Class and politics in the work of Henry Pelling

Abstract

established labour history on a professional footing, Henry Pelling is generally regarded as worthy but rather dull. For he did not share the more colourful far-left political affiliations of figures such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson. Indeed, when these Marxists were at the height of their influence in the late 1960s and 1970s, Pelling’s careful history of the British Communist Party was frequently dismissed as Cold War propaganda. At that time his contributions to the history of the Labour Party were commonly pigeon-holed as scholarly but narrow, for they were seen as mere political history with no obvious wider implications for the analysis of society as a whole. As Jay Winter (1983: x) put it, albeit respectfully, in the Introduction to a collection of essays in Pelling’s honour: