Really interesting book which does exactly what it says on the cover, highlighting the reading and intellectual history of the British working class from around 1800 through to 1950.
Basically an exploration of case studies, memoirs, autobiographies, focusing on what these people read, how, where and with whom they read it, and the ideas they had because of it.
Notes
Some key thoughts:
- There was broad cultural engagement within the working class, basically using whatever resources were available to them to enrich otherwise difficult lives.
- The compounding effect of self-education, particularly through groups, while still maintaining a individual intelligence. While solo learners seemed to find it harder or were lead astray.
- How much things like forming opinions and critical reading are learned skills, and not innate. Similar feeling to Naming the Mind by Kurt Danziger. I should write more notes on this.
- Frames (c.f. Erving Goffman)—the lenses through which people interpret situations or media—and the ability of literature to expand them. See also Notes on Context.
- Interesting the importance of physical media, where poorer readers could only access second- or third-hand copies, and even then only though libraries or sharing. This often led to the working class having less contemporary tastes as the books fell to them only after they’d passed out of fashion.
Quotes
As one washerwoman’s son warned us, the autobiographer “may helplessly, perhaps even thoughtlessly, but more probably designedly, select, omit, minimize, exaggerate, in fact lie as wholeheartedly” as the novelist.
The great strength of these memoirs is that they represent an effort by working people to write their own history. All historians must use data selectively, but here, in the first instance, within some limits, the working classes decided what to include. Tellingly, they wrote at length about their reading, as if they were pointing the way for future historians.
Put simply, a history of audiences reverses the traditional perspective of intellectual history, focusing on readers and students rather than authors and teachers. It first defines a mass audience, then determines its cultural diet, and describes the response of that audience not only to literature, but also to education, religion, art, and any other cultural activity. For reading is not limited to books. We also “read”—that is, we absorb, interpret, and respond to— classroom lessons, concerts, radio broadcasts, films, in fact all varieties of human experience. Broadly, an audience history asks how people read their culture, how they experienced education in the widest sense.
Margaret Perry (b. 1922) wrote of her mother, a Nottingham dressmaker: “The public library was her salvation. She read four or five books a week all her life but had no one to discuss them with. She had read all the classics several times over in her youth and again in later years, and the library had a job to keep her supplied with current publications. Married to a different man, she could have been an intelligent and interesting woman.”
Goffman developed the useful concept of the “frame,” meaning “the organization of experience,” our ground rules for processing information, “the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events.” The frame does for the human mind what a program does for a computer. It determines how we read a given text or situation: whether we treat Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a bedtime story or a Freudian fable, Finnegans Wake as densely meaningful or gobbledygook, the morning newspaper as biased to the left or the right, Bible stories as truth, lies, or parables.
Readers do play an active role in making meaning, but they cannot capriciously or randomly assign meanings to texts without destroying the usefulness of language as a communication tool. They generally follow certain rules of interpretation (frames), though these rules vary from reader to reader and from situation to situation. Readers can adopt any frame they choose, provided it produces some kind of meaningful reading, and provided the readers have learned the rules laid down by the frame.
The authentic value of a liberal education lies not so much in acquiring facts or absorbing “eternal truths,” but in discovering new ways to interpret the world. We read Homer and Shakespeare and Milton primarily to learn how they saw things, and thus to enhance our own powers of sight. That, fundamentally, is why autodidacts like Will Crooks pursued knowledge under difficulties. The British class system had always drawn a sharp distinction between workers and thinkers: it was the prerogative of the latter to interpret religion, economics, society, and literature for the former. The founders of the Labour Party and other self-educated radicals realized that no disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life. Working people would have to develop their own ways of framing the world, their own political goals, their own strategies for achieving those goals. Locked out of Christminster, Jude Fawley would chalk that political program on the college walls: “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you …” (Job 12:3). The whole canon of world literature—not just literature with an explicit political message—could help them develop those powers of understanding.
