The Intellectual Life of the British Working ClassesWhich books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind?These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience. |
Contents
Chapter Two Mutual Improvement | |
Chapter Three The Difference Between Fact and Fiction | |
Chapter Four A Conservative Canon | |
Chapter Five Willingly to School | |
Chapter Six Cultural Literacy in the Classic Slum | |
Chapter Eight The Whole Contention Concerning | |
Chapter Nine Alienation from Marxism | |
Have You Read Marx? | |
Chapter Ten The World Unvisited | |
Chapter Eleven A Mongrel Library | |
Chapter Twelve What Was Leonard Bast Really Like? | |
Chapter Thirteen Down and Out in Bloomsbury | |
Notes | |
Wagner and Hoot Gibson | |
5A Reading in Parents Home 1944 | |
Chapter Seven The Welsh Miners Libraries | |
Index | |
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Common terms and phrases
Adult Education artists audience authors Autobiography autodidacts became Bible Board school Bohemia boys British Chartist classics clerks common Communist Cooperative critics Crusoe culture D. H. Lawrence Das Kapital Dickens economic England English enjoyed essays Everyman’s Library father feel felt fiction George girls highbrows Institute intellectual John John Clare knew knowledge Labour Party Lancashire learned lectures literary literature lived London Manchester Marx Marxist mass memoirs middlebrow middleclass mind miners modern modernist mutual improvement never nineteenth century novels offered one’s Oxford percent Pilgrim’s Progress poetry poets political popular proletarian public library readers recalled Robert Robinson Crusoe Ruskin College Shakespeare slum social socialist society South Wales stories Street taught teachers things Thomas thought trade union tutor Tutorial Class Tylorstown University Press V. S. Pritchett Victorian village volumes Weekly Welsh William women Woolf workers workingclass writing wrote young