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THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2015

STUART MIDDLETON
STUART MIDDLETON*
Affiliation:
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge E-mail: sam41@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 179 - 208
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am very grateful to Jon Lawrence, Stefan Collini, Peter Mandler, Duncan Kelly and the anonymous reviewers for Modern Intellectual History for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and to Barbara Taylor for some timely historiographical advice.

References

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9 Dworkin, Ireland and Jay both view Williams and Thompson as adopting broadly similar usages of the term: Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 96; Ireland, “The Appeal to Experience”, 90; Jay, Songs of Experience, 196.

10 Sewell, “How Classes Are Made”; Ireland, “The Appeal to Experience”.

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65 “Working-Class Writing”, Left Review, 2/13 (Oct. 1936), 667.

66 Hilliard, “Producers by Hand”; Hobday, Edgell Rickword, 169, 187.

67 Hobday, Edgell Rickword, 160.

68 “Writers’ International”, 38.

69 “The International Association”, Left Review, 1/11 (Aug. 1935), 462–3.

70 Quoted in Croft, Andy, Comrade Heart: A life of Randall Swingler (Manchester and New York, 2003) 78Google Scholar.

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76 Williams, “Experience and the Creative Process”.

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79 Ibid., 219.

80 Ibid., 219.

81 Ibid., 224.

82 Williams, Raymond, “A Fine Room to be Ill In”, in Wyatt, Woodrow, ed., English Story, Eighth Series (London, 1948), 63–78, at 76–7Google Scholar.

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84 Hilliard, English as a Vocation, 147–50, 153–5. Hilliard also notes the distinctions between the cultural politics of Leavis and other core Scrutiny writers, and those espoused by Williams, at 156–7.

85 Quoted in Smith, Raymond Williams, 237.

86 Williams, Raymond, “The Idea of Culture”, Essays in Criticism, 3/3 (1953), 239–66, at 243–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Ibid., 243. Whether Arnold had actually espoused such a view of culture is highly questionable: cf. Collini, Stefan, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford, 1994; first published 1988), chap. 5, esp. 85Google Scholar.

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89 Ibid., 36.

90 Ibid., chap. 3, esp. 52.

91 Ibid., 193.

92 Ibid., 193 (emphasis added).

93 Ibid., 52, 65.

94 Ibid., 313.

95 Jay, Songs of Experience, 195.

96 Smith, Raymond Williams, 399.

97 Hall, Stuart, “In the No Man's Land”, Universities and Left Review, 3 (Winter 1958), 86–7, at 86Google Scholar. Hall offered a broadly similar analysis (with the same usage of “experience”) in the inaugural editorial of New Left Review: “Introducing NLR”, New Left Review, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1960), 1–3.

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102 Thompson, E. P., Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York, 1994), 254Google Scholar.

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104 Thompson, E. P., “Commitment in Politics”, Universities and Left Review, 6 (Spring 1959), 50–55, at 54Google Scholar.

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106 Ibid., 55 (emphasis added).

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111 Thompson, “Revolution Again!”, 18; Leavis, F. R., “Under Which King, Bezonian?”, Scrutiny, 1/3 (Dec. 1932), 206, 210Google Scholar. The variance in spelling reflects the respective usages of Thompson and Leavis.

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113 Ibid., 24 (emphasis in original).

114 Marx, Karl, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon”, in Karl Marx–Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (London, 1976), 105–212, at 211Google Scholar.

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116 Ibid., 31.

117 Ibid., 27.

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119 Ibid., 31.

120 Ibid., 33 (emphasis in original).

121 Cf. Swingler's usage in Poetry and the People, above at n. 70. Entrants to one of the later writing competitions had similarly been informed, “Writing is the essence of experience; the product, not the raw material”—“Competition: ‘What Life Means to Me’”.

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123 Ibid., 9.

124 Scott, Joan W., “Women in The Making of the English Working Class”, in Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 68–90Google Scholar.

125 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9.

126 The orthodoxy of Thompson's Marxism in this respect is also noted by Scott, “Women in The Making”, 69–70.

127 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 12.

128 Ibid., 212.

129 Ibid., 229.

130 Ibid., 271.

131 See, e.g., ibid. 30, 116, 199, 319, 416.

132 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 57–63; Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, chap. 4, esp. 150.

133 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 214, 249, 213.

134 Ibid., 199.

135 Ibid., 31, 90.

136 See, e.g., ibid. 59, 78, 94, 102, 181, 473, 605.

137 E.g. ibid., 59, 78.

138 Ibid., 469, 451.

139 Ibid., 603.

140 Ibid., 604, 605.

141 Ibid., 605–6 (emphasis added).

142 Ibid., 719, 727, 732.

143 Ibid., 710, 740.

144 Ibid., 737; O’Malley, Raymond, “Folk-Songs in the English Room”, Use of English, 4/3 (1953), 169–73, at 169Google Scholar. See also Holbrook, David, English for Maturity: English in the Secondary School (Cambridge, 1961), chap. 6Google Scholar.

145 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 733.

146 Ibid., 31.

147 Ibid., 746. See also 759: “When Cobbett considered the position of the artisan or the cotton-spinner, he extrapolated from the experience of the small masters who were being forced down into the working class.”

148 Ibid., 769.

149 Ibid., 778.

150 Thompson, E. P., “The Peculiarities of the English”, in Miliband, Ralph and Saville, John, eds., The Socialist Register 1965 (London, 1965), 311–62, at 312–13, 333, 359Google Scholar.

151 Williams, Politics and Letters, 373.

152 Williams, Raymond, ed., May Day Manifesto 1968 (Harmondsworth, 1968), 28–9Google Scholar.

153 Ibid., 165–6, 182–3.

154 Ibid., 158.

155 University of Swansea, Papers of Raymond Williams, WWE/2/1/16/356 (emphasis in original). This letter is dated only “29 May”, but Thompson's references to a copy of New Left Review, 67 (May–June 1971), which had been left in his cottage in Wales, and to the absence of a dialogue with the younger New Left Review group, indicate a date during the early 1970s.

156 Ibid.

157 Thompson, “Poverty of Theory”, esp. 197–201.

158 E. P. Thompson, “The Politics of Theory”.

159 Jay, Songs of Experience, 190–91. The influence of Oakeshott is suggested by a somewhat post hoc reference by Thompson in The Poverty of Theory, but there is little positive evidence for it in the work of either thinker.

160 Williams, Culture and Society, 317 and passim.

161 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9 (emphasis added).

162 Müller, Jan-Werner, “On Conceptual History”, in McMahon, Darrin M. and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York, 2014), 74–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and see Middleton, “‘Affluence’ and the Left”, 138.

163 Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience”, American Historical Review, 92/4 (1987), 879–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

164 Ibid., 907.

165 Jones, Ben, The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester, 2012), chap. 1, esp. 4–5Google Scholar; cf. the more uncomplicated usage of the category in Todd, Selina, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014)Google Scholar.