William Lamont
Perry Anderson’s Diary (LRB, 21 October) was moving and perceptive on E.P. Thompson. On one small point of difference with Thompson, he seems to me to be half-right. He suggests a Blake/Muggletonian connection, less in ‘New Jerusalem’ common aspirations, than in a provident keep-your-head-below-the-parapet stance in the age of Jacobinism. This is a good corrective to over-romanticising Blake or the sect: I have found Muggletonians in America glorying in their non-involvement in the War of Independence! But Thompson was also half-right. There was a contrary strand within the small sect, which looked back to a radical tradition associated with Muggleton’s co-founder John Reeve, and which had its rival prophets in James Birch and Martha Collier. And even Birch’s ‘orthodox’ opponents conceded his point that 1787 was a good time for men to expect the winding up of the age of the Third Commission, precisely because ‘never was the Naturall Rights of Mankind so well asserted and granted as [it] is now.’
One small personal footnote. I hardly knew Thompson, but he was enormously generous in making available to me his Muggletonian knowledge. His own lack of condescension towards the Last Muggletonian and his family probably was instrumental in their decision to transfer their personal archive to the British Library (now open to all scholars). The family remembers with affection a tall, gangling, be-scarfed figure who descended on them, and whom they called among themselves ‘Dr Who’: an unusual tribute which one suspects he would have enjoyed.
William Lamont
University of Sussex