The founders of the Labour Party and other self-educated radicals realized that no disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life. Working people would have to develop their own ways of framing the world, their own political goals, their own strategies for achieving those goals.
Generations of liberal critics, from Matthew Arnold to Lionel Trilling, recognized that literature, by suggesting a wealth of alternative perspectives on the world, would inevitably subvert ideology.
In their Homerides (1715) Thomas Burnet and George Duckett warned that, thanks to Pope, “every Country Milkmaid may understand the Iliad as well as you or I.”
Educated people commonly (though by no means universally) found something profoundly menacing in the efforts of working people to educate themselves and write for themselves. As Arnold predicted, culture was a force for equality and was destructive of ideology, including the ideology supporting the British class structure.
The young men—the shyest creatures in the country, and the most sensitive to ridicule— found safety in comic songs which … dealt with somebody’s misfortunes or discomforts, in a humorous, practical-joking spirit, and so came nearer, probably,
Whatever their attitudes toward Goethe, all Nonconformist sects encouraged the habits of close reading, interpretive analysis, and intellectual self-improvement. Those talents, exercised on Scripture and sermons, could be carried over to any kind of secular literature.
More importantly, “Il Penseroso” taught Bamford to ask questions and voice his thoughts—a revolutionary transformation.
To be oneself courageously and unashamed in matters of dress, talk, and action, meant running the gauntlet of ridicule and tribal opposition. Much easier was it to fall into the rut and become moulded to mediocrity. The preparation for this attitude was in the elementary schools. After mass education in which the absorption of historical absurdities was more important than mental development, boys passed into the factories with minds ill-equipped to withstand a new environment. … Growing up in an atmosphere of constraint in which individual thought and action stubbornly follow the groove of class prejudice, there eventually emerges the “sound, solid British working-man.”
Carlyle’s hero-worship made him appear a proto-fascist in the eyes of many readers (including Joseph Goebbels) but it inspired Hardie to embrace the role of the Hero as Proletarian. From Carlyle, as one agitator proclaimed, the working classes “learnt to hate shams.” He exposed the ideological facades of the class system, preached independence of mind, and offered a vision of economic justice.
It seems that from our earliest days we are striving to become articulate, struggling to clothe in words our vague perceptions and questionings. Suddenly, blazing from the printed page, there are the words, the true resounding words that we couldn’t find.
Blatchford realized that the emerging Labour Party had no single statement of ideology. Its doctrinal texts were nothing less than the whole canon of classic literature. When, in 1906, the Review of Reviews asked Labour MPs to define their program, they gestured broadly to a kind of Everyman’s Library compendium of great books.
Liberal education proved more effective than straight indoctrination in making radicals because, frankly, it was more thrilling, more likely to generate the enthusiasm that mobilized students to change the world. For Alice Foley (b. 1891) the pursuit of culture was an act of rebellion against both her strict Catholic upbringing and the working conditions at her Bolton cotton mill.
That was what Alice learned from Emily Brontë: Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
Rocker reversed the Marxian theory that culture is economically determined, arguing that all economic systems are culturally determined. Modern industrial society, for example, had been created by modern scientific culture, not vice versa. Culture was not, then, constructed by a particular class, but was “the creation of countless generations of people of all social classes,” and “cannot be judged from the point of view of class or of economic conditions.”
Like most mutual improvement groups, Culloden College depended on the organizing energy of a few enthusiasts, and it collapsed when they migrated elsewhere or lost interest.
Meanwhile, his conception of the function of literature changed as well. Great books were “the common property of mankind,” transcending time and provinciality, but they were not scriptures containing absolute truths.
For people accustomed to accepting dogmas handed down by churches, chapels, teachers, politicians, and employers, mutual improvement provided invaluable training in forming and expressing opinions.
When she had the chance to attend college classes, even for a few months, she learned just enough to establish an intellectual rapport with her husband. But there was no united female front on this issue: another student’s wife affirmed that women belonged in the domestic sphere, and doubted that further education would be helpful there. And workingmen of the early nineteenth century rarely acknowledged women as intellectual equals or companions.
