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The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
This prizewinning book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers' memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, the author discovers how members of the working classes educated themselves, which books they read, and how their reading influenced them.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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2666 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Rose
81 books18 followersJonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. He is co-editor of Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. He held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the The Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.
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June 17, 2020
The bedrock of conservatism is a fundamental pessimism about the behavior of other people whereas progressivism is based on optimism. This book is a resounding case for optimism. Today the white working-class of Western societies is typically stereotyped as being unintellectual. In general this may be true, but as this book shows that is hardly an ineffable condition. In the past there was a great hunger for literature of all types among miners, colliers, factory workers and many other typically working class professions. The tradition of the autodidact was strong in the British working class and eventually blossomed into the popular base of the Labor Party.
I felt a certain sense of identity with the stories collected here since I could recognize many of these ordinary readers as kin. It was common for a miller or blacksmith to prop a book by their workstation and sneak as many pages as they could of reading a day. Miners kept their own mongrel libraries, leaving us behind a record of their interests and reading habits. It was common for workers at one time to write their own biographies and these ordinary Britishers thus left behind a rich set of accounts about their lives. There were many brilliant people who did their best to claim for themselves a part of the wider intellectual world, despite the incredible constraints that fate had placed upon them. It has always been hard for me to understand how people who have the easy opportunity to learn don’t take it.
The self-taught workers clashed with Marxists and gravitated to their own common sense vision of the good, based on a type of “Practical Christianity” of prudence and good works that they had gleaned from their liberal readings. This book doesn’t clearly determine “what happened” to the autodidactic working-class tradition. But it seemed to be degraded by the rise of visual culture and the efforts of elite intellectuals to keep crafting an ever more modern culture that would protect their position and exclude those below them. Today it is merely a remarkable memory.
I felt a certain sense of identity with the stories collected here since I could recognize many of these ordinary readers as kin. It was common for a miller or blacksmith to prop a book by their workstation and sneak as many pages as they could of reading a day. Miners kept their own mongrel libraries, leaving us behind a record of their interests and reading habits. It was common for workers at one time to write their own biographies and these ordinary Britishers thus left behind a rich set of accounts about their lives. There were many brilliant people who did their best to claim for themselves a part of the wider intellectual world, despite the incredible constraints that fate had placed upon them. It has always been hard for me to understand how people who have the easy opportunity to learn don’t take it.
The self-taught workers clashed with Marxists and gravitated to their own common sense vision of the good, based on a type of “Practical Christianity” of prudence and good works that they had gleaned from their liberal readings. This book doesn’t clearly determine “what happened” to the autodidactic working-class tradition. But it seemed to be degraded by the rise of visual culture and the efforts of elite intellectuals to keep crafting an ever more modern culture that would protect their position and exclude those below them. Today it is merely a remarkable memory.
Read
December 6, 2021My wife: "What are you reading?"
Me: "A book called, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes."
Wife: "Sounds thrilling."
Me: "It is!"
And, it really is thrilling in its way. This is a fascinating book, crammed full of quotes and anecdotes: maids dreaming of becoming novelists and Welsh miners quoting long passages of poetry in the darkness of the pit. Rose lets the "working classes" speak for themselves largely via a vast amount of research collected from published and unpublished memoirs of self-educated workers. I suppose I enjoyed the book so much, in part, in that I recognized members of my own tribe - people who, once they discovered reading and literature, were transformed by it (and became a little obsessed with it). I worked through this book slowly, reading it on lunch breaks mostly, and while I enjoy so many more advantages than the readers Rose describes in his books, I suppose I identify with the autodidact tradition he chronicles (even while being staggered at times at some of the challenges working class autodidacts had to face and overcome). Rose nicely deflates certain popular assumptions of academic cultural theory (on the canon, on who reads what and why, on the capacities of readers), and brings empirical evidence to understanding how cultural frames change reader response (I'm not qualified to judge some of the arguments he makes in relating the intellectual history he describes with the history of working class politics in Britain). On a larger level, the book serves as a caution against the temptation to condescension as it reminds its readers of the rich inner lives of others and challenges certain default societal assumptions about what (and who!) is valuable. With the collapse of professional academia well underway, this book also provides resources for thinking through how one might cultivate intellectual life and community outside the realm of the university (and some of the challenges that must be faced). A long read, technical in spots, but well worth it.
Me: "A book called, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes."
Wife: "Sounds thrilling."
Me: "It is!"
And, it really is thrilling in its way. This is a fascinating book, crammed full of quotes and anecdotes: maids dreaming of becoming novelists and Welsh miners quoting long passages of poetry in the darkness of the pit. Rose lets the "working classes" speak for themselves largely via a vast amount of research collected from published and unpublished memoirs of self-educated workers. I suppose I enjoyed the book so much, in part, in that I recognized members of my own tribe - people who, once they discovered reading and literature, were transformed by it (and became a little obsessed with it). I worked through this book slowly, reading it on lunch breaks mostly, and while I enjoy so many more advantages than the readers Rose describes in his books, I suppose I identify with the autodidact tradition he chronicles (even while being staggered at times at some of the challenges working class autodidacts had to face and overcome). Rose nicely deflates certain popular assumptions of academic cultural theory (on the canon, on who reads what and why, on the capacities of readers), and brings empirical evidence to understanding how cultural frames change reader response (I'm not qualified to judge some of the arguments he makes in relating the intellectual history he describes with the history of working class politics in Britain). On a larger level, the book serves as a caution against the temptation to condescension as it reminds its readers of the rich inner lives of others and challenges certain default societal assumptions about what (and who!) is valuable. With the collapse of professional academia well underway, this book also provides resources for thinking through how one might cultivate intellectual life and community outside the realm of the university (and some of the challenges that must be faced). A long read, technical in spots, but well worth it.
