Acknowledgements
A small army of librarians, archivists, and public record office workers assisted me with my research. Special thanks are due to John Burnett, who generously gave me access to his collection of unpublished working-class autobiographies at Brunel University Library; and to the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the London office of the Workers’ Educational Association, where most of my research was done. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to Paul Thompson and his coworkers at the Sociology Department of the University of Essex. They conducted the massive oral history project on family, work, and community life before 1918, which is the basis of Thompson’s book The Edwardians (1975). My Chapter Five sifts, analyzes, and quantifies the interviews they collected, though my conclusions are not necessarily theirs.
Bill Bell, John Burnett, Sondra Miley Cooney, Anne Humpherys, Gerhard Joseph, Robert L. Patten, John Rodden, and David Vincent all slogged through the manuscript, and their comments did much to improve it. I must thank all my friends in the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, who together provided an education in the social history of literature. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the British Institute of the United States, the American Historical Association, and Drew University provided the time and the money needed to complete this project. Earlier versions of sections of this book were published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Libraries and Culture, the Journal of British Studies, Albion, and Biblion, and I am grateful to their editors for allowing me to rework that material in this volume.
Permission to quote or cite unpublished documents was generously granted by the Bishopsgate Institute, the BBC Written Archives Centre, the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Brunel University Library, the Buckinghamshire County Record Office, the University of Edinburgh Library, the County Record Office Huntingdon, the Imperial War Museum, Keele University, Elizabeth Kirtland, Terence A. Lockett, the University of London Library, the Marx Memorial Library (London), the Mitchell Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the National Museum of Labour History, the Newcastle Central Library, the Newport Central Library, the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Oxford University Archives (Bodleian Library), the Rotherham Central Library Archives and Local Studies Section, the Ruskin College Library, the Sheffield Local Studies Library, the South Wales Miners’ Library, the Southwark Local Studies Library, the Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich), and the Waltham Forest Local Studies Library. A few of my attempts to contact copyright holders were unsuccessful, so I take this opportunity to thank them, wherever they may be.
Most of all, I thank my wife Gayle—for everything. This book is for her.
When this book was first published twenty years ago, it concluded with an assumption that was simply wrong. When I looked back from the perspective of 2001, it appeared that the lives of working people had gradually improved over the past two hundred years. They had won the right to organize, better wages and working conditions, and a social welfare safety net. Education had become universal, and it aimed at teaching not only vocational skills, but also the arts and humanities. Parents could reasonably expect upward mobility for their children. Given all that, I concluded that autodidacts had become obsolete. They flourished in the Victorian period, when intellectually adventurous working people could not rise out of their class or attend a university. But later the scholarship ladder effectively skimmed off the brightest working-class minds, formally educated them, and propelled them into the middle classes.
Or so it seemed. The progress was real enough, especially after 1945, but more recently it has been thrown into reverse. The two social classes that supported liberal democracy and enabled economic mobility—the independent middle classes and the organized working classes—have been “hollowed out.” By 2005 it was already apparent that an individual born in 1970 enjoyed less social mobility than one born in 1958. “The huge university expansion of the past 20 years has disproportionately benefited the children of the well-off,” Nick Cohen concluded. “The gap between the higher-education participation rates of the working and middle classes is now wider than ever.”1 In 2019 a government commission reported that “social mobility has stagnated … at virtually all life stages,” the inevitable result of cutbacks in spending on secondary education, adult education, and public libraries.2 The commission also found huge regional differences: in northeast England less than a third felt optimistic about their economic future, compared with 78 percent of Londoners. Almost half of respondents felt that their living standards were worse than what their parents enjoyed, and just a third of 18 to 24-year-olds believed that there were fair opportunities for all in Britain.3 In fact, graduates of the nine top public schools are still ninety-four times more likely to rise to elite positions than everyone else.4
Tom Woodin has revealingly contrasted two UNESCO reports on adult education, a generation apart. In 1972 Learning to Be stressed liberal education, but by 1996 Learning: The Treasure Within was emphasizing that “individuals are expected to take responsibility for updating their skills in order to keep abreast of rapid economic and technological changes.” At the same time, he noted, “Social class has passed from being a central category of historical analysis into a state of virtual oblivion. … Paradoxically, these changes have proceeded during a time of increasing economic inequality throughout the world.” But of course there is no paradox here: we are increasingly embarrassed to talk about class precisely because class divisions are becoming ever greater, and one symptom of economic inequality is our insistence that working people should forget about the liberal arts and focus on making themselves more marketable.5 That was the motive behind the attempt (fortunately unsuccessful) to shut down Newbattle Abbey College (Scotland’s residential adult school of the humanities) in the 1980s. It was, observed Neil Kevin Hargraves, “a reflection of a wider crisis of Scottish democracy and culture, and the disempowerment of an ‘intellectual under-class’ at the hands of a powerful, centralized elite.”6
That crisis extends far beyond Scotland. Many social critics characterize this new economic order as “neo-liberalism,” but Joel Kotkin argues that it is actually “neo-feudalism”—“a strongly hierarchical ordering of society, a web of personal obligations tying subordinates to superiors, the persistence of closed classes or ‘castes’, and a permanent serflike status for the vast majority of the population.” Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in a tiny elite, tech barons especially. There is an intellectual class, but it is less like the old liberal intelligentsia and more like the medieval clergy. Members of this class prefer to work for transnational organizations not subject to democratic accountability, like the Roman Catholic Church before the English Reformation (the original Brexit). Rather than encourage free debate, they proclaim themselves “experts” and label their orthodoxies “science”. Intellectuals once valued dissent and iconoclasm, but this new clergy is devoted to stamping out heresy. They promote “cancel culture,” they increasingly find employment in the ever-expanding Orwellian censorship machinery built up by tech companies, and they preach that “Free Speech Is Killing Us” (the actual title of a sermon published in the New York Times).7 The professions that need intellectual freedom to flourish—journalism, publishing, the humanities in academia—have been steadily shedding jobs and now offer very slim employment prospects to young people. I found that working people who spent their lives taking orders from superiors put a high value on freedom of thought, but Kotkin concludes that twenty-first-century workers are “becoming more like medieval serfs, with diminishing chances of owning significant assets or improving their lot except with government transfers.”8 In my original research, I was impressed to discover that rail workers and miners in the old industrial economy could accomplish a fair amount of reading on company time. That is obviously not possible today in an Amazon fulfillment center.
