I

Who is social criticism addressed to? What is it attempting to achieve? How should we understand and assess performances in this genre? These deceptively simple questions raise more issues than can be dealt with in a single essay, but they provide the framework for the sub-set of issues to be focused on here, with that reference to ‘performance’ providing the leitmotif. Social critics often choose to present themselves as writing in a self-consciously dissident voice, claiming an identity as a lonely ‘outsider’ as a way of both emphasizing and validating their dissidence; however, this can never be a straightforward identity. The very act of criticism assumes an implied community of the potentially like-minded, and every articulation of dissent is at the same time an attempt to assert a rival form of authority. Straining for effect, we might say that inside every ‘outsider’ is an insider trying to get out, though that way of putting it risks hardening the categories rather than dissolving them.

This trope has been particularly marked in twentieth-century political writing, perhaps because there has been a stronger emphasis than in earlier periods on the systemic nature of the social and economic forces that sustain conformity. The more powerful the orthodoxy is represented as being, the harder the task of the critic can be made to seem. This can be accentuated to the point where it can even become difficult to imagine there being any readers who could be brought to recognize, let alone agree with, the heterodox views of the critic. This familiar dynamic produces what I am calling ‘the rhetoric of dissidence’ in which the power of the prevailing orthodoxy is exaggerated while, simultaneously, the critic is exempted from its grip. There is always a hint of David and Goliath about the imagined confrontation, where, as a result, measured argument may not be the preferred weapon; instead, the literary equivalents of a slingshot tend to recommend themselves, and this is where performance becomes central.

But the standard forms of scholarly reconstruction tend to ignore the varied literary expressions of this dynamic, concentrating instead on identifying and assessing the propositional content of the writing. An underlying assumption of such scholarly practice is that a piece of political writing consists of a set of closely argued propositions that are intended to compel assent. In practice, there is usually some unsteadiness about who, exactly, is to be persuaded: is it the author’s opponents (assuming, for the moment, that this is a clear-cut category), or is it those who already largely agree (in which case ‘persuasion’ hardly seems the right description), or is it – and I think this is tacitly assumed by the most ardent propositionalists – an imagined neutral observer, able to assess the cogency of an argument sub specie aeternitatis? But, whatever view is taken of that matter, in practice the assumption seems to be that elements in the writing that do not contribute to the propositional case are at best decorative, at worst distracting.

In this essay, it is precisely those elements that I shall focus on. If we are to take the sub-title of this volume seriously – ‘genre and cultures of publishing’ – we need to be able to do justice to the literary tactics that characterize the more expressive or even playful genres, such as polemics, philippics, jeremiads, satires, fictions, parodies, and so on. I am not here intending either to validate or to dismiss the dissident voice, though a certain sympathy with it on my part will no doubt be evident; rather, I want to explore some of the literary tactics by which the implicit logic of that position is negotiated, and, since this is not a timeless, unchanging structure, I also want to ask about the relations between the implied readers and the actual readerships such critics did reach in particular cases, even with writings that seemed to announce that no such readership now existed.

II

We may start with the trope of loneliness. In October 1945, George Orwell reviewed the book which issued from a P. E. N. Club gathering held in August 1944. That gathering had been intended to mark and reflect upon the tercentenary of Milton’s Aeropagitica and its celebrated defence of freedom of expression. Orwell was dismayed at what he saw as the mealy-mouthed temporizing of the contributors who did not, he alleged, come out and say clearly that the freedom Milton was defending was what he termed ‘the freedom to criticize and oppose’. ‘A discussion of this kind’, Orwell continued,

