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