All these disturbing trends are global, certainly not limited to Britain. In 2017 half of the world’s wealth was owned by fewer than a hundred multibillionaires, many of them in China, a country that is ostensibly Communist. Indeed, the Chinese regime—which promotes gross inequality, ruthless imperialism, repression of democratic movements, persecution of religious minorities, and total surveillance of its own people—only confirms my conclusion that Marxism is not now and never was the answer. “We are facing a new set of problems,” observed Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady in 2018. “We have people with degrees doing Mickey Mouse jobs and young people who will have no occupational pension and no house to sell to see them through old age.” That was before the economic fallout from the Covid pandemic and lockdowns, which has breathtakingly accelerated the advance of inequality, devastating small businesses and workers and transferring still more wealth to the extremely rich. And the future looks even grimmer: a 2017 study projected that 30 percent of all British jobs would be automated by 2032.9
In universities throughout the Western world, humanities enrollments have plummeted, giving way everywhere to technical and business studies. And in primary and secondary education, Gradgrind has triumphed: we have increasingly sacrificed literature and the arts to focusing on the “basics” and “teaching to the test.” As self-educated miners and Matthew Arnold recognized, liberal education is a force for equality: it can be cheaply acquired by anyone equipped with Everyman’s Library or Penguin Classics, and it enables non-experts to intelligently criticize the work of experts. It is far more expensive to educate what Kotkin identified as the new clergy: technicians, lawyers, business and finance executives, bureaucrats, and political operatives. They command high salaries, they develop their own technical jargon that is unintelligible to others, they tend to rely unquestioningly on “data,” and they don’t really want to debate questions of ethics or aesthetics or larger purposes.
Kenan Malik recognized the pernicious consequences of this blinkered approach to education. He explained that we can, if we choose, broadly educate the voters, but then we are compelled to reason with them and treat them as intelligent adults. That much was apparent in the first of two major political debates: Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn in 1975, contrasted with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. The issue in both was the same—should Britain remain in Europe? But, Malik noted, in 1975 the adversaries had to “listen carefully to each other and respond to the other’s points, fierce in defence of their arguments, but reasonable towards their opponent. … Benn and Jenkins took their audience seriously and so considered their arguments, and those of their opponent, with care.” Today politicians pander and slander precisely because they are contemptuous of voters, treating them as sheep who can be easily swayed with mindless slogans, following the instructions of political operatives who are “experts” at mass manipulation.10
For a still more striking American parallel, compare the Kennedy–Nixon debates of 1960 with Biden–Trump in 2020. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley (on the right) and David Susskind (on the left) used television to engage in rational and civilized dialogues with individuals they disagreed with. Now cable news loudmouths stare into the camera and parrot repetitive propaganda, caricaturing their opponents as either idiotic or satanic.
When Benn and Jenkins debated, there were still grassroots organizations that nurtured proletarian authors. They came together in 1976 to form the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. One of the success stories of that movement was Liverpool warehouseman Jimmy McGovern, who wrote for the popular and controversial soap opera Brookside. But the 1980s (he later recalled) were “a bloody awful time to be a white working class male. … The trade unions (built largely by white working class males) were smashed. The factories and mines and shipyards (staffed largely by white working class males) were closing. Feminists were telling us we were sexist pigs. Blacks were telling us we were racist bastards. Gays were telling us we were homophobic bigots. . . . The trendy left . . . had a mental image of us: a foul-mouthed fascist skinhead with a tattoo on his arm and a spanner in his hand.”11 These newer leftist movements talked of “diversity” but didn’t seem much concerned with worker representation, and working-class communities noticed that “multiculturalism” embraced every culture but their own.
