Chapter Eleven

A Mongrel Library

The academic pioneer of popular culture studies was raised by a widow on public assistance. Richard Hoggart (b. 1918) granted that his mother “was certainly not an intellectual,” but he was exposed to the autodidact tradition through his grandmother, who made sure he did his homework and claimed that they were related to “poet Longfellow” and “painter Hogarth.” He profited little from his Hunslet elementary school, where a bully attacked him for being a Jew (he wasn’t) and “talking posh” (he hardly did). Though he failed the scholarship examination, he was admitted to a “brick cube” grammar school. There the teachers were more inspiring, but Hoggart never ventured beyond the assigned work until the day the headmaster confronted him outside his study. He had read one of Hoggart’s essays, which began with the sentence “Thomas Hardy was a truly cultured man,” and he asked—in a conspicuously southern and middle-class accent—“What is ‘a truly cultured man,’ Hoggart?”

I was baffled. I thought he was playing me up, because if our headmaster didn’t know what a truly cultured man was, if the phrase wasn’t absolutely cast-iron, where were we? And he said, “Am I one? I don’t think so. I don’t feel myself ‘truly cultured.’” This was my first sight of a mind speculating, of thought as something disinterested and free-playing, with yourself outside it. I usually thought of a master as somebody who said, “This is what such-and-such a verb is, or this is what happened in 1762, and you have to learn it”. . . . One of the things . . . my headmaster . . . did for me, and perhaps this is where my interest in cultural change starts, was to give me a feeling for cultural comparisons, between the cultures of the North and South in England, and between different social classes.¹

Once he had broken free of the idea that culture was something set in stone, Hoggart began to think seriously about the relative worth of various levels of culture. While he admired Fiction and the Reading Public, he felt that Mrs. Leavis had too easily dismissed popular literature:

Helped by Orwell and C. S. Lewis, I became more and more drawn to the question of what people might make of that material, by the thought that obviously poor writing might appeal to good instincts, that the mind of the reader is not a tabula rasa but has been nurtured within a social setting that provides its own forms and filters and judgements and resistances, that one had to know very much more about how people used much of the stuff which to us might seem merely dismissable trash, before one could speak confidently about the effects it might have.

In 1964, with money from Allen Lane of Penguin Books, he set up the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. At the time he was impatient with professors devoted to the standard canon, “as though that was not itself a cultural construct but a prescription from heaven.” Within a few years, however, he began to wonder what he had created. There was the doctoral student who denounced Hoggart’s Arnoldian humanism and demanded that the Centre only admit students from the hard left. There was the spreading plague of jargon and abstractions used as “props or crutches, substitutes for thought, ways of showing others and assuring themselves that they belong to an inner group.” And then there was the monster that he himself had inadvertently midwived: “‘The Beatles are in their own way as good as Beethoven’ nonsense.” Hoggart unfortunately lived long enough to hear an Oxbridge academic proclaim that “Lavatorial graffiti are not to be distinguished in any qualitative way from the drawings of Rembrandt,” and a BBC executive declare “There is no longer art. There is only culture—of all kinds.”

“Here the far Left meets the slick entrepreneurs,” Hoggart sighed. “Some of our arguments come back to haunt us.” In fact Hoggart had never been an uncritical populist: he originally intended to title his most famous book The Abuses of Literacy.² His definition of culture combined a reverence for great books, a lesser but real admiration for not-so-great books, and a sociological interest in the uses of all levels of literature. It avoided the sharp dichotomies drawn by the Romantics, Victorians, and Modernists, who tended to make a fetish of the highest art and dismiss everything else as pernicious rubbish. It equally rejected the postmodernist notion that “the comic strip cannot be treated as qualitatively inferior to a Shakespeare play or any other classic text.”³