June 2, 2011
A monumental book, full of the most amazing new insights. A sort of intellectual roller coaster ride through the period 1850 to 1950, mainly focused on Britain but with asides to the US and Europe. Instead of focusing on what was being written, he focuses on what was being read, using information from working class memoirs, public library loan records and book sales. I grew up near the South Wales coalfield which still had the aftermath to its history of working class passionate drive for education. I suppose therefore this book filled in much detail to a story whose outlines I already knew: the miners who could quote Homer or Marx equally well in pub arguments with my father. But I suppose what is interesting, is that this book in a way is a prolonged denunciation of the elitism of much current academic study, of the post modernists contempt for Great Works. And here we have future radical leaders transformed not by modernism but by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Dickens. Great works of art undermined the dominance over the minds of the workers, not preaching of specific religious or political bills of goods. Anyway, the book has left me quite stunned and will take time to digest; but if you are up to a 464 page ride, it is worth the trip and as A C Grayling calls it: 'A historical triumph, extraordinary, heartening, sometimes astonishing, often moving.'
And seeing the hunger for learning and the way the ruling elites tried to literally stop their servants reading in their own time, I wondered how much has changed. Isn't the dumbing down of media achieving the same thing? And don't Great Books retain their radical potential to make use realize that we see the world through frames and knowing that is the most radical thought we can have. A weaver in around 1850 stumbling across Homer and finding out another world existed. Weavers in Scotland were something like 95% literate and read as they wove.
And seeing the hunger for learning and the way the ruling elites tried to literally stop their servants reading in their own time, I wondered how much has changed. Isn't the dumbing down of media achieving the same thing? And don't Great Books retain their radical potential to make use realize that we see the world through frames and knowing that is the most radical thought we can have. A weaver in around 1850 stumbling across Homer and finding out another world existed. Weavers in Scotland were something like 95% literate and read as they wove.
April 24, 2013
Meticulously research, this provides a reservoir of source material to follow up. The highly readable themes cohere nicely. There are revelations of our near working class history in every chapter, signposts to hundreds of other destinations. Obviously, a work like this has to be severely edited, and there is no room for the author to develop ideological critiques. However, despite the odd nod in the direction of balance, it's clear that Rose wants to evoke a past age when things were 'better', when ordinary lasses and blokes were 'more cultured': lots of truth in that - but. His cavalier dismissal of cultural studies which turned, according to him, into some sort of monster that devoured the likes of Hoggart almost immediately after he had set up the CCCS, is too polarised, and he could easily be challenged over his last three chapters. Still, even a leftie like myself has no hesitation in recommending this superb study of working class cultural life.
September 17, 2013
Over 10 years since I first read it, this book is still an engaging debate on the validity of education for all, not just the social elite, and the innate desire to learn. It is also a helpful reminder that we shouldn't become too complacent about the advantages that modern education can confer, or the erosion by present-day governments, anxious to mark changes on the education system and do away with meritocracy in favour of those who can afford to pay the fees.
It also made me remember my maternal grandfather who, despite ambitions and having the intellectual ability to be a schoolteacher, was told by his father that as the eldest of 6 children he had to go out and work to support the family, instead of study. He lied about his age and fought in the Great War instead, was gassed in the trenches and subsequently returned home to work in a steel mill in the north. My elderly aunt still remembers him reading a book every day.
It also made me remember my maternal grandfather who, despite ambitions and having the intellectual ability to be a schoolteacher, was told by his father that as the eldest of 6 children he had to go out and work to support the family, instead of study. He lied about his age and fought in the Great War instead, was gassed in the trenches and subsequently returned home to work in a steel mill in the north. My elderly aunt still remembers him reading a book every day.
July 24, 2011
Humbling (methodologically for the historian), and impressive (in its scholarship for that same historian): me in both cases. Through detailed analyses of things such as library stock and lending records, diaries and journals, Rose has revealed an extremely rich world of working class erudition, auto-didacticism, and scholarship. Here are groups of miners in a reading circle exploring Kant and the big issues of Enlightenment philosophy. Importantly, Rose reveals a working class intellectual life that did not conceive of 'really useful knowledge' as vocational training and that resisted the bosses ideas about Mechanics Institutes in favour of high intellectualism – not just an impressive piece of scholarship, but a book that should significantly revise our views of the 19th and early 20th century British working class.
June 2, 2013
I'm not going to try recommending this because let's face it, who apart from me is going to be demented enough to want to read a 500-odd page book about the reading habits of long-dead British workers? I will say that I loved it, found it constantly engaging and insightful, and that I particularly liked the way the author put the boot into Marx, Joyce and various other political and literary sacred cows.
November 3, 2024
It is hard to walk away feeling uninspired.
November 23, 2019
I've been pecking away at this book for eight months, and didn't want it to end. I've a feeling it'll be simmering in the old brain for years to come. My main take-aways seem to be three things:
-Modernism as a bourgeois response to working-class autodidact culture. Rose argues beautifully and with thoroughness that the mass proliferation of cheap paperback classics, libraries, monotonous factory work (book on the loom, you know) and mutual aid societies were raising the 'masses' to a level of cultural literacy which made the upper class nervous. This elite education had been the sole domain of those with the funds and leisure to afford the luxury of Culture. In a conscious effort to move the goal post beyond reach, the literati of Bloomsbury concocted Modernism, a literary style intentionally obscure, effectively barring the way for those who had dared to get familiar with the Classics. The miner who had only just discovered Scott, Bunyan and Milton was totally unprepared for The Wasteland, and that was sort of the point.
This trend swept through those "in the know", effectively barring the way for normal folks to participate in Culture for a generation. Mua-ha-ha!
