Remembering A. L. Morton, Historian of English Radicalism

Ahead of a talk to the Socialist History Society tomorrow, James Crossley looks at the life of a trailblazing historian.

A. L. Morton (1903–1987) is best remembered for A People’s History of England (1938), a book at least as famous for its title as its content.

A People’s History of England is probably the first Marxist history of the nation. It explains the transformation from ancient forms of societies through the rise and fall of feudalism and on to capitalism, the rise of the working class, and the potential for a new era of socialism. For Morton, these transformations in England were the product of competing class interests and technological advances. The book stood in stark contrast to the usual histories of the nation focused on its supposed great individuals.

The seventeenth-century English Revolution played a crucial role in Morton’s history. Morton stressed the historical significance of the popular forces the revolution unleashed, some of which he dismissed as making naïve demands too ahead of their time. Morton saw Cromwell, for all his failures and flaws, as someone who harnessed the potential of popular forces for progressive purposes.

Morton’s criticisms of naïve utopianism and his explanation of the importance of popular coalitions in A People’s History of England should also be understood in the context of the 1930s. Put another way, this was a history which looked to the past to promote the importance of broad, popular front alliances against the threat of fascism.

But there was much more to Morton’s life and his dedication to the labour movement than his most famous book.

A dedicated materialist

Morton was born in 1903 at Stanchils Farm near Bury St Edmunds. Rural England was a constant feature in Morton’s understanding of the nation’s history. Morton was said to have been most content talking with farm workers about the history of class conflict in the countryside. Rural England also guided Morton’s understanding of the future. It was remarked at his memorial that Morton’s idea of a New Jerusalem probably looked like the Suffolk countryside.

After being tutored at home, Morton’s grammar and public school education was embedded in the world of royalism, Anglicanism, imperialism and militarism, soon intensified by the First World War.

Morton reacted against this setting as his politics shifted leftward. The Russian Revolution and the horrors of the War were expected prompts, as well as his fears about what capitalism and technological developments were doing to the countryside. Morton’s reading reflected his changing politics—first, Jack London’s The Iron Heel before moving on to Willaim Morris and then Marx and Lenin.

Morton studied History and English at Cambridge (1921–1924), where he became involved in the Cambridge University Labour Club and (what became) influential socialist circles associated with the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb.

An important moment for Morton was the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which Morton and other socialists saw as a generational account of the crisis of capitalism. While Eliot moved in the opposite political direction, Morton saw the Soviet Union as the answer to the problems starkly laid out in The Waste Land.

Another, perhaps even more unlikely, influence on Morton was the classical scholar and popular poet A. E. Housman. In Housman’s poetry, Morton saw an appreciation of the countryside that could be adapted for the revolutionary cause. The courageous and dignified characteristics of Housman’s rural types were the characteristics required of revolutionaries.

After Cambridge, Morton took up a teaching post in 1924 at the grammar school in Steyning. In Steyning, he befriended the eccentric poet and publisher Victor Neuburg—formerly a close follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley.

Morton was a dedicated materialist and saw magic and religion as outdated. Nevertheless, he discussed such issues with Neuburg and developed a class-based understanding of the history of magic, witchcraft and the evolution of religion. Through these discussions, Morton developed his lifelong interest in radical English history, especially William Blake.

Morton was made redundant after supporting the General Strike of 1926 and moved closer to home. He began working at A. S. Neill’s progressive Summerhill school in Leiston, where he met his first wife, Bronwen Jones. After marrying in 1928, they moved to London as members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. By 1934, the couple had split, and Morton settled down with Vivien Jackson, daughter of the working-class autodidact and Communist intellectual T. A. Jackson.

In 1930s London, Morton was engaged in menial work for the Communist Party in the more deprived areas, which he saw as essential training for its intellectuals. During this time, Morton published reviews and articles on history, literature, and politics in the Daily Worker and literary journals. Here, he developed a Marxist understanding of English and European history, the transformation from capitalism to socialism, and human relations in a post-revolutionary society, culminating in A People’s History of England.