But in the study of the drama my education has left me little, if at all, in advance of any of my class, because the points which come up for discussion are questions of life and character where their knowledge and experience are as great, and probably greater, than my own. It seems to me that we find in the plays, and particularly in the Shakespeare plays, a basis of common experience and common humanity which destroys any barrier erected by social conventions and differences in educational opportunities.
The women exchanged penny novelettes, the men weekly newspapers. One could borrow Pamela and the Waverley novels from a neighbor, Christie’s Old Organ from the Sunday school library. Her uncle, a shoemaker, had once carted home from a country-house auction a large collection of old books that no one would buy: novels, poetry, sermons, histories, dictionaries.
The great virtue of mutual improvement was a general sharing of knowledge; its great drawback was a corollary distrust of private study, which was regarded as selfish and unneighborly.
For anyone who had spoken before a mutual improvement society, attended a WEA class, or read aloud bits from the evening paper in the kitchen, education was a social activity, not essentially different from the fellowship of the pub, chapel, or trade union. Knowledge was something to be shared around. The scholarship student, in contrast, had to withdraw into a shell and hoard as much information as possible:
Since these stories followed the same narrative conventions, there was no reason to doubt them. “For my part I implicitly believed them all, and when told by my father or others that they were ‘trash’ and ‘nonsense,’ and ‘could not be true,’ I, innocently enough, contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that ‘it were a sin to disbelieve.’”
The notion that there can be different versions of one story—suggesting that no version is absolutely true—is again an acquired literary convention.
Thomas Jones (b. 1870) recalled that his mother, a Rhymney straw-hat maker, “was fifty before she read a novel and to her dying day she had not completely grasped the nature of fiction or of drama.” When she read Tom Jones “She believed every word of it and could not conceive how a man could sit down and invent the story of Squire Allworthy and Sophia and Tom out of his head.”
Their grandparents read Jack and the Beanstalk and Pilgrim’s Progress as documentaries not because print is inherently credible, but because there is something powerfully compelling in a new and unfamiliar medium of communication. Its dazzling and novel capacities for transmitting information may so impress an audience that they must learn all over again how it can be manipulated.
As the proletarian novelist Jack Common noted, “Films were still far too real for anybody to be cynical about them. It was the utterly convincing reality of these scenes which compelled us to behave as though we were at the point of joining in upon them.”
At age ten Harry West (b. 1880), the son of a circus escape artist, read Pilgrim’s Progress merely as “a great heroic adventure.” Only later did he appreciate it as a religious allegory, and still later—after his exposure to Freud and Jung—he came to “discover it as one of the greatest, most potent works on practical psychology extant.”
Most working people had to struggle with the art of recording their lives, and they cited Dickens, more than anyone else, as the man who got it right.
As rules for organizing experience, frames are essential tools for writing stories as well as reading them. For people who had never been taught how to tell their own histories, Dickens supplied the necessary lessons.
Literary canons may change over time; but at any given point, the reading tastes of the British working classes consistently lagged a generation behind those of the educated middle classes, a cultural conservatism that often coexisted with political radicalism.
Only in the intervening window of unfashionability would they be affordable for the working-class autodidact, whose reading would therefore always be a certain distance behind the times.
Here were the outlines of what would become a common leftist critique of modern culture: while the popular media distracted the masses from serious literature, a bureaucratized system of compulsory education reduced Shakespeare to tedious classroom drill.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, when literary modernism was emerging, the self-educated had only just mastered the great English classics. By the time the masses caught up with post-Victorian writers, literary elites had moved on to still more advanced authors.