-Rose describes a theory of Culture (its manufacture and dissemination) which I found fascinating and enlightening. What had previously been a vague skepticism of mine towards both "popular culture" and the avant garde has been fleshed out by Rose's argument that the one trickles down from the other. The cutting edge ("cool") gets packaged, sold, and distributed throughout mass culture, so that it's soon depressingly common, irredeemably outdated. To remain sharp, the cutting edge must be forever hankering for the "new thing". But alas, weird is forever the new normal, and so the race continues as the goal posts are moved on and on. So the consumers of culture are always buying what the producers of culture have since discarded. The consumers never catch up, and the producers can never pause to rest or take stock, because the new "new" is always around the next corner. Talk about exhausting. No thank you.
-My most treasured take-away is that I think I found "my people" in the pages of this book. The working-class autodidacts who believed in education not primarily for its economic value, not for "relevance", but because it was a worthy undertaking. It was good, noble, and ennobling to read the great thoughts that came before. Though I don't have nearly the level of poverty or difficulties these workers had, I can't help but feel an affinity toward Welsh miners who lightened the shafts with light from Milton, Socrates, and Dante. Poverty-stricken housewives who claimed the dignity of a well-swept dirt floor and sought a leg-up from Shakespeare so that they might point their children a little farther beyond the grime of East London.
I have to thank Mr. Rose for the incredible amount of research and care he put into the writing of this book. The notes and index are also heavy with ripe fruit. Can't recommend this book enough.
-Modernism as a bourgeois response to working-class autodidact culture. Rose argues beautifully and with thoroughness that the mass proliferation of cheap paperback classics, libraries, monotonous factory work (book on the loom, you know) and mutual aid societies were raising the 'masses' to a level of cultural literacy which made the upper class nervous. This elite education had been the sole domain of those with the funds and leisure to afford the luxury of Culture. In a conscious effort to move the goal post beyond reach, the literati of Bloomsbury concocted Modernism, a literary style intentionally obscure, effectively barring the way for those who had dared to get familiar with the Classics. The miner who had only just discovered Scott, Bunyan and Milton was totally unprepared for The Wasteland, and that was sort of the point.
This trend swept through those "in the know", effectively barring the way for normal folks to participate in Culture for a generation. Mua-ha-ha!
-Rose describes a theory of Culture (its manufacture and dissemination) which I found fascinating and enlightening. What had previously been a vague skepticism of mine towards both "popular culture" and the avant garde has been fleshed out by Rose's argument that the one trickles down from the other. The cutting edge ("cool") gets packaged, sold, and distributed throughout mass culture, so that it's soon depressingly common, irredeemably outdated. To remain sharp, the cutting edge must be forever hankering for the "new thing". But alas, weird is forever the new normal, and so the race continues as the goal posts are moved on and on. So the consumers of culture are always buying what the producers of culture have since discarded. The consumers never catch up, and the producers can never pause to rest or take stock, because the new "new" is always around the next corner. Talk about exhausting. No thank you.
-My most treasured take-away is that I think I found "my people" in the pages of this book. The working-class autodidacts who believed in education not primarily for its economic value, not for "relevance", but because it was a worthy undertaking. It was good, noble, and ennobling to read the great thoughts that came before. Though I don't have nearly the level of poverty or difficulties these workers had, I can't help but feel an affinity toward Welsh miners who lightened the shafts with light from Milton, Socrates, and Dante. Poverty-stricken housewives who claimed the dignity of a well-swept dirt floor and sought a leg-up from Shakespeare so that they might point their children a little farther beyond the grime of East London.
I have to thank Mr. Rose for the incredible amount of research and care he put into the writing of this book. The notes and index are also heavy with ripe fruit. Can't recommend this book enough.
September 11, 2021
Reading this back in 2013 was a revelatory experience: finally, I thought, we know who was reading what! We are treated to surveys of working-class (and lower middle/middle-class) readers and excerpts from accounts of working-class intellectuals. There are many accounts of people climbing out of poverty to become authors, politicians, teachers, academics with richly satisfying intellectual lives. There are cases of some people who simply expanded their minds at night while enduring drudgery during the day. It was such a positive experience, and informed my thesis, as many of the accounts are late-19th/early-20th century, shedding light on the perceptions of the reading masses from publishers and famous novelists of the day. Take, for instance, G. A. Henty, immensely popular boys' author who wrote about heroes in far-off colonial lands: it is clear from Rose's book that the author's intention - to turn schoolboys into imperialist ideologues - was largely ineffective for working-class readers.
Rereading the recently released third edition has been fun, but has highlighted some of the book's limitations. Some of the debates are a little dated (culture wars/canon debates still exist but have a different focus now, and the author probably does too) and there is an over-reliance on certain readers who loom larger than others but distort the reality - Alice Foley, Flora Thompson, Robert Blatchford, et al. Sometimes, admittedly rarely, it feels as if the author is threading his prose through the quotations in a mechanical way. It is also sad that the class wars are back, something that was no longer considered an issue in the second edition, but something that is addressed with regret in Rose's new (albeit brief) preface.
All in all, though, this remains a valuable book, and one that I wish more people would read.
Rereading the recently released third edition has been fun, but has highlighted some of the book's limitations. Some of the debates are a little dated (culture wars/canon debates still exist but have a different focus now, and the author probably does too) and there is an over-reliance on certain readers who loom larger than others but distort the reality - Alice Foley, Flora Thompson, Robert Blatchford, et al. Sometimes, admittedly rarely, it feels as if the author is threading his prose through the quotations in a mechanical way. It is also sad that the class wars are back, something that was no longer considered an issue in the second edition, but something that is addressed with regret in Rose's new (albeit brief) preface.
All in all, though, this remains a valuable book, and one that I wish more people would read.
