‘Reflections on Jacoby and all that’

http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Thompson_Reflections-on-Jacoby_Annotated.pdf

'Thompson also offers some interesting reflections on the relationship between his writings and the environment in which they were produced. Although his first two books were conceived not as academic products but as interventions in adult education, the recognition that The Making of the English Working Class received transformed him into ‘a target for academic criticism’. This, in turn, affected the way Thompson approached his subsequent work: it lost, he says, the impetus that came from the dialogue with adult students and made him a less spontaneous, much more ‘conscious’ (and thus, slower) writer. Different audiences helped produce different types of historical works. Bryan Palmer and Scott Hamilton have noticed that, in his later work, Thompson was much more ‘cautious’ on the use of sources and more ‘circumspect’ in his scholarship. For Hamilton, ‘the early Thompson railed against intellectual conformity; the later model worries about incommensurability’. According to Palmer, Thompson ‘felt insecure’ about his knowledge of eighteenth-century history and decided not to teach a graduate seminar on ‘Customs in Common’ at Queen’s University in 1988 (7). Thompson was the first in recognizing that shift, as his comments in this paper confirm.'


http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/reflections-on-jacoby-and-all-that-an-unpublished-essay-by-e-p-thompson/