It was literature itself, not talk about literature. It made its own impact, spread the goods out in front of me, and let me make my choice. Nobody told me what I ought to like, it was just there for me to like, if I wanted to. All the great people were there, from Chaucer to Tennyson, in passages which were supposed to take a half hour to read; and there was one for every day of the year, with a gossipy little introduction to each which gave all that was needed to be in the picture. From them I learned that behind the English writers lay others, belonging to far off times and places, in the old days of Greece and Rome; and that was a fact that I had never heard of before, but something to go into, if ever the chance came along. Racing to make up educational deficits, autodidacts often resorted to prepackaged collections of classics.
“Hot with the hunter’s passion, I began to chase everything labelled ‘standard,’” recalled orphanage boy Thomas Burke (b. 1886), who devoured books until “my mind became a lumber-room.” Inevitably, “Criticism was beyond me; the hungry man has no time for the fastidiousness of the epicure. I was hypnotised by the word Poet. A poem by Keats (some trifle never meant for print) was a poem by Keats.
These generational skirmishes were part of a broad transformation of the left, which began early in the twentieth century and is only now reaching completion. Within the Labour Party, the shift from a working-class self-educated leadership to a middle-class university-educated leadership brought with it a shift from economic protest to cultural protest.
Because writing isn’t for a working man. It sets him apart. Makes him lonely among his own people. It is an extravagance a working man cannot afford. He isn’t such a good toiler if he knows too much or does things like writing.
Terrific arguments used to spring up among working people at the mention of Darwin’s name. Nobody had read any of his books, nobody knew anything about the origin of species. But that was all the better. If you only have a small amount of exact knowledge, and if you are a truthful sort of person, your knowledge limits your arguments. But when you know nothing at all you can argue north, south, east, and west, just as your fancy takes you.
It was at a Methodist society that Lawson first found working people who shared his intellectual passions. One had been well into his thirties before his wife taught him to read: in his old age he was successfully tackling the New Testament in Greek and Nietzsche.
It is true that our fathers, in Wales, taught us a religion of cast-iron dogma, which, according to all the theories, should have made us obscurantists, inhabiting a very small world. But it did not. In some mysterious way we became freemen of a spacious world. Along beside the narrow dogma went a broad culture.
Among its students, as one observer noted, it managed “to create a sense of confidence in the outside world, and so to help break through the reluctance and doubt of men trained from childhood with little or no idea of other places or other work beyond that of mining.” In so doing, however, Maes yr haf encouraged the best minds to leave the coalfields.
Many of the books I’d already read but I was coming to them now under guidance, and seeing them from new and unsuspected angles. … I was acquiring knowledge now under discipline, and finding, while doing it, that the masses of undigested, unselected facts, with which my retentive memory teemed, were falling into form and place and becoming altogether more formidable weapons in my armoury.
He was an excellent teacher, genuinely interested in discussing ideas and persuading students to express their own. It was rather like boxing with a far superior opponent who wants to encourage you and will not take advantage of his greater skill. Yet he never patronised or pretended ignorance; he treated students as his equals in intelligence, if not in knowledge.
“Greek art will never keep the workers from claiming their world; in fact, it will help them to realise what a stunted life they have hitherto led. Nothing that is beautiful will harm the workers.”
This is one of the functions of the frame: like an intelligence analyst, it must first sift “signals” from a much larger body of irrelevant “noise” before it can interpret the former. As one London East Ender explained in 1911, he developed an internal censor to edit “the flood of goody-goody literature which was poured in upon us. Kindly institutions sought to lead us into the right path by giving us endless tracts, or books in which the comparative pill of religious teaching was clumsily coated by a mild story. It was necessary in self-defense to pick out the interesting parts, which to me at the time were certainly not those that led to the hero’s conversion, or the heroine’s first prayer.”
After she graduated and found work with the Times Book Club, she discovered the West End. It was a thrill to visit the galleries and theaters, but she felt as disoriented as a tourist in a foreign capital. She never thought to buy a street map: she had no idea that such things existed, and in any case would have considered it “an unacceptable extravagance.”
I knew their names but they were not nearly so important as the names of the shops in the small part of London in which I had been born and reared. England was but a suburb of London just as London itself was but a suburb of Clerkenwell.