July 1, 2023
A rich history of the working class tradition of autodidacticism and the constant class tensions it created. To some degree it’s a lament for a lost culture, one my mum, a child of the South Wales valleys, will often talk about, mentioning that there were some phenomenally clever self-educated people about. It’s also a pointer to some neglected culture and why it mattered so much to the supposedly uneducated masses.
As a warning, it comes to a somewhat pessimistic conclusion (though this is compellingly argued throughout), not only in terms of how culture works in a class-riddled society but in the aims of modern governments and their denigration of low and high arts. And in that it perhaps becomes something quite special, not only a history of a neglected audience wiling and eager to improve and learn but a thoughtful call to arms on a vital tradition on the verge of being lost completely (if it hasn’t been already).
As a warning, it comes to a somewhat pessimistic conclusion (though this is compellingly argued throughout), not only in terms of how culture works in a class-riddled society but in the aims of modern governments and their denigration of low and high arts. And in that it perhaps becomes something quite special, not only a history of a neglected audience wiling and eager to improve and learn but a thoughtful call to arms on a vital tradition on the verge of being lost completely (if it hasn’t been already).
October 6, 2014
A worthwhile and fascinating topic presented in a sometimes crisp and accessible, memorable manner, and, at other times--the majority of times--presented in a dull, plodding, unnecessarily dense manner.
December 8, 2011
An avalanche of evidence that in the preTV world of the 19th and early 20th centuries many of the working class had a thriving self-education ethos, centred on the classics.
October 19, 2007
This is a very readable, absolutely fascinating look at what the British working classes were reading and learning from the 1700s to the mid-20th century. The author discusses what books and plays were most popular among with working classes, different traditions of schooling, the libraries and self-improvement societies established by Welsh miners...I could go on and on. The title sounds dry, but the book is full of surprises and well worth a look.
May 29, 2013
A book which changed my life. The working man got a ravenous desire to read nd they read anything and everything to get that skill ability. The Bloomsbury Set under Virginia Woolf suppressed the new Intelligentsia that resulted.
April 4, 2025
An extensive dive into a fascinating issue, striking an excellent balance between detail and readability. Though the author only advances this argument himself intermittently, I was most struck by the difference between views of the working class derived from broad theories and those arising from empirical evidence. It's also amusing to see so many classics I was assigned in school getting treated as new trash, though on that note...
The author has a tendency to ironically use the language of others, making it difficult to pin down his own thoughts at times. I mention this primarily because in my opinion the text sometimes lacks the neutrality that would befit a work like this, though of course this comes down to the author and I being (likely) divided on some fundamental issues.
I often complain that nonfiction doesn't have enough primary source quotations, but that's absolutely not an issue here: there are abundant quotations, both aggregated and at length, concurring and disagreeing. That's everything I want from a book chronicling past opinions.
The author has a tendency to ironically use the language of others, making it difficult to pin down his own thoughts at times. I mention this primarily because in my opinion the text sometimes lacks the neutrality that would befit a work like this, though of course this comes down to the author and I being (likely) divided on some fundamental issues.
I often complain that nonfiction doesn't have enough primary source quotations, but that's absolutely not an issue here: there are abundant quotations, both aggregated and at length, concurring and disagreeing. That's everything I want from a book chronicling past opinions.
September 7, 2024
beyond astonished, the immense usage of firsthand sources/documents drew me to incredible perspectives
May 16, 2017
This has been an absolutely wonderful read. Each night I would read a section - ranging from 2 to 10 pages - to my mother, which allowed me to show off my familiarity with the topic by serving as a running commentary, explaining details on almost every page. That said, it is not a book for everyone: she has very little knowledge of either the period or the literature, so without my assistance this book would have been meaningless to her. However, having been a proud autodidact since childhood, this was for the most part a relatively easy read for me.
The primary argument of the author is that everybody is wrong when it comes to how they investigate how literature influences people. That is, they look at the literature and imagine how it must have influenced people, yet never actually ask the people how they themselves felt to have been influenced by it. So by studying surveys and autobiographies written by WEA members, Ruskin College attendees, and miscellaneous autodidacts ranging from the 1750s to the 1950s, Rose endeavours to provide the audience's side of the picture.
Yes, this book can be dull at times, overly repetitive, and sometimes negatively didactic, bit in general it is an excellent read. The middle sections deal a little too much with Marxism in working class thought (rather, what the working class interpreted as Marxism, for, apparently, nobody had ever actually managed to get through Marx), and the book as a whole could have dealt a lot more, to my liking, with the topic of the introduction: frames and individual interpretations and how people experience what they read, etc. But, as a whole, this is a remarkably enjoyable and elucidating book.
The primary argument of the author is that everybody is wrong when it comes to how they investigate how literature influences people. That is, they look at the literature and imagine how it must have influenced people, yet never actually ask the people how they themselves felt to have been influenced by it. So by studying surveys and autobiographies written by WEA members, Ruskin College attendees, and miscellaneous autodidacts ranging from the 1750s to the 1950s, Rose endeavours to provide the audience's side of the picture.
Yes, this book can be dull at times, overly repetitive, and sometimes negatively didactic, bit in general it is an excellent read. The middle sections deal a little too much with Marxism in working class thought (rather, what the working class interpreted as Marxism, for, apparently, nobody had ever actually managed to get through Marx), and the book as a whole could have dealt a lot more, to my liking, with the topic of the introduction: frames and individual interpretations and how people experience what they read, etc. But, as a whole, this is a remarkably enjoyable and elucidating book.
September 10, 2020
An excellent introduction to traditional working-class autodidact culture and the authors, publications and institutions involved. I’ll give this book an extra star for its alternative canon of worker authors and their reminiscences of pre-TV everyday life. Meticulously researched but not at all ponderous or academic in style.
