The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (review)

Voices. This book is full of the sound of voices. We hear the testimony of domestic servants, weavers, wheelwrights, coal miners, factory hands, farm laborers, shepherds, and hosts of others, telling in their own words of the lives they have lived in their minds. The sources are approximately two thousand autobiographical memoirs, published and unpublished, written by members of the British working classes over the last three hundred years or so. Almost all of the memoirists were concerned to discuss their intellectual development, for it was usually the sense of identity that they obtained from reading, discussion, experience of the arts, and engagement with political ideas that provided them with the impulse to write about themselves in the first place. Only gradually during the last decades of the twentieth century have social historians made the discovery that people whose inner lives had generally been regarded as at best a mystery and at worst something circumscribed and brutal actually spoke out in sufficient numbers to permit worthwhile generalizations. Memoir by memoir, in archives, private collections, and research libraries, the essential corpus was identified so that it could be listed and its content opened up to the diligent researcher. (See J. Burnett, D. Vincent, and D. Mayall, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, 3 vols. [New York: New York University Press, 1984-89].)

Jonathan Rose is precisely the scholar the memoirs needed. He has combed patiently and with admirable care through these remarkable resources. Through extensive quotation he lets the memoirists tell their own stories, but always his own scholarly voice is there, shaping and interpreting what they have said. He seldom needs to persuade because his witnesses do that for him. They talk of their love of reading and surprise us with what they found most inspiring. Reader after reader enjoyed Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, Ruskin and Dickens, and the school stories of Frank Richards. Although intensely interested in politics and often achieving important roles in trades unions and the Labour party, their socialism was not that of the Marxists but the more humane doctrines of Robert Blatchford. Their love of theater (Shakespeare in particular) and classical music was so strong that they would ungrudgingly spend the last few pennies they had for a ticket. When libraries and adult education classes were available to them, they valued them as if they were their life's blood. Their stories are full of a quiet heroism as they struggled through grinding poverty, lack of opportunities for schooling, and the disregard of their more privileged fellow citizens. Time and time again they report that what sustained their belief in the value of what they were pursuing was the discovery that they were not alone amongst their fellows: other autodidacts and lovers of ideas and high culture could be found in the most unpromising of workplaces and communities.

The significance of what Rose's book reveals is hard to underestimate. Here we have minds engaging with a lettered mode of learning and the resources of a culture that established society effectively sought to deny them over a period of centuries. From the intellectual energy and mental acquisitiveness of significant numbers of the working classes there grew up a movement that was not just political but was deeply rooted in humane understanding. This movement eventually captured the political heights. The Labour party's electoral victory of 1945 was both the culmination and destruction of working-class culture. This reviewer, born in that momentous year, was the product of the guaranteed nourishment, medical care, decent housing, schooling, and open opportunities for work and professional advancement that came with the new Welfare State. However, the members of my family were from those same working classes that experienced the struggles described in Rose's book. In my first years I absorbed their...