The Working Classes

BOOK REVIEWS The Working Classes Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xv + 534 pp. $50.00 THIS is a splendid book and a very astounding read. It offers (as the publisher's blurb suggests) "a new method for 'cultural historians' that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatregoers, filmgoers , and radio listeners." This is the history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective, drawing on workers' memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records , library registers, and newspapers. In uncovering the experience of ordinary readers, Jonathan Rose upsets many common assumptions and arrives at some fresh and controversial conclusions. Rose attempts to answer questions which many historians have considered unanswerable. As the 'Tale Book News" asserts, what was the quality of the education of the working class? How did they educate themselves? How much did they know about politics, sciences, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals , and why did they pursue the life of the mind? In answering them Rose offers a new method for cultural historians—an "audience history." He arrives at some very controversial conclusions. For example, he found that classical literature and music had a large following among the British proletariat (the workers who read Shakespeare, Milton and Ruskin did not copy middle-class values and were politically speaking quite radical) and, on the basis of hard evidence, Rose shows that most Victorian era working-class children liked their schools and teachers and found that a vast majority of pupils and their parents did not object to corporal punishment. And, contrary to current thinking in the cultural studies field, popular culture is a vast "universe" of books, periodicals , movies, and broadcasts, sending out a cacophony of conflicting messages. A tour de force, Jonathan Rose's work is a pioneer effort in literary history enriched by a system of endnotes which also serves as a bibliography . The entire book will long stand as a standard work in Victorian literary history. J. O. Baylen Eastbourne, England 223 ...