Growing up in 1950s and 1960s Manchester, I was only very vaguely aware of the working-class self-help culture around me: the odd book by a local writer in the public library, a knowledgeable, pipe-smoking bloke in the corner of the pub who was said to write slogans for breweries, an old textile-worker uncle who left Esperantist magazines in our toilet, the occasional snippet of a dialect poem recited out of the blue. We were never taught anything at school about our own community’s literary traditions and history, so it is only many years later that I can get a clearer view from a distance. The panoramic views afforded by this polyphony of memoirs are rich in information and sometimes quite powerful in their effect.
Growing up in 1950s and 1960s Manchester, I was only very vaguely aware of the working-class self-help culture around me: the odd book by a local writer in the public library, a knowledgeable, pipe-smoking bloke in the corner of the pub who was said to write slogans for breweries, an old textile-worker uncle who left Esperantist magazines in our toilet, the occasional snippet of a dialect poem recited out of the blue. We were never taught anything at school about our own community’s literary traditions and history, so it is only many years later that I can get a clearer view from a distance. The panoramic views afforded by this polyphony of memoirs are rich in information and sometimes quite powerful in their effect.
September 21, 2016
Magisterial to a degree uncommon in today's academia, Rose is an illuminating and forceful advocate of studying actual readers. Several major arguments to be found here overturn generations of lip-service from critics. Working class readers did read "high" literature; they did so for many reasons more frequent than class aspirations; their reading patterns often ignored the division between "high" and "low" or "mass" culture to begin with; when they read "low" literature they often got more complex meanings out of it than we expect; neither readers nor reading practices cleanly correspond to genres; they didn't just follow set meanings but developed their own to both support or oppose socio-econonic forces in their own lives; etc. If you're interested in the long 19th century British literature or working class, read it.
February 6, 2014
The enthralling story of how weavers, navvies, and clerks struggled over two centuries to educate themselves and become conversant in literature, philosophy, politics, science, and the arts, until their ultimate defeat at the hands of the hipsters.
August 30, 2011
See my review on my book blog:
http://quirkyreader.livejournal.com/1...
http://quirkyreader.livejournal.com/1...
October 17, 2012
I loved this. Fascinating and heartening to read about self-education and mutual improvement clubs in the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries. Brilliant book.
August 5, 2024
It is often assumed that social class is no longer as relevant as it used to be. Alongside this, there is often the equally false assumption that people from working class communities either don't read books or, if they do, they read what used to be called "penny dreadfuls", that is books with little or no literary quality. In his ground-breaking 500+ page "The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes", Jonathan Rose debunks both these assumptions. He argues that far too often, critics concentrate on writers, rather than looking at the experiences of readers.
He attempts to restore some balance by looking at the largely unpublished memoirs, autobiographies and diaries of over 2000 workers from the late 18th to mid 20th century, workers who include miners, factory workers, agricultural workers, those who work in transport, shop workers, low level clerks and others, most of whom were avid readers. Very few of these went on to higher education, though some did find their way to Mechanics Institutions and branches of the WEA (Workers Education Authority), and even for those few who did end up at university, the term "autodidact" (or self-taught) still applies. The bulk of this book and its conclusions are based on what these workers wrote about their experience of reading.
What becomes apparent is that there is a long tradition of reading among working classes and that tradition includes classic and sometimes difficult texts. For many of the earlier generations looked at here, the Bible and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" were the first books they came across. But more secular writing soon became popular, including the poetry of Homer; the plays of Shakespeare; poets such as Milton, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; novelists like Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen and Hardy and philosophers like Plato, Aristostle, Carlyle and Hume. Interestingly, these are some of the writers that inspired me as a teenager and adult, years before I went to university as a mature student.
We read of people who came across particular books that led to further reading. We find workers who saved up to buy cheap second-hand editions of classics, of the formation of reading groups where books would be shared and discussed and, once free public libraries began to be opened, borrowing books. We also discover the influence such book reading had on working class creativity and politics. Many of these autodidacts became amateur - and occasionally professional - writers, creating poetry, fiction and articles for magazines and newspapers. Many also became trade union and political activists, including leading figures in the early days of the Labour Party (as well as the ILP -Independent Labour Party, the Communist Party and other Socialist groups). With his descriptions of workhouses, debtors prisons, unemployment, poverty, poor quality education and inequality, the work of Charles Dickens was particularly influential.
Rose is also highly critical of the modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century, with the elitism and obscurantism of the likes of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and others being recipients of his ire. He argues that these authors write in a way that is deliberately difficult and obscure in order to ensure that the best literature is beyond the understanding of the "lower" orders. Although I agree with much of what he writes about modernism, I do feel he ignores what is good and worth saving in modernist literature. Personally, I find Woolf tedious, Joyce unreadable and Pound's fascism a barrier, but there are others whose work can be enlightening. None more so than the poetry of T. S. Eliot, though I have little time for some of his literary and political views.
The book is at its weakest when discussing the second half of the 20th century, with his dislike of beat poetry, rock music and pop art clouding his judgement. I also found his analysis of the effects of imperialism on working class communities in the 19th and early 20th century to be flawed. He is probably correct when he says that the Empire had little effect on the thinking of the working classes, but he fails to mention that workers did benefit from the exploitation at the heart of imperialism. As others have pointed out, without such exploitation, there may not have been the resources to bring in free education, old age pensions, public libraries and even the NHS.
But overall, his analysis and the presentation of the experiences of workers provides a much needed corrective. And while reading this book, I was reminded of when in my early 20s I worked as a labourer in a foundry where I became friendly with a fellow labourer who was secretary of the local James Joyce Appreciation Society. We spent many a happy evening in the pub together discussing the merits and faults of - and comparing - James Joyce and my favourite writer Charles Dickens. I also worked alongside amateur musicians, artists and writers. And like many of the experiences Rose describes, my reading also helped educate me politically as I became involved in the trade union movement and a Labour party activist.