A backlash was inevitable. I would never presume to meddle in British elections, but the Brexit vote and the triumph of Boris Johnson do seem to confirm the growing gulf between the left and the workers that I had detected in 2001. Working-class Britain had always been intensely local and community-oriented, largely unaware of what was happening in Europe, and not willing to be submerged in a very bourgeois cosmopolitanism. So naturally 64 percent of the working class voted for Brexit, compared to just 43 percent of the upper/upper-middle class. And it was clear even in 2001 that the postmodern left was striving to distance itself from working-class culture. Having studied a focus group in Crewe in 2018, pollster Deborah Mattinson warned that working-class voters felt that Labour had drifted from a “pie-and-a-pint party to quinoa”—and Crewe and Nantwich was a seat that the Conservatives picked up in the 2019 general election.12
Given the decline of formal liberal education, and given that many young people from middle-class backgrounds may find themselves precipitated into lowpay jobs (assuming they have any jobs at all), what is to be done? Zena Hitz of St. John’s College (which remains dedicated to its distinctive “Great Books” curriculum) concludes that
We’re at the end, or toward the end, of an extended collapse of the institutions that made it possible for many of us to make a living through intellectual or creative activity. We’ll have to find another way. That might mean renewing our institutions—which seems just possible, although hardly inevitable, in a crisis of this magnitude. It also might mean unplugging the activities from institutions entirely, and renewing a grassroots, freelance sort of economy for arts and for the work of the mind.13
That seems to suggest a return to autodidact culture. And for all their flaws, social media offer unprecedented opportunities for self-education, DIY research, and samizdat publishing. The American media critic A. J. Liebling famously wrote that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Now everyone owns one—even if bureaucrats, corporate titans, and established intellectuals find that frighteningly democratic. We still have mutual improvement societies, but now they are online discussion groups. No literary critic today commands the public respect accorded to F. R. Leavis or Lionel Trilling, and enrollments in university English departments have imploded. But readers are doing their own criticism in self-governing book groups: 50,000 of them in the UK, where 32 percent of the participants identify as working-class and 36 percent are lower-middle-class.14
Pamela Fisher and Roy Fisher write that “Today, an autodidact is likely to be an active communicant within a cybercommunity. The autodidact is now generally seen as someone who has acquired high levels of expertise, usually in a particular field, through self-education.” They focus specifically on parents of disabled children who “autodidactically employed research in order to subvert professional power in a context of a medical model imbued by features of an excluding managerialism,” and thus achieved “subtle shifts in power away from professional expertise. … No longer content to leave ‘the medical side’ to the experts, in some cases parents are gaining a grasp of medical discourses that goes beyond what would be typically expected of a ‘lay person’.” This drive for self-education is particularly strong in the autism community, largely because the “experts” have conspicuously failed to identify causes, effective treatments, preventive measures, or cures.15
In 2001 I was also hopeful that this book would be followed by other studies of “the common reader,” and there I was not at all disappointed. In addition to a host of monographs, we now have online resources such as Britain’s Reading Experience Database (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/index.php), and the What Middletown Read Project (https://lib.bsu.edu/wmr/index.php) offers a searchable record of literary life in a “typical” American town in the age of Theodore Roosevelt.16
However, some non-Western historians told me that it would not be possible to conduct similar studies in their parts of the world, where the working classes were either illiterate or invisible to the historical record. Saikat Majumdar argues that “The typical colonial autodidact, however provincial and poor, is more likely to come from the indigenous bourgeoisie or petit-bourgeoisie.”17 And yet, Joan Judge has been studying common readers in Republican China,18 and Arun Kumar found fifty night schools for Bombay textile workers in 1919.19 Consider also the work of Keith Breckenridge, Hlonipha Mokoena, Corinne Sandwith, and others on the African working class.20 There may have been mute inglorious Miltons in every corner of the world, and if we as historians search intensively for the records they left, we may discover that these individuals weren’t mute after all. I look forward to the opening of that scholarly frontier in the coming decade.
Introduction to the Second Edition
A few years ago some labor historians at an English university confided to me that, when this book was first published in 2001, they posted the newspaper reviews on their departmental bulletin board. As they explained it, the fact that an academic study of labor history could still attract the attention of the popular press did wonders for their morale, which sorely needed boosting. True, their field had enjoyed a vogue for about twenty years, starting with E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). But it was gradually eclipsed by the historiography of gender and race, and in 1983 Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 sent younger scholars off in yet another direction, exploring linguistics and culture.
To be congratulated for revalidating working-class history was, for me, as ironic as it was flattering, for I could hardly call myself a labor historian. Certainly, as an American undergraduate and graduate student in the 1970s, I had been assigned The Making of the English Working Class: whether I read it all the way to the end is another question. But my chosen specialty was intellectual history: while others of my generation were studying the workplace, trade unions, family structure, diet, housing, and wages, I much preferred the world of ideas. Naturally, I had to defend that peculiar taste in the classroom. Wasn’t intellectual history elitist? Did the conversations of great minds have any real influence outside their own select circle? Shouldn’t history be about everyday life, material culture, and the “inarticulate masses”? These were tough but fair questions, and ultimately I, along with other intellectual historians, realized that they could only be answered by inventing three new academic fields.
The first and (for me) the most fascinating was the history of reading. My model was not E. P. Thompson, but a shopworn copy of Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader which I found in a campus bookstore early in my first year of graduate study. Historians of reading have never been solely concerned with the lower classes, but they have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the great books had plebeian readers, that reading has long been a necessity of everyday life for ordinary people, and that books were an important part of the material culture of most working-class homes. This was the method deployed not only in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes but also in several other works all published within a few years of each other: Christine Pawley’s Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (2001), Martyn Lyons’s Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (2001), Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002), Stephanie Newell’s Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life” (2002), and Thomas Augst’s The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003). We knew each other, we presented papers at the same conferences, we shared the thrill of working on a new and rapidly advancing scholarly frontier. We used similar kinds of sources (memoirs, library registers, the records of mutual improvement societies) and we all discovered the same kind of self-improving common readers in various parts of the world. More recently our work has been assisted by the development of electronic resources: the Reading Experience Database (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/) for Britain, and the What Middletown Read Project (www.bsu.edu/middletown/wmr/) for the United States, both of them searchable by class and occupation.
