Dorothy Thompson Was One of Britain’s Great Socialist Historians
Dorothy Thompson’s work on Chartism secured her reputation as one of the finest Marxist historians Britain has produced. She displayed a particular sensitivity to gender issues and encouraged creative dialogue between Marxist and feminist currents.
Illustration of the Newport Rising on November 4, 1839. Chartists and sympathizers marched on the town of Newport (Monmouthshire, Wales) to liberate fellow Chartists who had been taken prisoner in the Westgate Hotel. From British Rebels and Reformers, published by William Collins of London, 1942, p. 39 (Culture Club / Bridgeman via Getty Images)
Dorothy Thompson, née Towers (1923–2011), known to her friends as Dotty, was a highly distinctive person and historian. She was a prominent member of the Communist Party Historians Group in Britain, which included such renowned figures as Christopher Hill, John Saville, and Eric Hobsbawm.
After leaving the Communist Party in response to the invasion of Hungary in 1956, she was active in Britain’s New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Teaching history for many years at the University of Birmingham, she established a reputation as the leading historian of the nineteenth-century Chartist movement, publishing a series of books and essays on the subject.
This brief appreciation assesses Dorothy Thompson’s contribution to what can be termed the “Thompsonian project.” Of course, no such schema ever existed in any official sense. Yet Dorothy shared for most of her adult life a great emotional, physical, and intellectual partnership with her fellow historian Edward Thompson (1924–1993).
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