He attempts to restore some balance by looking at the largely unpublished memoirs, autobiographies and diaries of over 2000 workers from the late 18th to mid 20th century, workers who include miners, factory workers, agricultural workers, those who work in transport, shop workers, low level clerks and others, most of whom were avid readers. Very few of these went on to higher education, though some did find their way to Mechanics Institutions and branches of the WEA (Workers Education Authority), and even for those few who did end up at university, the term "autodidact" (or self-taught) still applies. The bulk of this book and its conclusions are based on what these workers wrote about their experience of reading.
What becomes apparent is that there is a long tradition of reading among working classes and that tradition includes classic and sometimes difficult texts. For many of the earlier generations looked at here, the Bible and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" were the first books they came across. But more secular writing soon became popular, including the poetry of Homer; the plays of Shakespeare; poets such as Milton, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; novelists like Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen and Hardy and philosophers like Plato, Aristostle, Carlyle and Hume. Interestingly, these are some of the writers that inspired me as a teenager and adult, years before I went to university as a mature student.
We read of people who came across particular books that led to further reading. We find workers who saved up to buy cheap second-hand editions of classics, of the formation of reading groups where books would be shared and discussed and, once free public libraries began to be opened, borrowing books. We also discover the influence such book reading had on working class creativity and politics. Many of these autodidacts became amateur - and occasionally professional - writers, creating poetry, fiction and articles for magazines and newspapers. Many also became trade union and political activists, including leading figures in the early days of the Labour Party (as well as the ILP -Independent Labour Party, the Communist Party and other Socialist groups). With his descriptions of workhouses, debtors prisons, unemployment, poverty, poor quality education and inequality, the work of Charles Dickens was particularly influential.
Rose is also highly critical of the modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century, with the elitism and obscurantism of the likes of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and others being recipients of his ire. He argues that these authors write in a way that is deliberately difficult and obscure in order to ensure that the best literature is beyond the understanding of the "lower" orders. Although I agree with much of what he writes about modernism, I do feel he ignores what is good and worth saving in modernist literature. Personally, I find Woolf tedious, Joyce unreadable and Pound's fascism a barrier, but there are others whose work can be enlightening. None more so than the poetry of T. S. Eliot, though I have little time for some of his literary and political views.
The book is at its weakest when discussing the second half of the 20th century, with his dislike of beat poetry, rock music and pop art clouding his judgement. I also found his analysis of the effects of imperialism on working class communities in the 19th and early 20th century to be flawed. He is probably correct when he says that the Empire had little effect on the thinking of the working classes, but he fails to mention that workers did benefit from the exploitation at the heart of imperialism. As others have pointed out, without such exploitation, there may not have been the resources to bring in free education, old age pensions, public libraries and even the NHS.
But overall, his analysis and the presentation of the experiences of workers provides a much needed corrective. And while reading this book, I was reminded of when in my early 20s I worked as a labourer in a foundry where I became friendly with a fellow labourer who was secretary of the local James Joyce Appreciation Society. We spent many a happy evening in the pub together discussing the merits and faults of - and comparing - James Joyce and my favourite writer Charles Dickens. I also worked alongside amateur musicians, artists and writers. And like many of the experiences Rose describes, my reading also helped educate me politically as I became involved in the trade union movement and a Labour party activist.
March 24, 2025
This is a thought-provoking study of British autodidact culture with illuminating first-person accounts from autobiographies, diaries, and the occasional survey/study.
This book was published in 2001, in the afterglow of '80s and '90s "canon" discourse. Allen Bloom, E.D. Hirsch - you get the idea. This isn't a right-wing social media denunciation of What They Took From Us (RETVRN) but there is a strong conservative sympathy for the pre-modernist here. Marxists don't come off well, and bohemianism in general is discussed as just another industry, but for liberal arts types. Not a new angle, but Rose handles it well.
I was drawn to this book because it isn't 2001 anymore and I needed some insight. We're in the age of Trump, social media, climate change, and AI, and a lot of people (graduate of the school of hard knocks is common social media self-description) are "doing their own research" on the efficacy of vaccines. Rose doesn't go into the hard sciences much, and gatekeeping and credentialism exist as he points out, but anyone who has read or tried to read a scientific paper can see the problem of killing off expertise. Studying immunology (race science is more like it) through propaganda mills like AM talk radio and Prager U. isn't going to cut it. So as far as a dotted line from the days of mass availability of books being a new thing to the wash of (mis)information that we now swim in, I'm pretty jaded. The urge to self-improve is there, and the entrepreneurs that facilitate/mold that have always been there, but the current outlook isn't good in spite of the legitimate resources that are available.
I found a good deal of perspective into my own experience. I don't have working class roots - it was assumed I would go to college, and I did, where I studied literature, natch, but I frequently turn wrenches and drive a truck at my tech job. I remember my days as an "office boy" (Rose uses the term for the clerking class that emerged in the 1800s) when I could make ends meet and still have plenty of time for indy rock, hanging out, and my reading habit. This was before gentrification redefined the bohemian landscape and the dot com boom offered many a Gen X slacker a path to prosperity that didn't involve law school.
Another thing that resonated with me personally was the value of the second-hand book market for working class autodidacts, and how reading used books left them behind the literary vanguard. Used book stores used to be much more of a thing, and in high school I discovered the Lanny Budd books by Upton Sinclair. Hugely popular in the WWII years but quite out of fashion in the '80s, the Budd books and "Oil!" used the formula of the upper class scion who discovers socialism. Sinclair's origins as the son of fallen Southern gentry may've been a factor. Along the way the reader gets a primer on fascism, the "merchants of death" theory, tension between incremental change and revolutionary schools of thought, and some goofy spiritualism for good measure. This dovetails with Gold's writing - Sinclair threaded the needle between left-wing didacticism and page-turning fun to make a bestselling pitch for left politics, but postwar prosperity and the Cold War appear to have sapped his audience's socialist fervor.