These sentences paint an encompassingly black picture, though there are various points that might now give us pause. There is, to begin with, a question of whether discussion of freedom of expression actually had been so much more lively c.1905; Orwell’s more generalized nostalgia may be at work here. Then there is the suggestion that such debate might still be carried on ‘in some obscure periodical by people who have not much to lose’. The constraints in the mainstream public sphere, this suggests, are simply too great: the advantage of marginality, it implies, is that obscurity itself is a way of escaping such constraints. But the ‘general drift’ and the ‘pressure’ of the factors Orwell identifies have ‘killed’ – not ‘restrained’ or ‘obstructed’, but ‘killed’ – the possibility of a proper discussion anywhere else. And of course the deck is stacked from the start: the phrase about becoming ‘a minor official’ encodes a curl of the lip, while ‘the pressure of totalitarian propaganda’ is an unapologetically tendentious rendering of what might, less tendentiously, be referred to as ‘arguments supportive of Communism’ or ‘sentiments sympathetic to Soviet Russia’. Orwell is famous for calling a spade a spade, but ‘propaganda’ is used in this passage to close down discussion: propaganda is always something put about by others, the deliberate distortion of truth to advance the interests of one side in a conflict. One can almost conjugate the implied positions: ‘my arguments are rational, your views are misguided, his or her lies are propaganda’.

Orwell then went on:

A question, even a rhetorical question, beginning ‘how many?’ might seem to be asking for a quantitative answer, but the implication here is that such people are not to be found. And this, the passage insists, is not surprising: that list of major cultural institutions shows where power lies, and no one dares cross them all, just as no one could criticize the glorious Soviet ally at the moment when its appalling wartime sacrifices seemed about to lead to the defeat of Hitler.

Or, rather, perhaps there was one candidate. Orwell certainly made his living out of writing, but he did not hesitate, here or elsewhere, to criticize those great cultural powerhouses. And there was at least one person who had had the requisite ‘courage’, since it was precisely in the ‘late summer’ of 1944 that Orwell finally managed to secure a publisher for Animal Farm, which other publishers had turned down because of what was seen as its ‘genuine criticism of Soviet Russia’. So perhaps adverse circumstances had not entirely ‘killed’ the possibility of the kind of discussion Orwell calls for, and it was not only in an ‘obscure periodical’ that this case could be mounted. This review itself appeared in Tribune, a weekly which by then was identified as an influential organ of the left within the Labour Party: it scarcely counted as ‘obscure’. Orwell’s more famous discussion of the same topic, in his essay ‘The Prevention of literature’, appeared in Polemic, a journal whose contributors included several of the leading non-Marxist progressive figures of the day.Footnote ² When Animal Farm finally came out in August 1945, it sold over 14,000 copies in the first three months in the UK; it became a Book-of-the-Month club choice in the US in the following year, and sales in both countries over the next decade topped ten million copies.Footnote ³

One of the paradoxes of the work of social critics who portray themselves as doing battle with an overwhelmingly powerful orthodoxy is that they, at the same time, write as though the ‘truths’ they are putting forward are self-evident. Orwell characteristically goes in for a lot of adverbial bullying of this kind, saying that a particular state of affairs is ‘obviously’ or ‘plainly’ the case. So the truths the critic is pointing to are there for all to see – so ‘plainly’ there that it is hard to understand how anyone can miss them – yet at the same time the dominant orthodoxy is so encompassing that no one does see them. As I mentioned, the writings of all social critics have, logically, to have some implied addressee, even if, as in the extreme case of someone like Adorno, that writing can at times seem more like a message put in a bottle and thrown overboard in the hope of its being washed up on a more hospitable shore at some point in the future. The activity of criticism presumes the possibility of recognition on the part of the implied addressees, but it is hard to specify in concrete terms who such addressees might be in the present, while, by contrast, the forces of error can be given specific sociological embodiment, as in Orwell’s enumeration of actual cultural bodies that exercise their malign power.

It may be – all generalizations about reading are stabs in the dark – but it may be that polemical writing tends to be read far more by those who broadly agree with it than by those who don’t. For that, as well as other reasons, one of its chief functions can be understood less as persuasion than as, say, raising morale, stating in a memorable and forceful way positions its readers want to see so stated, reminding them of the appeal of ideas that they already half-understand or are disposed to accept. Crude attempts to measure ‘effectiveness’ by counting how many minds were changed by a piece of writing can never do justice to this feature of social criticism. The very choice of a newspaper or periodical to read in the first place will often indicate a broad sympathy with that publication’s characteristic approach. The age of the internet and social media has only intensified this effect, through various forms of algorithmic as well as human preselection of items to view.

