Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Katharine Gane Thompson (née Towers; ) was a social historian and a leading expert on the Chartist movement.

Early life

Dorothy Towers was born in Greenwich, south-east London, daughter of professional musicians Reginald and Kathleen Towers, who met at the Royal Academy of Music. To supplement their income, they were teachers and ran shops selling musical instruments, and later televisions. They were supporters, but not members, of the Labour Party. Her paternal grandfather, a shoemaker, had settled in London. Due to the ill health of her elder brother, Tom, the family lived at the agricultural village of Keston, in a four-room cottage, before moving to Bromley. In 1942, Thompson entered Girton College, Cambridge as an exhibitioner, graduating with an upper second.

Career During the war, her work as an industrial draughtswoman for Royal Dutch Shell interrupted her formal education. In 1944, she married Gilbert Buchanan Sale, a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Despite her studies and work, she continued to pursue a career in history and was politically active. She joined the Young Communists, and, having divorced her first husband,

With husband E. P. Thompson, she was part of the dissenting group in the Communist Party of Great Britain which in 1956-7 set up the socialist humanist journal the New Reasoner, where her competence meant her principal role was "business manager". She broke with the Communists and identified as a Socialist. She was inspired working with writers, artists, historians and trade unionists in the formation of new left clubs in many towns; she admired such figures as the Scottish miners' champion Lawrence Daly and clothing worker Gertie Roche.

Thompson's position as the most influential historian of Chartism has been reinforced by two volumes of essays: Outsiders (1993) and The Dignity of Chartism (2015).

She was a leading member of the Communist Party Historians Group.

Selected articles/works

The Early Chartists (1971) Bibliography of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1976 (edited with J. F. C. Harrison) (1978) The Chartist Experience : Studies in Working-class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (edited with James Epstein) (1982) Over Our Dead Bodies : Women against the Bomb (editor) (1983) The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (1984); (reprinted Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013) Chartism in Wales and Ireland (1987) British Women in the Nineteenth Century (1989) Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (1990) Outsiders : Class, Gender and Nation (1993) Images of Chartism (edited with Stephen Roberts) (1998). Selected Poems by Frank Thompson, edited by Dorothy Thompson and Kate Thompson (2003) The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy Thompson (edited by Stephen Roberts) (2015)