The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (review)

In the early years of the twentieth century, Richard Hillyer, a cowman's son in a Northamptonshire village, borrowed a volume of Alfred Tennyson from his classroom's meager library. The words entranced him, his "dormant imagination opened up like a flower in the sun....Here in books was a limitless world that I could have for my own. It was like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time" (127). Jonathan Rose's magnificently researched The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is full of such instances, culled from the last two centuries of autodidactic culture. Both a history of the reading of working people, and of the social cultures which were fed by their consumption of print, it is a compelling testimony to the power of the written word to transform individuals' lives.

Using autobiography (both printed and unpublished), library records, and the results of surveys, Rose attempts to reconstruct what ordinary working people read, and how they read it. He takes "reading," in a usefully broad sense, to encompass responses to all kinds of cultural events, from films and radio programs as well as books, and has no truck with reception theory that concentrates on texts: what matter to him are the voices of readers themselves. He is constantly alert, however, to the ways in which personal and public agendas may mediate these voices; sensitive, for example, to the underrepresentation of nineteenth-century women in his study since few of them found occasion to record their experiences. Broadly chronological, his study moves from the reading of Chartists, and those who both participated in and challenged the evangelical revival, through the activities of mutual improvement societies (and he is good on their difference from the more paternalist mechanics' institutes), the changes brought about by the 1870 Education Act, the borrowing patterns of Welsh miners' libraries, and the various contentions surrounding the Workers' Educational Association. He gives a far more sympathetic portrayal of the reading practices of clerks than does E. M. Forster ("What Was Leonard Bast Really Like?"), and examines—very much through the lens of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992)—the alienating effects of modernism on some working-class readers. Even if rather too apt to regard modernist literature solely as something designed to keep ordinary people at bay, he recognizes that formal difficulty was to some extent a defensive response to the fact that the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic was becoming increasingly sophisticated and better educated. And there is no quarreling with those women and men of the working classes who looked scathingly at Bohemian posturing from backgrounds that knew real physical hardship at first hand.

"No two reading histories were alike," Rose writes (367). In part, this was because people often had to read what came their way: something that comes across powerfully in his book is the acute provincialism experienced by many working-class Britons until the middle of the twentieth century, their geography—and their cultural literacy—as foreshortened as a Saul Steinberg map. The patchy availability of print and the cost of new books were responsible, too, for the fact that for much of the nineteenth century, the reading of the working classes was rarely up to date. The detailed richness derived from the accounts Rose has explored, however, also demonstrates how dangerous it can be to generalize about reading, and to make assumptions about who was reading what, and how they responded. This comes as no surprise in relation to women's consumption of print: Rose is far from the first to observe women's responsiveness to male canonical writers, or that girls frequently preferred their brothers' books to the less exciting ones targeted at them. More intriguing are his...