For these reasons, one tends to find in the writings of social critics a kind of double address: an explicit address to a situation that is so bleak or hostile that it seems as though a lone voice can have little hope of making a difference, and an implicit address to those capable of recognizing the need for such criticism and of responding to the critic’s articulation of that need. And this double address, I want to suggest, often manifests itself in certain stylistic features that go beyond mere propositional statement – especially in irony, humour, deliberate exaggeration, ritualized repetition, and a tone of knowingness that is the prose equivalent of a wink. All of this means, in my view, that intellectual historians and literary critics have something to learn from each other in dealing with such material, but rather than arguing that case in general terms, I want at this point to move on to look at two case-studies in more detail.Footnote ⁴ Orwell is a useful, but perhaps rather too obvious, starting-point, and so in the rest of this essay I shall focus more closely on writings by two figures who, though well known for their achievements in other genres, are not often thought of in this connection – Virginia Woolf and E. P. Thompson.

III

Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, published in 1938, is usually discussed as an important feminist and pacifist statement, but here I shall focus not on its place in those traditions of radical thought, but, rather, on the peculiar character of its literary tactics. It is a book which, for all Woolf’s immense cultural standing nowadays, has long puzzled or divided readers. Perhaps the obvious starting-point when considering the book in these terms is to note that it is cast in the form of a letter.Footnote ⁵ Ostensibly, it is a reply to an enquiry from a successful male barrister about what can be done to prevent war, and at various points in her prose the author apostrophizes the designated addressee in the second person singular, imagining how ‘you, Sir’, will respond, and so on. This device immediately gives Woolf some leeway in personalizing her case, allowing her to attribute views and attitudes to the barrister that are the outcome of his privileged, male, upper-middle-class education and background. The case is immediately pitched at someone who belongs to the same social class as the author – those who, as she puts it, ‘expect maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner’Footnote ⁶ – but from whom she is separated by the gulf of gender.

This is a variant on the ‘open letter’ format, addressed in this case to a fictive (or at least unspecified) rather than an actual recipient, and this device puts the reader in a position not dissimilar to that of the theatre audience in relation to an actor’s soliloquy. We are, as it were, eavesdropping on something not immediately addressed to us, though, like the soliloquy, it surely is ultimately addressed to us. When it suits Woolf, she can suggest that her barrister represents established society in its entirety, with all its paraphernalia of wealth, education, and hierarchy, while at other times she can suggest that the limitations of his experience and attitudes can be satirized for the benefit of readers who are outside, or at least are capable of stepping outside, this charmed circle, principally because of their gender. This allows for a variety of artfully collusive moves. For example, she introduces the fact that, even as late as 1937, students at the women’s colleges in Cambridge were not full members of the university by saying ‘you will scarcely believe it, Sir, but once more it is the voice of fact that is speaking, not of fiction’ (115), immediately insinuating the judgement that this exclusion was so grotesque that even a leading representative of male privilege might be unaware of it or think the claim so fantastic that it must be invented. This apostrophe is formally addressed to the barrister, but in reality it is recruiting the knowing reader.

The device of the direct epistolary address is kept up throughout the 200 pages of the book, enabling Woolf to maintain a personal, even lightly self-referential tone. She describes the great public schools and ancient universities as being devoted to the education of ‘our brothers’ – ‘our’ here hovering unsteadily over the register of the camped-up first-person singular and a genuinely extensive first-person plural, the brothers of (less well) educated women. Throughout, her prose exhibits the familiar double movement of a speech that is ostensibly addressed to an interlocutor but is, in fact, designed for the delight of the audience (a type of performance with which we are familiar from, say, scenes of the hostile cross-examination of a witness in a jury trial). In writing such as this, the very fact of adopting a stylish, amusing form is a way of rising above one’s disadvantage, as if to say: ‘Look! The case can be made in a witty ironic way which itself is an argument against our inferiority.’ The whole performance is collusive, though it’s not easy to identify quite who is being colluded with, a point I shall come back to.