A second route for connecting intellectual history with labor history is the history of authorship, as pursued by the Labouring-Class Writers Project at Nottingham Trent University. In this field I drew some inspiration from Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse (1974), but I discovered that not all working-class writers were obscure impoverished milltown versifiers. Quite a few of them, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, were successful well-known prose writers. They have since fallen into a historiographical black hole, largely because they worked in a genre that academia despises and ignores. I don’t mean lowbrow literature: there is no shortage of monographs on penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and pornography. No, what has been shamefully neglected is middlebrow literature, which was by no means exclusively middle-class. While highbrow culture was controlled by the guild of Bloomsbury, the middlebrow remained an open marketplace for working-class writers such as Howard Spring, Ethel Mannin and Alexander Baron. I sensed their importance, but I was not able to say much about them in my book, simply because they had not yet generated a corpus of scholarly biographies and critical studies. Today the MLA International Bibliography lists just two hits for Spring, six for Mannin, and none for Baron, compared with 4,547 for Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Woolf and F. R. Leavis pronounced that middlebrow authors were not worth reading, and generations of academics obeyed. Not until the 1990s was that barrier finally broken, by Rosa Maria Bracco’s “Betwixt and Between”: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties and Thirties (1990) and Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 1920–1950 (1992). Rather than produce yet more books about Bloomsbury, we really need studies of the writers that the Bloomsberries defined themselves against, such as Christopher Hilliard’s To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006). We need to discover how these plebeian writers scrambled out of poverty up the ladder of popular journalism, how they transformed their life experiences into literature, how they appealed to working-class audiences.
That kind of scholarship inevitably involves a third new field, the history of taste. I grew up in an America where, it seemed, everyone was middle-class, everyone read the same middlebrow books and magazines, everyone ate the same kind of food at the same restaurants, wore the same kind of clothes, and watched the same indistinguishable programs on three undistinguished television networks. Of course, in reality American society was never quite that homogeneous, but it certainly grew less so over the ensuing decades. Income distribution became more unequal, cultural tastes became more stratified. One could not help but wonder whether there was some connection between the two trends. Were we witnessing the formation of a new class, variously called yuppies or trendies or bobos, and was the avant-garde a business that supplied this class with distinguishing (and expensive) cultural markers? In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Richard Florida saw a clear link between artistic innovation and dynamic postindustrial capitalism. So did a host of academic studies on “marketing modernism,” notably James Nelson’s Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (1989), Joyce Piell Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (1997), Peter D. McDonald’s British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (1997), Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998), Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (2000), Paul Delany’s Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (2002), and Catherine Turner’s Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (2003). These issues informed my own discussion of modernism and the working class, which proved to be gratifyingly controversial. (For a rebuttal, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere [2003]). I should stress that I never intended to devalue the aesthetic achievement of modernism. My point was that, as in the case of the Baroque, we can admire the art while recognizing that it buttressed social hierarchies.
I am sometimes asked if I have any roots in the working class. I can claim no such pedigree. A great uncle (whom I never knew) was a Bronx garment worker who spent much of the Great Depression reading through a kind of Yiddish Everyman’s Library, classics in translation from The Merchant of Venice to Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Otherwise my people were all professionals, managers, and shop owners. Speaking of cultural markers and the avant-garde, I attended a highly progressive private day school in Greenwich Village, very like A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, poles apart from the Victorian board schools. My old school was so unstructured that every pupil had to become an autodidact—and, yes, in that sense it may well have germinated this book.
In this second edition I have corrected some factual and spelling errors, with thanks to the readers who pointed them out. A version of this essay previously appeared in the journal Key Words, and something like it is published here, with the kind permission of the editors.
A Preface to a History of Audiences
This book addresses a question which, until recently, was considered unanswerable. It proposes to enter the minds of ordinary readers in history, to discover what they read and how they read it. It is relatively easy to recover the reading experiences of professional intellectuals: authors, literary critics, professors, and clergymen extensively documented their responses to books. But what record do we have of “common readers,” such as freedmen after the American Civil War, or immigrants in Australia, or the British working classes?
Not long ago David Perkins concluded that “for most times and places, we lack the sources, such as accounts of reading experiences, from which a history of reception could be written.”1 According to Jeffrey Richards, “It is pointless to ask for the first-hand accounts of ordinary people about how their reading or leisure has affected them. For such evidence cannot exist. The nature of popular culture and of its consumers provides no means of articulating such a conscious verbal response.”2 Historians, as Robert Darnton observed in 1980, “want to penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind’s thinking.”3
Just six years later, however, Darnton had become more optimistic. “It should be possible to develop a history as well as a theory of reader response,” he now suggested. “Possible, but not easy ….”4 In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars in the emerging discipline of “book history” invented the research methods and tapped the archival resources that allowed them to penetrate this mystery.5 Common readers disclosed their experiences in memoirs and diaries,6 school records,7 social surveys,8 oral interviews,9 library registers,10 letters to newspaper editors (published or, more revealingly, unpublished),11 fan mail,12 and even in the proceedings of the Inquisition.13
Of these sources, the most useful are the autobiographies of ordinary people. Richard Altick well appreciated their value when he wrote the pioneering work in the field, The English Common Reader, back in 1957. He was handicapped by the fact few such memoirs were known to scholars at the time (“If only we had the autobiography of [a] pork butcher…!”).14 By 1981, however, David Vincent had assembled 142 memoirs by early nineteenth-century British workers, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom he showed how they could be used to reconstruct a detailed history of reading response.15 In 1989 Vincent, together with John Burnett and David Mayall, completed The Autobiography of the Working Class, a bibliography listing nearly two thousand documents, published and unpublished, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.16 My book, based as it is on a reading of most of those memoirs, would have been impossible without their groundwork.
