added in parallel to Vanky's reply above!

Well that's driven me back to read the 1976 postscript - it's a good read - where the following apologia looks relevant

' ...' it is true that in 1955 I allowed some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text. I had then a somewhat reverent notion of Marxism as a received orthodoxy... The book was published at the height of the Cold War. Intellectual McCarthyism was not confined to the US...
The climate can be illustrated by the welcome afforded my book in the non-Socialist press. This welcome was mainly silence, broken by the review in TLS headed 'Morris & Marxism''

So, yes the _1955_ edition was coolly received, in EPT's opinion largely because of his unfashionable Marxist viewpoint. But in '76, (when The Making of the English Working Class was in its 5th Penguin reprint), things had moved on...   11:44, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)