The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (review)

The ambition of Jonathan Rose's lively and massively documented study, if it isn't amply indicated in his title, comes over starkly in the polemical preface. There Rose promises finally to address the question, long occluded by supposed lack of evidence, of what ordinary readers read and how they read it. Following the rise and fall of a nineteenth-century autodidactic tradition, the book marks an important step in reconstructing the working classes' own account of their intellectual history.

Rose draws on John Burnett and David Mayall's landmark bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984-89), and has read nearly two thousand memoirs, spanning two hundred years—a mass of evidence which explodes the assumption that intellectual histories are inevitably written from the point of view of a cultural elite. He is sensitive to the biases of these testimonies (their over-representation, for example, of an elite stratum of working-class readers), and handles them carefully, corroborating them with the results of social surveys, the records of Welsh miners' libraries, and other archival traces left by the "inarticulate masses." His focus is on books and readers, rather than texts and readings—"the history of audiences" is how Rose labels his field of enquiry (3)—and this emphasis lays bare the hidden contingencies that underlie audience response: the autodidacts' classical tastes, for example, are attributed to the availability of cheap, secondhand copies of books that went out of fashion after the eighteenth century (120).

But for scholars of modernism, the book's most interesting arguments will be found in the last two chapters, "What was Leonard Bast Really Like?" and "Down and out in Bloomsbury." Rose traces the heirs of Victorian autodidacticism into the twentieth century, and asks what happened when they came up against the vested interests of an educated middle class. The two chapters approach this encounter from opposite angles. The first asks what the modernist intelligentsia made of their peers in the working and clerking classes, and goes on to correct their misapprehensions, bringing the voices of actual working and clerking readers and writers back into the debate. The final chapter reverses the question, asking how the working-class intelligentsia accounted for their bourgeois-bohemian peers.

It is perhaps because of the nature of Rose's sources that the second of these chapters is the more successful: here, his working-class autobiographies give us an incredibly rich testimony of how the working class saw middle-class intellectuals. "What was Leonard Bast Really like?" creates an equally rich picture of how they saw themselves, but when it comes to thinking about middle-class stereotypes of working readers, the misrecognitions are perhaps more complex than Rose's informants will admit.

The plebian social explorers of "Down and Out in Bloomsbury" produced what amounts to a "perceptive—and disillusioning—sociology" of Bohemia. Though class obstacles (and the enormous expense of living in Chelsea) kept a 15s.-a-week clerk like Clare Cameron on the art world's fringes, "that marginal position allowed her to study Bohemians from an ideal vantage point" (441). Her impression, like that of the other girl clerks and jobbing autodidact journalists drawn on by Rose, was not good: the advanced middle-classes were dirty; they talked about free love without recognizing the real thing; fashion was their be-all-and-end-all. Bohemia, in the eyes of these critical outsiders, was the cultural R&D department of bourgeois capitalism, its horizons limited to the endless search for a new, marketable style. Rose's tenuous attempt to link the supposed disillusionment of The Waste Land with later Teddy-Boy rebels doesn't altogether diminish his provocative closing argument: that a modernist affection for the new, shocking thing eventually percolated down to the working-class. In the institutionalized Bohemias of the "creative industries" and radical academia, a tireless pursuit of the latest cultural commodity has replaced...