Like any other historical source, autobiography contains certain inherent distortions and biases. Memoirists are not entirely representative of their class, whatever that class may be, if only because they are unusually articulate. Autobiographies were produced in every stratum of the British working classes, ranging down to tramps and petty criminals, but a disproportionate number were written by skilled workers. Women account for only about 5 percent of the memoirists born before 1870, rising to about 15 percent for the 1870–89 cohort and about 30 percent for the 1890–1929 cohort. Of course, some autobiographical manuscripts were bowdlerized or rejected by bourgeois publishers, but that is not so great a problem as one might suppose. The majority of these surviving memoirs are unpublished, or were self-published, or were published by local or radical presses. Agitators usually managed to record their lives in some form, with the result that our whole sample is actually skewed to the political left: the Burnett–Vincent–Mayall bibliography lists many more Communists than Conservatives.
As one washerwoman’s son warned us, the autobiographer “may helplessly, perhaps even thoughtlessly, but more probably designedly, select, omit, minimize, exaggerate, in fact lie as wholeheartedly” as the novelist.17 None of this disqualifies the memoir as a historical document: after all, similar uncertainties are built into everything we find in archives and published records. We can minimize those uncertainties if we use these sources with some awareness of their limitations, and if we check them against other kinds of documents. Historians have descended into archives to verify two classic proletarian memoirs (William Lovett’s Life and Struggles [1876] and Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise [1939]) and both proved reasonably (if not perfectly) accurate.18 This book uses oral history, educational records, library records, sociological surveys, and opinion polls to confirm what memoirists tell us, and they usually (though not always) point to similar conclusions. They also make possible the double focus of this book: while autobiographies tell us a great deal about the vital minority of self-improving workers, other sources offer a more representative portrait of the working class as a whole.
The great strength of these memoirs is that they represent an effort by working people to write their own history. All historians must use data selectively, but here, in the first instance, within some limits, the working classes decided what to include. Tellingly, they wrote at length about their reading, as if they were pointing the way for future historians. An entire chapter on the subject is not unusual, and some autobiographies, such as Thomas Carter’s Memoirs of a Working Man (1845), are predominantly accounts of a lifetime of reading.19 Robert Collyer (b. 1823), who rose to become a celebrated Unitarian minister, deliberately chose to dwell upon the moment when, as a child laborer in a Fewston linen factory, he bought his first book, The History of Whittington and His Cat:
Does some reader say, Why should you touch this incident? And I answer, I have a library now of about three thousand volumes …; but in that first purchase lay the spark of a fire which has not yet gone down to white ashes, the passion which grew with my growth to read all the books in the early years I could lay my hands on, and in this wise prepare me in some fashion for the work I must do in the ministry. … I see myself in the far-away time and cottage reading, as I may truly say in my case, for dear life.20
Significantly, these memoirists devoted far more space to reading than later generations of labor historians. Though the “new social historians” of the past few decades have produced important and innovative work, they have harbored a prejudice against literary history, perhaps because it seems “elitist” and lacking in social scientific rigor. They have focused instead on the grittier or material aspects of working-class life—diet, housing, workplace culture, trade unionism, radical politics, crime, and family structure. All this has filled in large gaps in our knowledge, but it has left unwritten a critical chapter in the history of what were once called “the inarticulate masses”—who, it turns out, had a great deal to say.
Their reminiscences make possible a broader kind of reading history, which could be called a history of audiences. Put simply, a history of audiences reverses the traditional perspective of intellectual history, focusing on readers and students rather than authors and teachers. It first defines a mass audience, then determines its cultural diet, and describes the response of that audience not only to literature, but also to education, religion, art, and any other cultural activity. For reading is not limited to books. We also “read”—that is, we absorb, interpret, and respond to—classroom lessons, concerts, radio broadcasts, films, in fact all varieties of human experience. Broadly, an audience history asks how people read their culture, how they experienced education in the widest sense. This book tracks working-class responses to classic literature (Chapter One), informal education (Chapter Two), fiction and nonfiction (Chapter Three), dead authors (Chapter Four), primary education (Chapter Five), adult education (Chapter Eight), Marxism and Marxists (Chapter Nine), school stories (Chapter Ten), popular culture (Chapter Eleven), and the avant-garde (Chapter Thirteen). It uses social surveys to measure cultural literacy, the stock of knowledge acquired through reading, which in turn determines reading comprehension (Chapter Six); and it uses library records to quantify reading habits (Chapter Seven). It chronicles the first generation of common readers who became professional writers, ascending to careers in clerkdom and popular journalism, where they often encountered striking hostility and jealousy on the part of more affluent intellectuals, as illustrated in Chapter Twelve.
A history of audiences can of course address the impact of literature on political consciousness. The question of whether Dickens, Conrad, or penny dreadfuls reinforced or subverted patriarchy, imperialism, or class hierarchies has become an obsession in academic literature departments and cultural studies programs. Although literary criticism has been narrowed and impoverished by this fixation, the question is a legitimate one, and it is addressed (alongside other issues) in this book. The failure of political criticism, as it is actually practiced, is methodological: with some exceptions, it ignores actual readers.21 In this terrain, critics repeatedly commit what might be called the receptive fallacy: they try to discern the messages a text transmits to an audience by examining the text rather than the audience. This blind spot is not easy to excuse or even explain, given that over the past two decades we have become used to the notion that readers make meaning: they may enjoy wide latitude in interpreting what they read. We can discover how an Edwardian housemaid read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but only if we do some serious scholarly retooling.