Terms like autodidact or polymath can come off as loaded or pretentious, but I'm grateful I was encouraged to read as a child and I consider myself a lifelong learner.
Once again, this is a thought-provoking read and the first person accounts by the working class learners are often quite moving.
Now after reading such an improving book, I'm off to read some trash!
This book was published in 2001, in the afterglow of '80s and '90s "canon" discourse. Allen Bloom, E.D. Hirsch - you get the idea. This isn't a right-wing social media denunciation of What They Took From Us (RETVRN) but there is a strong conservative sympathy for the pre-modernist here. Marxists don't come off well, and bohemianism in general is discussed as just another industry, but for liberal arts types. Not a new angle, but Rose handles it well.
I was drawn to this book because it isn't 2001 anymore and I needed some insight. We're in the age of Trump, social media, climate change, and AI, and a lot of people (graduate of the school of hard knocks is common social media self-description) are "doing their own research" on the efficacy of vaccines. Rose doesn't go into the hard sciences much, and gatekeeping and credentialism exist as he points out, but anyone who has read or tried to read a scientific paper can see the problem of killing off expertise. Studying immunology (race science is more like it) through propaganda mills like AM talk radio and Prager U. isn't going to cut it. So as far as a dotted line from the days of mass availability of books being a new thing to the wash of (mis)information that we now swim in, I'm pretty jaded. The urge to self-improve is there, and the entrepreneurs that facilitate/mold that have always been there, but the current outlook isn't good in spite of the legitimate resources that are available.
I found a good deal of perspective into my own experience. I don't have working class roots - it was assumed I would go to college, and I did, where I studied literature, natch, but I frequently turn wrenches and drive a truck at my tech job. I remember my days as an "office boy" (Rose uses the term for the clerking class that emerged in the 1800s) when I could make ends meet and still have plenty of time for indy rock, hanging out, and my reading habit. This was before gentrification redefined the bohemian landscape and the dot com boom offered many a Gen X slacker a path to prosperity that didn't involve law school.
Another thing that resonated with me personally was the value of the second-hand book market for working class autodidacts, and how reading used books left them behind the literary vanguard. Used book stores used to be much more of a thing, and in high school I discovered the Lanny Budd books by Upton Sinclair. Hugely popular in the WWII years but quite out of fashion in the '80s, the Budd books and "Oil!" used the formula of the upper class scion who discovers socialism. Sinclair's origins as the son of fallen Southern gentry may've been a factor. Along the way the reader gets a primer on fascism, the "merchants of death" theory, tension between incremental change and revolutionary schools of thought, and some goofy spiritualism for good measure. This dovetails with Gold's writing - Sinclair threaded the needle between left-wing didacticism and page-turning fun to make a bestselling pitch for left politics, but postwar prosperity and the Cold War appear to have sapped his audience's socialist fervor.
Terms like autodidact or polymath can come off as loaded or pretentious, but I'm grateful I was encouraged to read as a child and I consider myself a lifelong learner.
Once again, this is a thought-provoking read and the first person accounts by the working class learners are often quite moving.
Now after reading such an improving book, I'm off to read some trash!
September 5, 2023
Rose sets up an idealisation of the Canon of English Literature as the salvation of working-class readers. But then in the fulsome detail that follows, we learn how the great canonic writers despise the working class at the same time as needing them as readers, and we learn about the limitations of what they can write about because of their limited experience in the world and we learn about how they are unable to represent the intellectual richness and power of working-class people because of their entrenched classist attitudes.
BeCos many canonic writers are not Simply bourgeois. All are human. There are plenty of working-class fans of Billy Bunter. etc.
So the mass of material in this book, that Rose has provided, undermines his own arse-licking forelock tugging professorial attitude to the establishment.
It’s all good, thank you JR. I Know you did your best!
If the Leisure class can do one thing, it is to use that leisure time to create a world of words. An artful space, not just of representation but of a contemplation. Space for a readers contemplation of their mental freedom.
What Rose can’t do is to come to some radical imaginative conclusions of how to change the state of affairs - end class oppression Yes Sir!. Something that I Can do. Right now! I propose to rejig the category. Let’s scotch ‘proletarian fiction’. Let’s use a new category of ‘working-class books’. Let’s physically reorder our bookshelves and talk about that process.
What Rose doesn’t tell us, but the information he serves up to us does, is that there are now plenty of ‘working-class books’, as well as plenty of ‘working class songs’ and all we need to do is be more active and informed selectors.
The first mind blowing insight that I’m indebted to Prof Rose for is that the C19th and early C20th in England was a vibrant time of self-directed and mutual education by working class people. Why did no-one tell me about that before?! (That's how poor our intellectual connections are at this time!)
The second surprise provided to me by the good professor is that a working-class intelligentsia did in fact arise in the 1920s and 1930s from those C19th Mutual improvement societies, WEA et cetera and did even kick some arse of the elite modernist literature scene - even if its more commercial novels were disparaged as middlebrow. And its Labour Party was a faint imitation of working class vitality and power due to its deference to a culture of the higher ups.
If you want a lot more detail of my proposal go to my blogger for a long detailed and illustrated review with many quotations etc
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
BeCos many canonic writers are not Simply bourgeois. All are human. There are plenty of working-class fans of Billy Bunter. etc.
So the mass of material in this book, that Rose has provided, undermines his own arse-licking forelock tugging professorial attitude to the establishment.
It’s all good, thank you JR. I Know you did your best!
If the Leisure class can do one thing, it is to use that leisure time to create a world of words. An artful space, not just of representation but of a contemplation. Space for a readers contemplation of their mental freedom.