One of the obvious indications that we are dealing with a piece of rhetoric in the classical sense is the amount of deliberate, ritualistic repetition in the text when dealing with objects of her scorn or mockery. It’s a familiar form of belittlement: such repetition can bring about an estranging effect, making the familiar seem absurd. For example, she hammers home her point about male attachment to outward expressions of hierarchy in this way, observing of the gradations of costume and decoration: ‘It says, “This man is a clever man – he is a Master of Arts; this man is a very clever man – he is Doctor of Letters; this man is a most clever man – he is a member of the Order of Merit”’, and so on. (105) Or consider the incantatory effect of the following passage about the difficulties women have had in being allowed to enter the professions: ‘They were great fighters, it seems, the professional men in the age of Queen Victoria. There was the battle of Westminster. There was the battle of the universities. There was the battle of Whitehall. There was the battle of Harley Street. There was the battle of the Royal Academy.’ (145) (It’s hard not to put on a mock-Churchillian voice in reading this.) The sympathetic reader may find this an effective device for bringing home the scale and reach of male resistance to women’s participation in the professions, but, of course, the danger is that the uncommitted reader may find such repetition and mock-heroic exaggeration simply laboured and tiresome.

The question of a potential readership and how to reach it is raised obliquely by the passage in which she responds to an imagined female interlocutor who asks what, in the world as it is, ‘some daughter of an educated man who has enough to live upon’ can do to further intellectual liberty and thus help to prevent war. Woolf affects to agree about the implied difficulties, but goes on:

Woolf then gives her imagined interlocutor a voice:

This is a particularly important passage in the book, not least for its reflexive character: should we see this as a description of what Woolf is doing? There is an obvious connection in the reference to ‘the private printing press’ which I’ll come back to – Three Guineas was, after all, published by, as the title pages of the firm’s early books said, ‘Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press’. But the passage suggests heroically defiant ways of disseminating one’s views, though it has to be said that Woolf’s forms of public expression of her own views bore little resemblance to ‘trundling them along the street on barrows’.Footnote ⁷

The passage raises a dilemma frequently faced by social critics who present themselves as dissident voices: how to address a public if the existing means of communication are all partisan or crooked, how to engage with a corrupt world without being corrupted in the process? Woolf, after all, had published a lot of books, essays, and articles by this point, frequently using these corrupt media. At first sight, her suggestion that one might found one’s own publishing press can seem wildly unrealistic, even embarrassingly self-referential. Perhaps it could be made to work – if one has some capital, a capable and cooperative husband, and famous friends willing to be published by such an unknown press. At so many points, Woolf seems to presume more than one kind of privilege.

It cannot be said that Woolf’s whimsical sallies and knowing personifications are all equally successful. Consider, for example, the broad humour and laboured pedagogical intent of the passage in which she imagines the Duke of Devonshire stepping ‘down into the kitchen and saying to the maid who was peeling potatoes with a smudge on her cheek: ‘“Stop your potato peeling, Mary, and help me to construe this rather difficult passage in Pindar”.’ (165) This, Woolf suggests, is what it is supposed to be like for a partly educated woman to be asked by a highly educated man for her opinion on how to prevent war. There may be some mild comic yield from the passage, though for many readers it will surely seem a wince-inducing piece of social stereotyping. Sustained whimsy is a fragile medium, always likely to shatter in the writer’s hands.

More generally, the risk is that Woolf’s playful and knowing tactics become self-defeating: a register that is entirely and consistently ironic starts to lose the benefits of irony. The archness can come to feel artificial rather than collusive. But although the writing constantly calls attention to itself as performance, we may ask whether this is perhaps also one secret of the success of certain kinds of polemic, carrying the sly implication that all this excess wouldn’t be necessary if the resistance were not so deeply embedded. Is there perhaps a mute invitation to cooperate in turning one’s own indignation into mockery?

