The Making of the English Working Class

Chapter 11 explains why Methodism became the preferred religion of both industrial capitalists and the working class. The chapter is divided into two subsections: “Moral Machinery” and “The Chiliasm of Despair.”

“Moral Machinery” shows why Methodism appealed to industrial capitalists. Since the late 1790s, Methodism had abandoned revolutionary Jacobinism and embraced the doctrine of submission to established order. More importantly, Methodism could terrorize the working man’s psyche, combating any rebellion against the Industrial Revolution’s rigid work-discipline. Dr. Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) argued that religion is a solution to worker resistance. Methodism in particular served the industrial capitalists’ purpose; unlike older forms of Calvinism, Methodism did not discriminate between the few “elect” saints and the damned multitude of sinners. Instead, Methodism taught that God’s saving grace could be withdrawn, so Methodists lived in perpetual fear of backsliding into damnation. Methodism also taught that poverty made moral backsliding less likely, for the poor were tempted less often than were the affluent. Furthermore, Methodism exalted labor as a sign of God’s favor. Above all, Methodism’s inexhaustible catalog of sins repressed every emotional impulse, in particular those related to human sexuality. In short, Methodism sanctified labor, made war on joy, and fitted its members for industrial submission.

“The Chiliasm of Despair” offers three possible reasons for Methodism’s appeal to the working class. The first was pure indoctrination, including the “psychological atrocities committed upon children” (377) in Methodist Sunday schools. The second was the Methodist sense of community. Notwithstanding its doctrinal assault on the human psyche, Methodism’s democratic approach to church membership meant that church doors were open to all. Moreover, in all religious denominations, individual members often privately discard elements of their faith that they find least useful or truthful, so in the early-19th century it was possible for decent people to mitigate the psychological cruelties of industrial indoctrination. The third reason is a theory Thompson calls the “psychic consequences of the counter-revolution” (375). In short, beginning in the 1790s, counter-revolutionary forces stifled Jacobinism with such ruthlessness and from so many directions that the immense revolutionary energy of those years had little outlet for its release. Many working people found one outlet in the enthusiasm of Methodist revivals, or even in the apocalyptic prophecies of Joanna Southcott. Intense Methodist recruitment often corresponded to moments of heightened political anxiety, which suggests not a revivalist era but a “revivalist pulsation” that reveals “an oscillation between periods of hope and periods of despair and spiritual anguish” (388). 

Chapter 12 explores the idea and function of community in the new industrial context. The chapter features four subsections: “Leisure and Personal Relations,” “The Rituals of Mutuality,” “The Irish,” and “Myriads of Eternity.”

The first three subsections explore working-class response to discipline and order the Industrial Revolution demanded. Methodism played a leading role in the inculcation of these values (see Chapter 11), but it was far from the only force at work. Civil authorities, for instance, paid close attention to county fairs, which the ruling class viewed with a mixture of snobbery and fear of sedition. The Industrial Revolution destroyed leisure and re-shaped personal relations, as “the family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell” (416). Friendly societies reflected working-class consciousness by embracing self-discipline while perpetuating communitarian ideals. Meanwhile, in the decades following the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived in English industrial towns. The mix of Irish Catholicism and English Methodism did not make for easy assimilation. Irish nationalism and English Radicalism, however, proved to be a natural alliance that strengthened working-class consciousness.

The chapter’s fourth (and briefest) subsection, “Myriads of Eternity,” offers three important conclusions to Part 2. First, scholars must not be content with empirical data. They must study the Industrial Revolution through the eyes of the people who experienced it. Only then can scholars form judgments about the phenomenon as a whole. With this in mind, the Industrial Revolution can be correctly seen as a cataclysmic change in the lives of working people. Second, the Industrial Revolution’s ideology of discipline and order belonged to the ruling class. In the counter-revolutionary panic of the early 19th century, the ruling class imposed that ideology with such ruthlessness that it amounted to a wholesale reshaping of human nature. Finally, it is “work itself” that “casts the blackest shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution” (446).