Book Review: The Cato Street Conspiracy

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 70 (Summer 2020)]

Cato Street, The Making of the English Working Class and English Exceptionalism


The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland 
Edited by Professor Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy
Hardcover 216 pages
 ISBN 978-1526144980 Manchester University Press 2019

The 200th anniversary of the Cato Street Conspiracy was on 23 February 2020 and it sparked the publication of a volume of new research on it, which endeavours to rescue the conspiracy from the enormous condescension of posterity.

The phrase is appropriate because it reminds us that E P Thompson in his still-benchmark The Making of the English Working Class does write about Cato Street but sees it very much as in the shadow of Peterloo. For Thompson it was the mass peaceful protest of Manchester on 16 August 1819 rather than the attempt at armed revolt of London on 23 February 1820 that set the framework for how the working class political tradition developed.

Thompson may well have been right, but that doesn’t mean that the tradition of Cato Street didn’t exist. The Making is a book specifically about the English working class as the title says. There were good reasons for this. Thompson was meant to be writing a history that covered the period 1760 to 1960 and the Making, weighing in at around 1000 pages in the print edition, was the first chapter. Secondly Thompson’s research was focused on England, the West Riding and London in particular.

Thompson made the point specifically in the preface where he apologises to Scottish and Welsh readers and notes that he has dealt with Irish-only immigrants to England. Focusing specifically on Scotland he argues that ‘it is possible, at least until the 1820s, to regard the English and Scottish experiences as distinct, since trade union and political links were impermanent and immature’

Even if we allow this it remains, with the benefit of further historical research, a weakness and one that has become more evident in the fifty-plus years since the book was published. 

Thompson was no expert in the different but strongly related histories of the Scottish, Irish and Welsh working classes.

However, without adding in that history the importance of an event like Cato Street cannot properly be understood. Thompson does write briefly about the Scottish Rising of early 1820 which was very clearly related to Cato Street. He doesn’t provide detail on the various West Riding attempts at risings in March and April 1820, and doesn’t cover at all the far from insignificant impact of events in Ireland and the revolutionary tradition that had developed there from the 1790s.

We can say then, as perhaps we always should, that Thompson’s book, impressive though it was, represents work in progress and work that should still be in progress.

 Keith Flett