After quoting an attack on her by the Dean of Durham, on the BBC in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘So the deans have their vanity, and if I say what I mean in 3 Guineas I must expect considerable hostility.’Footnote ⁸ Once published, Three Guineas did attract ‘considerable hostility’, including from several members of Woolf’s own circle. Her close friend and former lover, Vita Sackville-West, found it ‘provocative’ and full of ‘misleading arguments’, while the ever-loyal but discriminating Leonard thought it her worst book, though he didn’t quite tell her so.Footnote ⁹

Q. D. Leavis’s swingeing critique of the book in her Scrutiny piece entitled ‘Caterpillars of the commonwealth unite!’ was dismissed by Woolf as arising from personal grievances, and it has not found much favour among modern commentators.Footnote ¹⁰ But Leavis landed one or two telling blows, highlighting the ways in which the class characteristics that Woolf foregrounds, or even parades, in the book could alienate many types of reader. Leavis found Three Guineas ‘bad-tempered, peevishly sarcastic, and incoherent’, noting Woolf’s own ‘self-righteous glow. This is a sermon on “the art of living” as conceived by a social parasite’. And she mocked Woolf’s lines about women who have had to do their thinking and writing while they rock the cradle and stir the pot by saying that Woolf wouldn’t ‘know which end of the cradle to stir’.Footnote ¹¹ There is class hostility here, and the assertion of a rival form of outsiderdom. Struggling to carve out time for some writing in the interstices of domestic chores, Leavis finds Woolf’s sense of servant-padded social entitlement and lack of realism about the practical obstacles most women face simply tiresome. Woolf writes as a member of that privileged social class whose sons traditionally went to the great public schools and Oxbridge, and although as a woman Woolf did not receive such an education, about which she is enduringly and understandably resentful, she still seems to be writing for women from that same class. Interestingly, Leavis also scorns Woolf as an ‘amateur’, implying that the serious business of social analysis and commentary has now largely moved into the hands of academics and other experts, leaving a literary dabbler from the rentier class looking outmoded and unprofessional.Footnote ¹²

Three Guineas did, nonetheless, find appreciative readers, and we get a better sense than is usually available of what a range of readers made of it from the collection of letters to her about the book which Woolf kept in this case.Footnote ¹³ There were complaints that Woolf ignored the realities of the lives of most women in the population, but there was also recognition that her advocacy was powerful and telling. Several women wrote to her clearly enchanted by the playful way in which she made a case on their behalf. Edith Somerville wrote to Ethel Smyth: ‘How admirable Three Guineas is!’ She had read it, she reported, ‘with ecstasy and fury’; but ‘only those of our persuasion will read it. It cuts too deep for men to endure’.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘Those of our persuasion’ could be taken to refer to all women, or more plausibly to feminist women, or even, at a stretch, to gay women, but the comment again underlines the problem that elaborately sarcastic polemics may only speak to the already converted.

When thinking of actual as well as imagined readers, it is important to remember the remarkable autonomy that Woolf experienced where the publication of her books was concerned. After her first two novels had been published by her half-brother’s firm, Duckworth and co, Woolf’s subsequent seven novels, one collection of short stories, two biographies, and eight volumes of essays of different kinds were all published by the Hogarth Press.Footnote ¹⁵ Virginia and Leonard Woolf had begun this as a recreation in 1917, hand-printing their first publications, but before long it became an established small publisher, and in some years a commercially successful enterprise, not least thanks to the sales of her own books. As she confided to a correspondent at the beginning of the venture, it was ‘the greatest mercy to be able to do what one likes – no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing’.Footnote ¹⁶ Painfully anxious about the reception of her more experimental forms of fiction, it was obviously a comfort to Woolf to think of their being read by people ‘who more or less like that sort of thing’, but that phrase points again to the dilemma facing the social critic: if one only reaches those who already more or less like that sort of thing, how is one ever to effect any change in attitudes, but then is such dissident writing likely to meet with any other kinds of reader in the first place?

