Francis Thompson (historian)
Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson was an English economic and social historian. He wrote several books.Early life
The son of Francis Longstreth Thompson, he was educated at Bootham School, York and Queens College, Oxford, taking his DPhil in 1956.Career
He was Reader in Economic History at University College London in 1963. He became Professor of Modern History at Bedford College in 1968, and was from 1977 to 1990 director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
He was president of the Royal Historical Society from 1989 to 1993.
He was best known for English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, which made the role of the landed gentry a high-priority topic for agrarian and political history. He also studied urban middle and working classes, and suburbia. He added to the long-standing debate on British class history by new emphasis on "respectability." Thompson argued that it operated across class boundaries and provided a powerful stabilizing counterbalance to the working class upheavals of Victorian society. His model of society contradicted the more commonly employed Marxist assumptions. He opened up a field that has attracted many younger scholars.Death and legacy
He died on 23 August 2017, aged 92.Works
- Victorian England: the horse-drawn society; an inaugural lecture at Bedford College
- English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century
- The Rise of Suburbia editor
- Horses in European Economic History: a preliminary canter editor
- The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900
- The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986
- The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 editor
- Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780–1980 Ford Lectures
- Landowners, Capitalists and Entrepreneurs