That kind of history could cast a sharper light on provocative issues such as canon formation. Do the “great books” embody universal moral values, psychological insights, and aesthetic standards? Or, as Janice Radway (and a large cadre of contemporary cultural critics) would put it, is it “the dominant class who define and maintain the value of high culture”?22 The second theory suggests that if the job of literary criticism were handed to readers farther down the social scale—say, colliers and millgirls—they would produce a different canon. But without a history of audiences, how do we know? What if the same books recommended by intellectual elites brought aesthetic joy, political emancipation, and philosophical excitement to these ordinary readers? If the dominant class defines high culture, then how do we explain the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts, not to mention the pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy? A past president of the Modern Language Association, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (to take a representative of our own dominant cultural class) authoritatively states, as something too obvious to require any evidence, that classic literature is always irrelevant to people who have not received an orthodox Western education. It is an undeniable “fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them.” It is an equally self-evident “fact that other verbal artifacts (not necessarily ‘works of literature’ or even ‘texts’) and other objects and events (not necessarily ‘works of art’ or even artifacts) have performed and do perform for them the various functions that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare perform for us.”23
This theory has no visible means of support. If classic authors have no “transcultural or universal value,” as Smith alleges, they would never be translated into other languages. And how can Smith explain Will Crooks, Labour MP? Growing up in extreme poverty in East London, Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled: “What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece.”24
Smith claims that we respond to a great book only because it tends to “shape and create the culture in which its value is produced and transmitted and, for that reason, to perpetuate the conditions of its own flourishing.”25 But how did the Iliad create the culture of the East End? Again and again we find classic literature embraced by working people who thoroughly lacked literary education. Though Smith dismisses the notion of “cultural deprivation” as mere condescension, it was painfully real to those who were denied her educational privileges. Bryan Forbes (b. 1926) grew up in a nearly bookless home: “I never saw my mother read a book until she was in her eighties when, like somebody coming off a starvation diet, she consumed three or four novels a week.”26 Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until during her last illness, at age fifty-four. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and “mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read.”27 Margaret Perry (b. 1922) wrote of her mother, a Nottingham dressmaker: “The public library was her salvation. She read four or five books a week all her life but had no one to discuss them with. She had read all the classics several times over in her youth and again in later years, and the library had a job to keep her supplied with current publications. Married to a different man, she could have been an intelligent and interesting woman.”28
One finds similar blind spots in the scholarly handling of popular culture. T. J. Jackson Lears takes a fairly typical approach to the subject when he analyzes a 1930 radio scenario: after a tired housewife tells her fatherly doctor her troubles, the program segues into a commercial, which assures women that a good night’s sleep on a Beautyrest mattress will preserve their good looks and their husbands’ affections. Lears then poses a leading question—“Consider the constructions of gender and power at work in this passage”—and answers it himself. A history of audiences, however, would first consider the questions that Lears (and most other practitioners of cultural studies) fail to ask. Even if this advertisement seems to endorse “female dependency” on male authority figures, how do we know that any listener consciously or subliminally absorbed that message? Assuming that women were paying attention when it was broadcast (a risky presumption), they might well have treated it as just another sales pitch. Possibly some listeners put a feminist construction on it: an overworked housewife may have concluded that, after years of sacrificing for her family, it was high time to purchase something for her own comfort. Or perhaps an immigrant learned that in America a doctor was not an unapproachable shaman, but a neighbor who could help him negotiate a strange culture. My point is that there is as much hard evidence for any of these readings as there is for Lears’s, which is to say, none at all; and we will get no closer to answering these questions unless we shift our attention from the text to the audience. After all, why focus selectively on this particular advertisement, when others may have projected a very different image: for example, patriotic women performing men’s jobs in the Second World War? In fact, why devote so much analysis to something that flashed by the audience in a few minutes? Of all the radio programs, books, magazines, newspaper articles, and school lessons that a Depression era housewife absorbed over a lifetime, how do we know which ones significantly shaped her attitudes and opinions?
Perhaps we should ask her. She may not be able to tell us the whole story, but we must begin with her. She might have left behind a document telling us which books and radio programs were important to her, and why. Lears claims that neither he nor other practitioners of cultural studies “would deny consumers a place alongside producers in the process of constructing cultural meanings,” but most of them have failed to redirect their research toward those consumers.29 Even historical studies that promise to tell us something about the “impact” and “influence” of the press usually do not focus directly on audience response.30 When we do address those issues, we will discover what Roger Chartier calls “appropriation”: the power of an audience to transform received messages and render them “less than totally efficacious and radically acculturating.”31
This book describes how people at the bottom of the economic pyramid appropriated the Bible, Jude the Obscure, the Girl’s Own Paper, Beethoven, the BBC, Marines of Guadalcanal, adult education courses, elementary school lessons, even the disciplinary thrashings administered by schoolmasters. All of these experiences required interpretation. In every case, the “reader” had to ask what sociologist Erving Goffman treated as the most basic question of human existence, the question we ask when we first become aware of an external universe, and continue to ask up to the moment of death: “What is it that’s going on here?” How do we interpret not only books, but all the raw sensory data that is constantly showering on us? Goffman developed the useful concept of the “frame,” meaning “the organization of experience,” our ground rules for processing information, “the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events.”32 The frame does for the human mind what a program does for a computer. It determines how we read a given text or situation: whether we treat Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a bedtime story or a Freudian fable, Finnegans Wake as densely meaningful or gobbledygook, the morning newspaper as biased to the left or the right, Bible stories as truth, lies, or parables. Every political ideology, psychological theory, religious doctrine, scientific method, literary genre, and school of literary criticism is a distinct frame. Thus the frame is an essential tool for historians of reading: it explains why Robert Darnton was right to treat print, rather than economics, as the prime cause of the French Revolution.33 To say that revolutions are caused by economic crises begs the question: in the mind of the politically active public, who or what causes such crises? The king? Aristocrats? Economic overregulation? Bankers? Capitalism? The inevitable vissicitudes of the free market? An act of God? Foreign investors? Greedy workers? The Jews? Different frames will lead individuals to different “readings” of the situation, with radically different political results.