By background and style of life, the Woolfs belonged to the professional upper-middle class. By the 1930s, their income was quite striking: according to J. H. Willis’s calculations, they had a combined net income of over £4,000 a year (the approximate equivalent at 2022 prices would be around £250,000 a year).Footnote ¹⁷ I give these details partly to provide some context for thinking about what kind of ‘outsider’ Woolf was when she published Three Guineas. There is no neat or automatic match-up between a constructed writerly identity and an actual sociological position. Yet, for all her social advantages, and despite her considerable success and recognition, there was a sense in which Woolf was becoming more of an ‘outsider’ in the late 1930s than she had ever been.Footnote ¹⁸ As she became angrier and more explicit about the historical plight of women, she also became firmer and more vocal about her pacifist convictions, and the expression of these views not only put her at some distance from majority opinion in the England of her day, but also, in ways that were emotionally or psychologically harder to bear, caused a greater gulf to open up between her and some of her most intimate Bloomsbury associates, even including Leonard. Three Guineas is an angry, acerbic piece of writing in which an elaborate attempt is made to channel the anger into wit, sarcasm, and irony. But these are always unstable registers: when they work, they subtly recruit the collusion of the knowing reader; when they don’t, they risk alienating the sympathies of the uncommitted.

IV

Just as Virginia Woolf is, of course, best known as a novelist, so E. P. Thompson is most celebrated as a historian. But Thompson also wrote many other types of non-fiction prose – essays, critiques, reviews, polemics, columns, and so on – and in his occasional and polemical writing, he deployed an exceptionally rich array of literary weapons with a stylishness that few social critics could match. Perhaps acknowledgement of this richness underlay Eric Hobsbawm’s somewhat hyperbolic comment that Thompson’s was the ‘writer – on his day – of the finest polemical prose this century’.Footnote ¹⁹ And yet, notoriously, Thompson frequently represented himself as not only confronted by the massive resources of established power, but also at odds with the dominant strains among his putative comrades on the left. He was thus in the position of conducting campaigns on several fronts simultaneously, with the result that he toys with, though perhaps does not altogether control, the posture of the lonely but heroic dissident who nonetheless solicits the collusion of unidentified readers who can be brought to share his sense of outrage and scorn.

In the introduction to Writing by Candlelight, a collection of his polemical writing from the 1970s, Thompson said that his pieces were written ‘to controvert, and if possible to discomfort, the purveyors of received wisdom, and to contest the official descriptions of reality presented in the media’.Footnote ²⁰ The aim ‘to discomfort’ might be achieved by several means, including drawing attention to information that such purveyors would rather keep hidden or neglected, but in Thompson’s case, a calculated form of irony that dallies with sarcasm, consorts with wit, and allows for contempt is his chief resource. The effect of this register is cumulative, so no one example will be sufficiently representative, but consider the opening to the title piece ‘Sir, writing by candlelight’ on the occasion of the power workers’ strike in 1970:

‘The epistolary levée en masse’: this brilliantly catches, but simultaneously satirizes, the self-dramatizing sense of indignation among the class who write letters to The Times. And Thompson is able to put historical flesh on the polemical bone by citing a series of previous occasions, going back to the nineteenth century, when, in the face of some popular action against injustice, ‘respectable opinion’ vented its alarm and sense of righteousness in the correspondence columns of that newspaper.

Or consider his description in 1971 of the forces of conservatism mobilized by Edward Heath: not ‘the authentic mentalities of contemporary managerial capitalism’, but

The use of the various French terms here serves not only to mock Heath’s supporters, but, in their allusions to the French Revolution, to highlight the comparative pettiness and inflated sense of indignation characteristic of their political attitudes. The passage asks to be forgiven for the excess of its high spirits, forgiven by those disposed to enjoy a dart at the Toryism of small minds; it scarcely seems intended to make tobacconists and travelling salesmen reconsider their political allegiances.