What Rose can’t do is to come to some radical imaginative conclusions of how to change the state of affairs - end class oppression Yes Sir!. Something that I Can do. Right now! I propose to rejig the category. Let’s scotch ‘proletarian fiction’. Let’s use a new category of ‘working-class books’. Let’s physically reorder our bookshelves and talk about that process.
What Rose doesn’t tell us, but the information he serves up to us does, is that there are now plenty of ‘working-class books’, as well as plenty of ‘working class songs’ and all we need to do is be more active and informed selectors.
The first mind blowing insight that I’m indebted to Prof Rose for is that the C19th and early C20th in England was a vibrant time of self-directed and mutual education by working class people. Why did no-one tell me about that before?! (That's how poor our intellectual connections are at this time!)
The second surprise provided to me by the good professor is that a working-class intelligentsia did in fact arise in the 1920s and 1930s from those C19th Mutual improvement societies, WEA et cetera and did even kick some arse of the elite modernist literature scene - even if its more commercial novels were disparaged as middlebrow. And its Labour Party was a faint imitation of working class vitality and power due to its deference to a culture of the higher ups.
If you want a lot more detail of my proposal go to my blogger for a long detailed and illustrated review with many quotations etc
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
May 11, 2022
This is a genuinely inspiring history of British autodidactism that while reading I couldn't help but think: "Let's bring it back!" But - as is hinted at throughout the book and which the final chapter explains, though rather briefly - the forces of post-industrialism have left little room for a similar sort of tradition to take hold in Britain, on comparable countries, today.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the liberal inclusion of quotes from 19th and early 20th century working class memoirs (which were quite common and which much of this book's material is based on). There are a number of incredibly touching anecdotes shared via the quotes and many experiences that are connected to larger topics like class alienation that comes with social advancement, tensions between cultural conservatism and economic progressivism in the working class, and the creation of avant-garde culture by elites in order to maintain the exclusion of increasingly well educated lower classes.
Rose's writing style isn't the smoothest, oftentimes reading like a dry history text, but his commentary on the memoir material and various autodidact enclaves and institutions is always illuminating and frequently provocative. Though his description of the British working classes is unapologetically positive, the nuance he threads throughout the book keeps him from lapsing into romanticism. What emerges in the end is a authentically moving portrait that encourages one to pursue learning as a miner, weaver or clerk of that era would have: out of pure interest and without concern for material benefit or social advancement.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the liberal inclusion of quotes from 19th and early 20th century working class memoirs (which were quite common and which much of this book's material is based on). There are a number of incredibly touching anecdotes shared via the quotes and many experiences that are connected to larger topics like class alienation that comes with social advancement, tensions between cultural conservatism and economic progressivism in the working class, and the creation of avant-garde culture by elites in order to maintain the exclusion of increasingly well educated lower classes.
Rose's writing style isn't the smoothest, oftentimes reading like a dry history text, but his commentary on the memoir material and various autodidact enclaves and institutions is always illuminating and frequently provocative. Though his description of the British working classes is unapologetically positive, the nuance he threads throughout the book keeps him from lapsing into romanticism. What emerges in the end is a authentically moving portrait that encourages one to pursue learning as a miner, weaver or clerk of that era would have: out of pure interest and without concern for material benefit or social advancement.
April 13, 2025
An extremely detailed study to understand how the British educated themselves. In short, the answer is: they were largely self-educated with “Book reading” as the source of knowledge.
The author quotes hundreds of autobiographies of common people to illustrate his points. He also mentions the common books & authors that influenced the British class. For example, the authors that influenced their education are mainly Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Samule Smiles, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Darwin, Adam Smith, Marx, George Orwel and many more. I read at least one book from all of these authors apart from Dickens & Marx, which I guess make me largely a self-educated person !
The number of quotes in the book is impossible to comprehend. The author must have read hundreds of biographies to quote this much (or maybe he used an AI tool to perform such task!). Anyhow, the book was exceedingly long, and I enjoyed 40% to 60 % of it, the rest was a bit of a stretch.
The author quotes hundreds of autobiographies of common people to illustrate his points. He also mentions the common books & authors that influenced the British class. For example, the authors that influenced their education are mainly Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Samule Smiles, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Darwin, Adam Smith, Marx, George Orwel and many more. I read at least one book from all of these authors apart from Dickens & Marx, which I guess make me largely a self-educated person !
The number of quotes in the book is impossible to comprehend. The author must have read hundreds of biographies to quote this much (or maybe he used an AI tool to perform such task!). Anyhow, the book was exceedingly long, and I enjoyed 40% to 60 % of it, the rest was a bit of a stretch.
June 28, 2022
Utterly phenomenal. Rose fuses his enormous base of research into a colossal narrative of surprising fluidity. By the end his insights seem nigh irrefutable, although I did find myself in disagreement with some of his characterisation of the left and new culture in general. He does seem to have an underlying prejudice for certain types that he rationalises here, sometimes fairly, but I can't rid the feeling that his conclusions precede some of his research. Nevertheless he made me confront some of the recurring internal contradictions of Bohemia, ideological Socialism, Modernist writing, and everything I thought I knew about working class intellectualism. Consider me a fan.
January 11, 2023
The book is not for the feint hearted 500 odd pages in small font with little let up in pace and detail. References thick and fast and idealistic nuances sprinkled around like confetti, bombarding the reader with a plethora of historical academic and philosophical thought, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Without a doubt imo, a must read for anyone interested in the working class autodidactic journey from 18th century ignorance to 20th century universal academic opportunity, from miners son to Oxford Don in one generation. This book accurately explains the lot, couldn’t fault it and not a duff page throughout.
Without a doubt imo, a must read for anyone interested in the working class autodidactic journey from 18th century ignorance to 20th century universal academic opportunity, from miners son to Oxford Don in one generation. This book accurately explains the lot, couldn’t fault it and not a duff page throughout.
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