This Third Way was a distinctively working-class approach to literature, what could be called critical populism. Autodidacts certainly worshipped the classics, but they could also be charitable toward the lesser ranks of literature. While they generally had a conservative sense of literary hierarchies, they tended to grade books on a sliding scale rather than pass-fail. Once the old Evangelical hostility to secular literature had been overcome, even serious autodidacts could treat fairly rubbishy books with remarkable tolerance, and they were not distressed by the jumbling together of high and low culture. As proletarian author Thomas Burke put it, the ideal reader was one who could enjoy Virginia Woolf and Somerset Maugham and sportswriters.⁴ Though a Primitive Methodist lay preacher, miners’ MP John Johnson (b. 1850) insisted he was never an “objectionable young prig, scorning anything in the shape of light literature. . . . On the contrary, I eagerly devoured the best novelists and poets, and am strongly of opinion [sic] that if a man does not judiciously vary his reading he is likely to suffer from literary indigestion, whilst if I took a serious view of life and its duties I hope that did not preclude me from much innocent enjoyment.”⁵ These readers tended to approach any literary work on its own terms, from Julius Caesar to advertising bills, and take from it whatever they found valuable. After all, as one workhouse veteran noted, there was more mental stimulus in a boys’ weekly than in the typical Victorian schoolbook.⁶

From the nineteenth century up to the present day, popular culture has been blamed for promoting a variety of social evils: juvenile crime, racism, violence, male supremacy, consumer capitalism, not to mention bad taste. None of these accusations is completely groundless, far from it, but the actual uses of literacy may be much more complicated and ambiguous than most students of cultural studies imagine. They typically approach popular culture by selecting a work or genre (say, boys’ weeklies or romance novels), assuming these texts are read by a defined audience (in these cases, boys or women), and then trying to discern the attitudes of the presumed audience by studying the texts they are supposed to have read. But can we so neatly match up text and audience? Boys’ weeklies were also read by girls. Many women never read romances, and most women read much else besides. Children often read books far above their presumed level of comprehension. Moreover, can we understand the impact of a particular work or genre in isolation, without considering all the other intertextual influences at play? If not, then we must make some attempt to reconstruct the entire literary diet of the audience. If we do that for the British working classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find that no two individual reading histories were alike. Each one was a unique jumble of ephemera, junk, and often some classics. And if every one of the newspaper articles, sermons, penny novelettes, advertisements, movies, and Everyman’s Library volumes was open to individual interpretation by everyone in an audience of millions, how can we possibly arrive at any reliable generalizations about popular culture? The only workable method is to consult the readers themselves, and let them explain how they made sense of it all.

The Function of Penny Dreadfuls

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the penny dreadful (cheap crime and horror literature for boys) created something approaching panic among middle-class observers, who were certain that it encouraged juvenile delinquency.⁷ Working-class critics, however, were inclined to be much more easygoing. “Demoralizing literature? Well, none of us in after life adopted highway robbery as a profession,” noted Thomas Okey (b. 1852), “although each desired to possess a Black Bess and to effect exciting escapes from pursuing Bow Street Runners by ‘rides to York.’” As a basketweaver who became professor of Italian at Cambridge University, Okey recognized that much of the clamor over penny dreadfuls grew out of a longstanding prejudice against teaching the poor to read. To those who protested that the Board schools were producing semi-literates, Okey countered that they were probably as well-read as the Cambridge undergraduate he found absorbed in the “Pink ’Un” (the Sporting Times).⁸ A South Wales miner (b. 1875?), raised in an orphanage, acknowledged that “Robin Hood was our patron saint, or ideal. We sincerely believed in robbing the rich to help the poor.” (Actually he stole from a old widow’s tuck shop.) “Our real heroes were robbers like Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and Charles Peace, whose ‘penny-dreadful’ biographies we knew by heart.” Yet in later life, even as a Calvinistic Methodist minister, he did not condemn that genre:

It introduced me to a romantic world when pennies were scarce, and libraries seemed far beyond my reach. We read the badly printed booklets in all sorts of places, even in church; they gave us glimpses of freedom, abandon, and romance, heroism and defiance of fate, whilst we chafed at restrictions and shut doors. True, our heroes . . . were outlaws. But what boy is not a bandit, a rebel, a pirate at heart! As a corrective to natural law-breaking propensities, the ‘penny-dreadful’ always ended with the punishment of crime.⁹

Others argued that even junk literature stimulated the reading habit.¹⁰ An ironworker’s son (b. 1866) who rose to the upper ranks of the British Medical Association attributed his “budding love of literature . . . to an enthusiastic reading of Penny Dreadfuls which, so far from leading me into a life of crime, made me look for something better.”¹¹ Though miners’ MP Robert Smillie (b. 1857) surreptitiously gorged on Dick Turpin and Three-Fingered Jack as a boy, they too “led to better things”: by fourteen he had seen Richard III, read some of the Sonnets, discovered Burns, Scott, and Dickens.¹² “They were thrilling, absolutely without sex interest, and of a high moral standard,” explained London hatmaker Frederick Willis. “No boy would be any the worse for reading them and in many cases they encouraged and developed a love of reading that led him onwards and upwards on the fascinating path of literature. It was the beloved ‘bloods’ that first stimulated my love of reading, and from them I set out on the road to Shaw and Wells, Thackeray and Dickens, Fielding, Shakespeare and Chaucer.”