These are instances of Thompson taking aim at some fairly predictable targets, and in such cases, his writing presumes an appreciative nod from the equally predictable forces of anti-Tory feeling. But what about the following passage, from his ‘Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’, published in Socialist Register in 1973, where he alludes to his own by then long-running dispute with the younger generation of theoretically inclined New Leftists. Returning sardonically to his alleged ‘allegiance to an outworn English idiom’, Thompson contrasts this with Kolakowski’s high philosophical idiom:

A passage which is so manifestly over the top, one which so clearly enjoys its own inventive excess, may excite complex reactions in the reader. In a familiar way, Thompson is adopting as badges of honour terms that have been applied to him critically or disparagingly – those ‘romantic moralisms’ and that ‘empirical vision’. The whole sustained, metaphor-laden riff implicitly turns the tables on his critics in that anyone who can write in this collusive, camped-up way cannot be as limited and ploddingly earth-bound as his critics suggest. The ‘little eagles’ – shall we perhaps call them ‘Perry Anderson‘ and ‘Tom Nairn’? – come to seem to be possessed of the intellectual autonomy of lemmings, and their smart new vocabulary begins to look a little ungainly when held up in the tongs of Thompson’s quotation marks.

Thompson goes on:

Clearly, more than one kind of dissidence is being figured in these passages. He does not belong with the soaring eagles, nor is he wholly at home on the ground. He is, in a word he employs ironically elsewhere, a ‘prisoner’ held within a ‘hostile national culture’, which he describes in damning terms. And yet, and yet, he is of that culture, and ‘not only through the habits of a writer, but out of preference’. The identification in this passage is neither with here nor with elsewhere, but with an idealized version of an intellectual and literary tradition that is intimately part of here, even though it is, for the most part, a disregarded or derogated minority taste.

So, what are these passages doing, and who is being addressed here? To begin with an obvious point, it is worth remembering that humour attempts to recruit its audience, to draw them in to the circle of those who can recognize what is being laughed at as, indeed, laughable. By the time we reach the ‘stumpy idiomatic wings’ and the ‘plop!’ of his likely descent into the Channel, we are in effect being coaxed into seeing alleged weakness as actual strength. Again, anyone who can camp up his failings in this way is not wholly bound or defined by them. In practice, the joke is on the eagles: perhaps soaring is not so great after all. The whole passage says implicitly, ‘I, Edward Thompson, am more amusing than you, Leszek Kolakowski and your earnest theoretical followers, and any reader who can appreciate that amusingness is already half-way towards endorsing my larger critique of you.’ (As we saw with Woolf, the very device of the ‘open letter’ invites a kind of knowing eavesdropping.)

But who are these readers? They are clearly not to be found among the eagles and eaglets, nor are they the representatives of the ‘hostile national culture’ who are, in effect, holding Thompson ‘prisoner’. Are they those few – but how many is ‘few’? – who can recognize something of themselves in the ‘great bustard’, and if so, does that mean they are all of a certain age? Do the ways in which he tries to elicit a collusive smile from the reader mean that the ‘hostile national culture’ is not, after all, so encompassingly powerful? Though its dominant elements may be ‘resistant to intellectuality’, and although its leading opponents now fly with the eagles, there must, nonetheless, be those who get the point – and not just ‘get’ it in the purely propositional sense, but who, as it were, ‘get’ the joke, and find it telling. There must, in fact, be quite a flock of potential great bustards, so that, far from being on the point of extinction, the species is able to reproduce itself, albeit by the unlikely means of reading the close-packed pages of a small sectarian journal such as The Socialist Register. Even in this, one of Thompson’s most intemperate, defiant polemics, the hidden logic of the dissident voice is at work.

‘How far is too far?’ is an impossible question to answer when referring to the japery and mockery that are part of the polemicist’s arsenal, and context is all. However, Thompson didn’t hold back in the hope that a less colourful idiom might persuade the uncommitted. Opposing ‘going in to Europe’ in 1975, he riffed savagely on the Common Market as a great digestive organ of consumerism, what he called ‘the Eurostomach’, and, going further, he could not resist adding: ‘Once replete, the eurostomach will want to euronate. The present idea is to do it on the British working class’ (87). This piece appeared, unusually, in the Sunday Times; it seems likely that readers who already agreed with him laughed and that those who didn’t didn’t.