Goffman’s approach can help resolve that long and increasingly sterile literary debate over whether meaning is inherent in the text or created by the reader. One might as well ask whether a computer printout is produced by the program or the data: obviously, it is a matter of one working on the other. Readers do play an active role in making meaning, but they cannot capriciously or randomly assign meanings to texts without destroying the usefulness of language as a communication tool. They generally follow certain rules of interpretation (frames), though these rules vary from reader to reader and from situation to situation. Readers can adopt any frame they choose, provided it produces some kind of meaningful reading, and provided the readers have learned the rules laid down by the frame. One cannot read Pilgrim’s Progress as an allegory unless one knows what an allegory is.
Of course, an excellent way to learn the nature of allegory is to read Bunyan. Since every literary work frames reality in a particular way, we can build up a repertoire of interpretive strategies simply by reading widely. The authentic value of a liberal education lies not so much in acquiring facts or absorbing “eternal truths,” but in discovering new ways to interpret the world. We read Homer and Shakespeare and Milton primarily to learn how they saw things, and thus to enhance our own powers of sight. That, fundamentally, is why autodidacts like Will Crooks pursued knowledge under difficulties. The British class system had always drawn a sharp distinction between workers and thinkers: it was the prerogative of the latter to interpret religion, economics, society, and literature for the former. The founders of the Labour Party and other self-educated radicals realized that no disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life. Working people would have to develop their own ways of framing the world, their own political goals, their own strategies for achieving those goals. Locked out of Christminster, Jude Fawley would chalk that political program on the college walls: “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you …” (Job 12:3).34
The whole canon of world literature—not just literature with an explicit political message—could help them develop those powers of understanding. In fact, when autodidacts were asked which books made all the difference to them, they usually pointed to the same canon of “great books” derided by contemporary critics such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith. They knew that Homer would liberate the workers. If the classics offered artistic excellence, psychological insights, and penetrating philosophy to the governing classes—if, in fact, this kind of education equipped them to rule—then the politics of equality must begin by redistributing this knowledge to the governed classes. Anyone growing up in an industrial or rural slum would be predisposed to take the existing social order for granted: the vision of a long-dead author could come as a salutary shock, creating new discontents and suggesting radical possibilities. The epiphany that struck Will Crooks is one of the most persistent themes of working-class autobiography.
As for noncanonical literature, by and large it did not perform the same function for proletarian readers. Joseph McAleer has documented working people who freely testified that they resorted to popular fiction as an escapist narcotic. “As the Cockney said: ‘Getting drunk is the nearest way out of London,’ so reading is the quickest way out of Glasgow,” quipped a Scottish postman in 1944.35 This is not to say that all romance novels, school stories, and tough-guy detective fiction were pernicious: some of them, as we will see, had a certain educational value for common readers. But they usually did not do what the Iliad did. To explain why, one would have to explain why some books enter the canon and some do not, an intimidatingly complicated question. Certainly, the tendency of popular fiction genres to follow stereotyped formulas limits their value: they cease to offer much after one has read a few volumes. Authors are far more likely to inspire generations of readers, disciples, critics, and commentators if they produce novel, distinctive, provocative, even subversive ways of interpreting reality. That is exactly what autodidacts, struggling to make sense of it all, found in Shakespeare, Bunyan, Defoe, Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin. They embraced Sir John Lubbock’s “Hundred Best Books” list, that much ridiculed quick guide to the classics, because it offered a hundred ways of understanding the world, and a hundred plans for changing it. Probably more than a hundred: classics appeal to diverse populations of readers because they are usually capable of diverse readings. Pilgrim’s Progress, as we will see, was not always read through the frame of religious allegory.
One alternative to this versatility is to view the world through a single tunnel: what in common usage is called “ideology.” Putting it in Goffman’s terms—terms consonant with Edward Shils’s definition of the word36—an ideology is a particularly rigid frame. Of course, we cannot think without using some kind of frame, no more than a computer can work without a program. But we can be more or less flexible in our choice of strategies for determining truth, more or less willing to revise the frame in the light of new knowledge. We can (and most of us do) use a variety of frames in different situations: one in church, another in the laboratory, a third in an art gallery, a fourth in the polling booth, a fifth in courts of law, a sixth when we sit down with a novel. But we can also become stuck in a frame and judge everything by it, as in the old joke about the psychoanalyst who wonders what his doorman really meant when he said “Good morning.” If we cleave to Marxism, feminism, Christianity, Islam, liberalism, the traditional British class structure, or any other intellectual system to the point where we can no longer step outside it and assume another frame, then we are in the cage of ideology.
Generations of liberal critics, from Matthew Arnold to Lionel Trilling, recognized that literature, by suggesting a wealth of alternative perspectives on the world, would inevitably subvert ideology. As Arnold phrased it, culture can liberate us from “system-makers and systems” by “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”37 Today Arnold’s vision is less than popular among academic literary critics, who (as a glance at the MLA International Bibliography will reveal) tend to see literature as freighted with ideological baggage that may insidiously indoctrinate the unsuspecting reader. This school of criticism tells us more about the preoccupations of critics than the experiences of common readers in history, which, frankly, Arnold understood much better. Far from reinscribing traditional ideologies, canonical literature tended to ignite insurrections in the minds of the workers, exactly as Culture and Anarchy predicted.