Children’s papers could lead readers to great literature in more direct ways. As Willis noted, Union Jack serialized abridgements of Walter Scott novels, with more sensational titles, and the Chatterbox Christmas Annual for 1890 introduced him to Dr. Johnson.¹³ Barber John Paton (b. 1886) remembered that the Boys’ Friend “ran a serial which was an enormously exciting tale of Alba’s oppression of the Netherlands, and gave as its source, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic.” He borrowed it from the public library and, with guidance from a helpful adult, also read J. R. Green, Macaulay, Prescott, Grote, and even Mommsen’s multi-volume History of Rome by age fourteen. “There must have been, of course, enormous gaps in my understanding of what I poured into the rag-bag that was my mind, particularly from the bigger works,” he conceded, “but at least I sensed the important thing, the immense sweep and variety and the continuity of the historical process.”¹⁴

Thomas Frost (b. c. 1821), who wrote several penny dreadfuls, argued that they were the direct descendants of those charming chapbooks that had entranced earlier generations of common readers. While they could be “very trashy,” as a genre they were no more horrifying than some of Shakespeare’s plays and less immoral than many of the sensation novels available at Mudie’s Select Circulating Library. One could, he noted, find similar kinds of sensationalism in Ann Radcliffe, Smollett’s Count Fathom, Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, and Charles Dickens. Frost did not gloss over the qualitative differences here. He saw that Dickens and Bulwer Lytton represented a great improvement in popular taste over Dick Turpin and, following Wilkie Collins, he was certain that the mass reading public would eventually learn “the difference between a good book and a bad.”¹⁵ All the same, he recognized that even classics could appropriate themes and devices from trash literature. If that seems a remarkably modern critical insight for the 1880s, it was shared by a number of working-class readers. East End socialist Walter Southgate (b. 1890) remembered that Dick Turpin and Buffalo Bill stories “were condemned by our teachers (all from middle-class backgrounds) who would confiscate them,” but he appreciated their generic similarities to Robinson Crusoe, the Waverley novels, and The Last of the Mohicans.¹⁶ As a boy George Acorn, a fellow East Londoner, read “all sorts and conditions of books, from ‘Penny Bloods’ to George Eliot” with “some appreciation of style,” enough to recognize the affinities of high and low literature. Thus he discerningly characterized Treasure Island as “the usual penny blood sort of story, with the halo of greatness about it.”¹⁷

“I do not see why the poor old public should be flouted for preferring The Prisoner of Zenda to Hedda Gabler,” protested Robert Blatchford in 1903. He confessed to a boyish weakness for pirate stories and adventure tales. Had not Defoe, Scott, and Dumas worked in essentially the same genre? Literary men have always bewailed the deterioration of literary taste, but Blatchford’s reply to them would probably hold true for any generation: yes, the presses are churning out more rubbish nowadays, but also more good literature. “What about Dent’s Temple Shakespeare, what about the innumerable new editions of English and foreign classics now appearing? Frankly, I do not believe there were ever so many lovers of real literature, in this country at any rate, as there have been within the last ten years.”¹⁸

Neither Blatchford nor any other working-class memoirist seriously questioned traditional literary hierarchies. Their tolerant affection for low literature coexisted with a conviction that the great writers were objectively great. Following Matthew Arnold, Blatchford affirmed that only the “abnormally dull” could prefer poetaster Martin Tupper to Milton. For anyone with an innate sense of discrimination, “it is well-nigh impossible . . . ever to mistake a bad book for a good one.”¹⁹ Most books had some value, but they could be definitively ranked on a scale. In the following paragraph by gardener’s son Howard Spring (b. 1889) one can discern five distinct strata of literary taste:

From the Magnet it is no great step to G. A. Henty, and from that hearty friend of so much British youth, from Henty, I say, and from Ballantyne, Kingston and the rest, the passage to Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe is not difficult. I know. The boy who has read Treasure Island and has been tempted thereby to sample Kidnapped and Catriona is ripe for Scott and Dumas, and thence there is nothing less than the infinite to step into.²⁰

