Dorothy Thompson, British social historian died she was , 87

Dorothy Katharine Gane Thompson (née Towers) was a social historian, a leading expert on the Chartist movement died she was , 87. She entered Girton College, Cambridge, in 1942. During the war, her work as an industrial draughtswoman for Royal Dutch Shell interrupted her formal education. Nonetheless, she continued to pursue a career in history and was politically active. She joined the Young Communists, married the historian Edward Thompson in 1948, and moved to Halifax where they both worked in adult education and the peace movement. They had three children. Kate Thompson, the award-winning children's writer, is their youngest child.^[2]

(30 October 1923 – 29 January 2011^[1]) 


In 1968 Dorothy Thompson took a teaching post at the University of Birmingham. She taught in the School of History from 1968 to 1988. In January 2006 she was presented with a festschrift, The Duty of Discontent. Edited by Owen Ashton, Stephen Roberts (both former students of Dorothy Thompson) and Robert Fyson, the volume consists of twelve essays, spanning the whole range of nineteenth and twentieth century British social history. The importance of Dorothy Thompson's writings on Chartism and Irish and women's history is recognised by scholars across the world. Her work, like that of her husband, was always been informed by a passionate radicalism and a deep sympathy for the underdog.^[3]

Selected articles/works

• Early Chartists (1971)
• Bibliography of the Chartist Movement, 1837-1976 (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)
• Chartism in Wales and Ireland (1987)
• British Women in the Nineteenth Century (1989)
• Outsiders : Class, Gender and Nation (1993)
• The Duty of Discontent : essays for Dorothy Thompson (edited by Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts) (1996)
• Queen Victoria: Gender & Power Virago Press (2001)
• Selected Poems by Frank Thompson, edited by Dorothy Thompson and Kate Thompson (2003)

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