A. L. Morton

Arthur Leslie Morton (4 July 1903 – 23 October 1987) was an English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study, The English Utopia (1952).

Life Morton was born in Suffolk, the son of a Yorkshire farmer. He had two siblings, a sister Kathleen and a brother Max. He attended school in Bury St Edmunds until he was 16 and then at boarding school in Eastbourne. He then studied the English tripos at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1921 to 1924, graduating with a third-class degree. While at Cambridge, he developed friends from within the university Labour club, including Allen Hutt who became a typographer and Ivor Montagu who was later active in the film industry. He encountered socialist ideas, moving towards the communist group at the university around Maurice Dobb.

After college he taught at Steyning Grammar School in Sussex, where under his influence, most of the staff supported the General Strike in 1926. Dismissed as a consequence, he taught for a year at A.S. Neill's progressive school, Summerhill at that time in Lyme Regis. He then moved to London to write and run a bookshop in Finsbury Circus. In 1929 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and along with his wife, Vivien, remained a member for the rest of his life. Vivien was the daughter of the socialist Thomas A. Jackson.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four is, for this country at least, the last word to date in counter-revolutionary apologetics," he wrote.

Library A.L. Morton bequeathed his library to the university library of Rostock University in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany (which was then in the German Democratic Republic and named Wilhelm-Pieck-University after the GDR's first and only president, Wilhelm Pieck). The collection comprises more than 3,900 volumes, including all foreign-language editions of A People's History of England, many contain hand-written comments by Morton.

Works

A People's History Of England (1938) Language of Men (1945) essays The Story of the English Revolution (1949), Communist Party pamphlet The English Utopia (1952) The British Labour Movement, 1770-1920 (1956) with George Tate The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (1958) The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (1962) The Matter of Britain: Essays in a Living Culture (1966) The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (1970) Political Writings of William Morris (1973) editor Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings (1975) editor Collected poems (1976) Three Works By William Morris (1977) editor 1688: How Glorious was the Revolution? (1988) History and the Imagination: Selected Writings of A.L. Morton (1990) edited by Margot Heinemann and Willie Thompson