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“Postscript: 1976”: E. P. Thompson and the River of Fire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

Kent Puckett
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Extract

This new section of Victorian Literature and Culture focuses on apparently minor works of criticism, works that have fallen out of view but that might deserve another look. I want to talk about an almost aggressively minor instance of very Victorian scholarship, minor not only because it isn't often read but also because minorness is built into its very design: E. P. Thompson's “Postscript: 1976,” a longish essay that followed the second and revised edition of his 1955 biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. When seen in the reciprocal contexts of Thompson's career and the story of the British left (when, in other words, theory is seen not as opposed to but rather as a part of history), the apparently minor and belated qualities of Thompson's postscript emerge as a source of critical and even utopian promise. I want to argue that Thompson's lifelong engagement with the life of William Morris and with Morris's late conversion to socialism led him to a powerful and counterintuitive account of the lived threshold (what he and Morris call the “river of fire”) as essential to the methods of history and historical materialism.

Type
Defamiliarizations
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , Winter 2019 , pp. 813 - 834
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Many thanks to Rachel Ablow, Dan Blanton, Eric Bulson, Amanda Goldstein, Danny Hack, Daniel Simon, and Kara Wittman for their help with this essay.

References

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