New York Times Book Review July 1, 2001, Sunday

Rewriting History By David A. Bell

THE ESSENTIAL E. P. THOMPSON
Edited by Dorothy Thompson.
498 pp. New York: The New Press. Cloth, $45. Paper, $21.95.

For one of Britain's greatest modern historians, Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-93) cut an unusual figure. He never held a distinguished chair at Oxford or Cambridge, and indeed spent much of his career entirely outside the university system. His historical work sometimes trailed a distant second to his campaigns for radical political causes. He did not receive a lofty title from a grateful sovereign, and the prospect of his entering the House of Lords would undoubtedly have horrified him and most members of that body in equal measure. Although he was an often eloquent writer, he did not have the true English mandarin's grand, imperious prose style.

What he did have was an incomparable talent for ''rescuing'' ordinary men and women, as he put it in his most famous phrase, ''from the enormous condescension of posterity.'' In his most significant works, he offered a brilliantly colored vision of how 18th- and early-19th-century common people were affected by, reacted to and ultimately organized themselves against modern conceptions of property, and the rise of industrial capitalism. He presented this history not as the inevitable working out of vast and impersonal forces, but as an epic human conflict in which his own sympathies were fully invested, and fully visible. This passionate engagement, combined with deep-slicing wit and a penchant for speaking plainly (''This is to simplify. But simple points must be made''), gave his work an influence unsurpassed among 20th-century English-speaking historians, and made the man himself something of a cult figure.

''The Essential E. P. Thompson,'' a collection of Thompson's writings compiled by his widow, Dorothy, ranges widely over his career. It includes, of course, key chapters from his masterpiece, ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (1963), and from his path-breaking studies of 18th-century crowds and criminal law. It also has selections from early work on the Romantic craftsman, poet and Socialist William Morris, from Thompson's uncharacteristically turgid attack on structural Marxism (''The Poverty of Theory'') and from an extended essay on his missionary father's relationship with the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. It does not, however, provide examples of his nonhistorical work, which includes poetry, a major study of William Blake and voluminous political writings.

These omissions are something of a pity, for they would have helped place Thompson more clearly in his own historical context. Commentary from Dorothy Thompson is also sorely missed, for the same reason. Some of the writing collected here strikes a personal tone, and reflections in the same vein from Thompson's partner would have made the selections more accessible to those unfamiliar with him -- the volume's presumed target audience.

A sense of Thompson's own history is all the more necessary because prevailing interpretations of the British past have shifted with disorienting speed in the past 20 years or so. When Thompson began his work in the late 1940's, in a Britain marked by profound social and political antagonisms, Whig historians and Marxists alike tended to portray British history as a story of unending conflict. For the Historians' Group of the English Communist Party, which included Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, the central episodes were the 17th-century civil war (they called it the ''English Revolution'') and the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The one supposedly heralded the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the other the rise of the working class, and both pointed the way to the longed-for triumph of socialism.

This perspective infused Thompson's early work on Morris, and he later regretted that he had allowed ''some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text.'' These moralisms and pieties did not survive the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, and by the time he wrote ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (which began as the first chapter of a history of the English labor movement, but swelled to 848 pages), he had broken both with the Communist Party and with orthodox Marxism. But his sense of history as struggle had only intensified, for he had now come to his notion of a working class that had actively and heroically ''made itself,'' and that moreover had come ''within an ace'' of starting a proto-socialist revolution in the early 1830's. The failure of that revolution, supposedly in the face of concerted repression, gave the book a tragic tinge that only intensified its political appeal.

A vision of British history as continuous conflict remained dominant through the 1970's, in large part thanks to ''The Making of the English Working Class.'' But today, in Tony Blair's Britain, the past looks very different. Leading British historians like John Brewer and Linda Colley write not about early class struggles, but about the early vigor and dynamism of the British state and British culture, and about the people's patriotic support for the government against France. Colley presented her book ''Britons,'' which focuses on the same historical period covered by ''The Making of the English Working Class,'' as ''an attempt to rescue . . . the seeming conformists from the condescension of posterity,'' leaving no doubt which condescending nonconformist historian she had in mind. To the extent that the new prevailing interpretations highlight conflict, it is no longer class conflict, but rather ethnic conflict between the constituent nations of Britain (the English Civil War now sometimes goes by the title of ''the War of the Three Kingdoms''), and religious conflict. The most important period in the story now appears to be less the age of Cromwell or the Industrial Revolution than the 18th century, once derided for its supposed complacency and corruption, but now heralded as the moment when Britain consolidated itself and rose to world dominance.

In this new climate, it sometimes seems as if E. P. Thompson has altogether disappeared under a scrum of his critics. It is pointed out acerbically that the 18th-century legal system was less draconian and repressive in practice than he thought. It is argued that religious dissent, rather than emerging class consciousness, guided radical politics before 1832. From among Thompson's own professional and political allies come calls to emphasize race and gender as well as class. It is even charged that Thompson deliberately played down the racism, sexism and anti-Semitism of his radical heroes. And there are those who deconstruct the concept of class altogether, replacing Thompson's saga of working-class heroism with an impersonal tracking of shifts in the language of novels, pamphlets, plays and newspapers.

In truth, there is something to be said for many of these criticisms. It is hard to imagine how the society described in ''The Making of the English Working Class,'' agonizingly divided between repressive patricians and struggling plebeians, could have marshaled the herculean resources necessary to defeat Napoleonic France, let alone laid the foundations of a worldwide empire. The imaginative sympathy this missionary's son usually showed for his subjects tended to evaporate when it came to religion (from ''The Making of the English Working Class'': ''Calvinism was not the same thing as Methodism, although it is difficult to say which, in the early 19th century, was worse''). Although Thompson could display a remarkable feminist sensibility, as for instance in the moving defense of Mary Wollstonecraft included here, his admiration for the radical William Cobbett was undiminished by Cobbett's vicious anti-Semitism and his talk of ''fat and greasy Negroes.'' Thompson's close attention to language and ritual anticipated much of the current ''new cultural history,'' but his notions of working-class consciousness were simplified and exaggerated, and called out for sharper analysis.

Yet little of this matters, in the end. Thompson's interpretations were contestable, but his honesty and research were not. Nor did his occasional blindness to past prejudice ever come close to sliding over into active prejudice. Besides, what defines great historians is not the way their particular interpretations speak to contemporary standards and preoccupations, but the power of their overall vision of the past. Thompson's vision was undeniably, brilliantly powerful, even if one disagrees with the politics that inspired it. His conclusions still ring with the force of great homilies. And in the age of Blair, he reminds us that Britain was not always a place of muddled, polite, ''third way'' consensus, but a society that, whatever its other features, was one of appalling inequality, widespread injustice and long, bitter struggles to gain rights and comforts now taken almost entirely for granted.