Spring knew exactly what belonged in that highest category. When he won a University College Cardiff prize worth £3 in books, he lugged home sixty Everyman’s Library volumes, to cheers and laughter from the audience.²¹ Weaver-novelist William Holt extolled the standard greats (“Noble Carlyle; virtuous Tolstoi; wise Bacon; jolly Rabelais; towering Plato. . .”) and, having taught himself German, memorized Schiller while working at the looms. But he did not limit himself to classics: “I read omnivorously, greedily, promiscuously,” from dime novels and G. A. Henty to Hardy and Conrad. Holt disparaged popular authors such as Ethel M. Dell and Elinor Glyn for “peddling vulgar narcotics,” yet he was closely attuned to the mass reading public. His own autobiography sold a quarter of a million copies, and he once owned a fleet of bookmobiles. He reconciled taste with populism through this logic: though most readers consume a certain amount of junk, it does them no harm because they recognize it as junk. He recalled the protest of an old age pensioner in clogs, when a bookmobile offered him Edgar Wallace: “Dammit! Ah’ve seen me, when Ah’ve bin readin’ Edgar Wallace, sit up till three o’clock in t’ mornin’. Ah’d finish it, and then wuzz it across th’ house. Gor-yonnit! Ah doan’t know what Ah want readin’ sich rubbish for! But ’e could tell a good tale, could Edgar.”

In the 1940s Mass Observation surveys confirmed that fans of cheap thrillers commonly acknowledged they were facile and not to be compared with classics.²² William Holt appreciated what many scholars of popular culture today have yet to recognize: that the impact of literature cannot be measured by sales figures alone. Some books are chewing gum, consumed in mass quantities but leaving no taste behind; others transform the lives of the readers. That observation lay behind his own definition of a great book:

I believe that the humble person is the touchstone by which the true classic can be told. Surely a book cannot be truly great if it makes no impression at all on the mind of a humble man or woman? Great books evoke response in circles high and low, readers responding in their own way according to their own lights and in due proportion to the measure of their spirit and what they are able to bring to the book themselves, both innate and acquired.²³

Autodidacts widely recognized that essential difference. Only canonical literature could produce epiphanies in common readers, and specifically, only great books could inspire them to write. Lancashire millworker Ben Brierley (b. 1825) read penny fairy tales and horror stories as a boy, but they did not contribute to his work as a dialect poet: “I must confess that my soul did not feel much lifted by the only class of reading then within my reach. It was not until I joined the companionship of Burns and Byron that I felt the ‘god within me.’”²⁴ When young, ironmoulder-novelist Joseph Stamper devoured penny dreadfuls as well as Stead’s Penny Poets, and in an economy of scarcity he sometimes had to “ponder whether to buy Thomas à Kempis or Deadwood Dick.” Still, in one vitally important sense the cowboy hero could not be equated with cheap editions of Homer, Keats, Tennyson, Hiawatha, and Evangeline, for only the latter impelled him to write his own poetry, something that was not encouraged at school.²⁵

Poverty and Indiscrimination

We must therefore break the habit of treating high culture and popular culture as two distinct categories with mutually exclusive audiences. In fact, a promiscuous mix of high and low was a common pattern among working-class readers of all regions, generations, and economic strata. Their approach to literature was a random walk. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, autodidact culture is commonly ridiculed for its unsystematic organization and acquisition.²⁶ Even a sympathetic observer like Arnold Freeman, of the Sheffield Educational Settlement, was “astonished” by “the indiscriminate character of the reading even of the best of the workers,” who appeared “to read almost anything that is put into their hands.”²⁷ If that seems to be middle-class condescension, it was consistently confirmed by working-class readers:

. . . when I think of books and myself I seem to have played the butterfly rather than the bee . . . . [Warehouseman, b. 1861]²⁸

It began, as all writers’ lives begin, by copious, catholic, and indiscriminate reading. From the age of eight or nine I was allowed to read anything I wanted to, although I remember my father’s taking away from me Peregrine Pickle, saying I could read it when I was older. I got hold of it again within a week and read it clandestinely and avidly . . . . [Shipbuilder’s son turned professional author, b. 1887]²⁹