This book is a history of that revolution in thought, a revolution represented in the intellectual lives of Elizabeth Ashby and her descendants. She was a Warwickshire cottager’s daughter, who lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of the village of Tysoe. In 1859 she bore a son out of wedlock. Recovering from childbirth, she read the book that most people in her station started with—a vast family Bible. But no consistent ideology was communicated by Scripture: it was capable of multiple readings, even by the same reader. For Elizabeth Ashby, it could be a powerful tract for equality as well as a font of spiritual truth. When the vicar once made her take communion after a prosperous farmer’s wife, she defiantly quoted at him “Thou shalt not even secretly favour persons” and “No respect of persons with God, no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all that call upon Him.” “It was the first time that in all the centuries of Tysoe’s church’s existence a woman’s voice had been clearly raised in it to utter words of her own choosing, audible to many,” wrote her granddaughter, a professional historian. On other occasions Elizabeth treated the Bible simply as a collection of wonderful yarns, reading Chronicles to her children as bedtime stories.
She later married and had two more children. When her husband died after five years, she relied on the charity of the parish for 6s. to 7s. a week. Even at that level of poverty, the family began to expand its range of reading. Her son Joseph learned some Shakespeare at a National School. Though he left school before his eleventh birthday to become a farm laborer, his mother still gave him a few shillings to buy books. In any town it was possible to find a bookstall in the market square, where old volumes could be had for pennies. In Banbury Joseph bought something by John Wesley for his mother, a geometry text, and a 1759 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. One could hardly avoid treating the Bible as absolute truth if one had read nothing else, but exposure to other books might set off a debate in the mind, each volume offering another perspective, opening up a limitless cycle of readings and questionings. Joseph and mother perhaps alluded to that open-endedness with a passage from Rasselas which they liked to quote: “There are many conclusions in which nothing is concluded.”
By age nineteen Joseph had become a preacher for the Wesleyan Methodists: he was too eager for a broad range of secular knowledge to join the more anti-intellectual Primitive Methodists. Rigid dogmas were more attractive to those with deeper scars. One of Joseph’s intellectual companions, an orphan raised in hard poverty, concentrated his reading more narrowly on increasingly radical schemes for political salvation. He began with Mill’s On Liberty, turned to the progressive income tax Tom Paine proposed in The Rights of Man, then embraced the single tax of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. By the late 1940s he was a lockstep Stalinist, the sole village Marxist. Joseph remained the kind of liberal whose ideology amounted to a rejection of ideology. On Liberty “suited him down to the ground,” his daughter recalled, “but there was nothing doctrinaire or monopolistic about that.” The other villagers found their political vision not in Marx, but in the humane radicalism of Charles Dickens, who was probably the most popular author in the community.
The village children had to struggle with ponderous Victorian textbooks, and their reading was constantly interrupted by chores. Nevertheless, they managed to extract from these volumes something relevant to their individual lives. Joseph’s daughter described it as a process of appropriation: “What they heard and read was brought so immediately into contact with events and with work” that they developed a remarkable knack “for discerning unsuspected aspects of a topic and expounding them in terms of their own.”
In 1872 farm workers at the nearby village of Wellbourne went on strike, backed by Joseph Arch’s union. Local laborers were sympathetic but never expected the stoppage to succeed: the Banbury Guardian was given over mainly to hostile letters from farmers and clergymen. But when the Daily News took up the issue, Tysoe laborers chipped in to buy it—this was their first exposure to a London paper. Working-class readers throughout the country were gradually shifting from the local to the national press, which could offer a dramatically different perspective on events. The Daily News coverage of the strike was not only far more balanced, it was placed in the context of national issues. Now the men of Tysoe saw themselves as part of a larger struggle to win the right to vote and organize trade unions. The range of discussion in village shops grew to embrace the entire range of politics, even Progress and Poverty.
For workingmen, the expanding culture of print opened up opportunities to write and act in the public sphere. Joseph Ashby contributed notes on village affairs and politics to newspapers in Leamington and Warwick. He became a Liberal Party agent and a travelling agitator for the Land Restoration League. The quest for education carried his son Arthur to Ruskin College, an educational center for workingmen, and ultimately to the directorship of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford University. Women of Joseph’s generation could not take advantage of the new ferment to the same extent. His daughter recalled that her mother
would never greatly develop her literary taste or any other intellectual quality, for it seemed her duty to be perpetually poised for swift service—to husband, child, animal, neighbour and the chapel. Her delicate senses and vivid emotions were under the severest control—no job too hard or dirty, once its necessity was seen; the most innocent tastes were permitted no indulgence; no strong feeling was allowed to break through her resignation to heaven, husband, and fate. And so, naturally, she passes into the background of her husband’s and children’s lives, not often to emerge.
Yet Joseph taught his wife to enjoy Walter Scott and George Eliot, and would not permit her to waste time with the Girl’s Own Paper. He sincerely believed in the importance of education for the next generation of girls, according to his daughter, who became principal of the Hillcroft Residential College for Working Women.38
The roots of that autodidact culture go back as far as the late middle ages. It surged in the nineteenth century, particularly in Joseph Ashby’s late Victorian generation, and crested with the Labour Party landslide of 1945, the climax of this history. Thereafter, the working-class movement for self-education swiftly declined, for a number of converging reasons. This is, then, a success story with a downbeat ending.