Thompson’s polemical writings are studded with the telling use of historical allusions, and these often involve similarly risky literary tactics. For example in a fierce commentary on the government’s response to the 1972 miner’s strike, he went back to the nineteenth century to show how orthodox political economy had been deployed to support the case ‘that it was in the nation’s interests that [the miners’] wages should be kept as low as possible’, and he continued: ‘Hence the axiom that the prosperity of the nation entailed the unprosperity of the miners. Great pains were taken to explain this theorem to them (in Baldwin’s time the explanation took some nine months)’ (66). The sarcasm may seem a little contrived, but surely it suggests a nod to a readership who had neither forgotten nor forgiven the harsh treatment of the miners in 1926.

Generalizing his practice, he observed at one point: ‘It is never safe to assume that any of our history is altogether dead. It is more often lying there, as a form of stored cultural energy.… There is still today an enormous reserve of radicalism stored within our culture’ (75). It is to this energy and the tradition behind it that Thompson makes his appeal: there turns out to be quite a large space between repressive Tories on one side and soaring eagles on the other. But that is not to say that history was on his side: the relative success of the 1972 miners’ strike was followed by the relative unsuccess of the 1974 strike and then the catastrophic, terminal failure of the 1984 strike. Thompson’s optimism about the radical resources of his culture may not always have been justified, but perhaps it was the precondition of some of his most memorable writing.

The two great themes of Thompson’s later years were nuclear disarmament and the defence of civil liberties, and on both these topics, he was lining up with significant social forces within the culture, with the result that his prose is correspondingly less defiant. Indeed, in his writings about civil liberties and the jury system, he wrote as though it was his opponents who were out of step with majority opinion. He invokes the long history of resistance to central power in Britain, what he calls, variously, ‘our ancient cultural traditions’, ‘the most sensitive customs of a nation’, and even ‘our constitutional history’. When we find him maintaining that ‘our history’ – his use of the first person plural a clear sign of a putative audience – has been ‘an immensely protracted contest to subject the nation’s rulers to the rule of law’ (246), he can start to sound surprisingly like an old-fashioned Whig historian. The point about the existence of a responsive readership is supported by considering the venues in which his pieces were published. The Socialist Register and similar small journals of the left had provided natural homes for him when engaging in fraternal combat, but in fact the majority of pieces collected in Writing by Candlelight first appeared in New Society, a much more mainstream publication that happened to have a sympathetic editor.Footnote ²² We should also remember that by this point Thompson was writing as an independent man of letters partially supported by a private income: he had, as it were, his ‘500 a year and a room of one’s own’ (or, rather, a manor house of one’s own in his case). ‘Outsiderdom’, as I remarked earlier, takes many forms.

When reading both Woolf and Thompson, we can simultaneously register that the idiom is arch and the sarcasm exaggerated while also admiring the brio and stylishness of the performance, and this points to something important about the character of social criticism. At first sight, it may seem that describing the tactics or the tone of a piece of writing as ‘exaggerated’ amounts to saying that we don’t find the criticism persuasive, but that may not be quite right. We may recognize the element of excess as the kind of performative swagger necessary to draw attention to a case. We may even admire the knowing self-consciousness with which the writer deploys that excess, as if saying ‘yes, this is a bit mannered or over the top, but it gets and holds your attention, doesn’t it, and you can allow for or forgive it because I can show you that we are fundamentally on the same side’. As I mentioned earlier, the goal of much social criticism may not be to persuade those who are being criticized. Instead, the social critic may be recruiting from among the uncommitted, or perhaps stiffening the resolve of the already like-minded or raising their morale. But there are limits. A performative critique that seems too wide of the mark or too laboured or too tendentious tends, almost by definition, to be counter-productive, to alienate rather than to recruit. This means, in my view, that the adequate study of many forms of political writing requires us to be alert to the manifold ways in which the non-propositional features of texts may determine relations between implied readers and actual readers – or, as I put it earlier, that intellectual historians and literary critics have something to learn from each other.