"}\u201cA central feature, covering a fifty-year period, in the making of the English working class was precisely a mass resistance to proletarianization. \u201cWhen they knew that this cause was lost,\u201d notes Thompson, \u201cyet they reached out again, in the thirties and forties [of the nineteenth century], and sought to achieve new and only imagined forms of social control.\u201d
Thompson concludes his exceptional survey of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England as comfortably at home with paradox and contradiction as he is at its beginning. The years of capitalist industrialization in Britain were characterized first by tragedy, \u201cnot a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which the Romantics and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers.\u201d\u201d