Morton even took on the title of Proprietor at the Daily Worker. This role meant that the named person went to prison on behalf of the paper if need be. Morton narrowly escaped this fate in 1934 following a complaint by William Joyce (aka Lord Haw Haw) and the British Union of Fascists. They claimed the Daily Worker incited violence against a planned fascist rally through the phrase “to try to drown the Fascists in a sea of organised working-class activity.” Fortunately, the magistrate rejected the allegation.

By the start of the Second World War, Morton moved back to Leiston. Thanks to the nearby Eels’ Foot pub frequented by farm workers and fishermen, he developed his interest in lingering folk traditions that had just about survived capitalism and their combination of bawdiness and utopian impulses.

At Leiston, Morton was part of a small but thriving socialist culture centred around the newspaper, the Leiston Leader, while his army service was mostly labouring on the Isle of Sheppey. After the War, Morton had a short stint as a local Communist councillor (1947–1949), working closely with the Labour Party. They held monthly meetings with the townspeople to discuss issues relating to housing, interest on loan repayments, and local industrial developments.  

Morton was a key figure in founding the acclaimed Communist Party Historians’ Group in 1946. The Historians’ Group included figures who became major historians (for example, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Dorothy Thompson and E. P. Thompson), all influenced by Morton.

1946–1956 marked halcyon days for the Communist Party Historians’ Group. They wanted to understand history ‘from below,’ labour history, and the idea of an English radical tradition. Morton led the way, reassessing his older claims about the apparent naivety of English radical thinkers ahead of their time. Now, he argued, they pointed to the democratic and socialist future that the working class would bring to fruition.

His major publication in this era was The English Utopia (1952), which traced the history of utopian thinking and utopian literature in relation to peasant hopes, the rise of bourgeois thought, and the emergence of socialism. Again, the past was a comment on the present. In promoting the working class as the inheritors of English radicalism, Morton and the Historians’ Group offered an alternative to postwar conservatism, disillusionment with the Labour Party, and the growth of American militarism and cultural imperialism. 

In 1950, the Mortons moved to The Old Chapel in Clare, Suffolk, where they lived for the rest of their days. The denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev in 1956 was a jolt from rural life and local organising in the labour movement. Along with the Soviet military intervention in Hungary and debates over inner-party democracy, the fallout from Khrushchev’s speech contributed to a loss in members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, including key members of the Historians’ Group. Morton made a case for E. P. Thompson to be reinstated, but to no avail.

Morton continued to reassess the significance of utopianism and lost causes in his work on the radicals of the English Revolution, Chartism, Robert Owen, and others. He remained on friendly terms with much of the post-1956 New Left but had his criticisms. He believed the new wave of leftist intellectuals had fallen into an old trap of becoming too closely allied with middle-class and bourgeois interests rather than those of the labour movement.

Morton saw the Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia in 1968 as an invasion and wrongful interference in another socialist country. The fallout from events in Czechoslovakia—alongside the cultural, economic and political shifts towards neoliberal capitalism—fed into the sharp disputes that eventually ended the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1991. While he accepted that socialism was no longer as close as he once thought, Morton remained unsentimentally committed to the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution and to understanding England and English radicalism in class terms right up to his death on 23rd October 1987.

Morton’s legacy

Morton has largely been forgotten, partly because he directed his interests towards the labour movement rather than the relative fame offered by the universities. Certainly, we should remember him as a pioneer of radical and forgotten English history as much as the more famous writers he influenced. He understood the power of class forces that have shaped the present but also how class forces will shape the transformation to socialism in England in the future. In an era where talk of England has been disastrously abandoned to the right, we desperately need to reclaim Morton’s legacy.

Prof. James Crossley is the Academic Director at CenSAMM, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge and the author of A. L. Morton and the Radical Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). On Thursday 3rd April, he will be speaking to the Socialist History Society on A. L. Morton: Life in the Radical Tradition, register here.