I read voraciously, without direction, desultorily, in a panic of fear I would never have time to read all that I wanted to read; I picked up books and cast them away unread if they did not immediately appeal to me. And slowly out of this welter of reading I began to discover the few books which I could go on reading and re-reading. [Barrow steelworker, b. 1914]³⁰

Most working people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even some in the twentieth, faced an absolute poverty of reading matter. That is, the literature available to them could not fill up their leisure time, even if they read it all. There was no room for selectivity. As Cornish carpenter George Smith (b. 1800) had little access to libraries, he “read every sort of book that came in my way”—novels, history, biblical criticism. He particularly liked mathematics because it was slow reading: “A treatise on algebra or geometry, which cost but a very few shillings, afforded me matter for close study for a year.”³¹ Methodist millworker Thomas Wood (b. 1822) attended a school where there was only one book, the Bible, which was never read beyond the first chapter of St. John. Therefore he later “read everything I could lay my hands on,” which was precious little. At this time “A cottage library in a fairly well-to-do family would seldom exceed half-a-dozen volumes, and consisted of such books as Doddridge’s Use and Progress of Religion in the Souls [sic], Bunyan’s Works, particularly the Pilgrim’s Progress, Cook’s Voyages, News from the Invisible World, etc., and a volume, or perhaps two, of magazines.” He worked his way through most of the library at an independent Sunday school, and joined a mechanics’ institute for 1½d. a week. His reading, though “very heterogeneous” and undirected, could be quite intensive, as when he devoted almost a year to the six volumes of Rollin’s Ancient History. That “left an impression on my mind which 40 years of wear and tear has not effaced.”³²

A half century later Edwin Whitlock (b. 1874) faced much the same shortages. A farmer on Salisbury Downs, he had plenty of time to read while shepherding: “The difficulty was to get hold of books. The only ones in our house were the Bible, a few thin Sunday School prizes, which were mostly very pious publications, one or two more advanced theological works, and a Post Office Directory for 1867, which volume I read from cover to cover.” Whitlock also borrowed books from a schoolmaster and from neighbors:

Most of them would now be considered very heavy literature for a boy of fourteen or fifteen, but I didn’t know that, for I had no light literature for comparison. I read most of the novels of Dickens, Scott, Lytton and Mrs. Henry Wood, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War—an illustrated guide to Biblical Palestine, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, several bound volumes of religious magazines, The Adventures of a Penny, and sundry similar classics.

With few books competing for his attention, he could freely concentrate on his favorite reading, “a set of twelve thick volumes of Cassell’s History of England.”³³ For Durham colliery worker Sid Chaplin, the bitterest memory of poverty—worse even than the miners’ strike of 1926—was “a perpetual starvation of books. . . . You went with half a crown in your pocket and scoured the town like a lean book-hungry bloodhound, . . . fit to bay in the covered market because the book was sixpence more than you possessed. . . . I remember sneering at passing [Newcastle University] students because they had everything, which is to say all the books they desired, and I had nothing.”³⁴

Readers who read whatever came to hand would unavoidably stumble across a certain percentage of classics amidst the rubbish. Growing up in Clapton during the Depression, Michael Stapleton needed a signature from his father (an Irish navvy) for a public library card,

but I asked him on the wrong evening and he merely shouted at me. . . . So I . . . started examining every book in the house, ransacking forgotten cupboards and the hole under the stairs. I read everything I could understand, and begged twopenny bloods quite shamelessly from the boys at school who were fortunate to enjoy such things. I absorbed an immense amount of useless information, but occasionally a treasure came my way and I would strain my eyes under the twenty-watt bulb which lighted our kitchen. A month-old copy of the Wizard would be succeeded by a handbook for vegetarians, and this in turn would be followed by Jane Eyre. Tarzan and the Jewels of Ophir was no sooner finished than I was deep in volumes three and four of a history of The Conquest of Peru (the rest of the set was missing). I would go from that to Rip Van Winkle and straight on to a tattered copy of the Hotspur.³⁵

Under those conditions, one inevitably read much that was not age-appropriate, far above or below one’s comprehension level. James Williams (b. c. 1900) admitted that, growing up in rural Wales, “I’d read anything rather than not read at all. I read a great deal of rubbish, and books that were too ‘old’, or too ‘young’ for me.” He consumed the Gem, Magnet, and Sexton Blake as well as the standard boys’ authors (Henty, Ballantyne, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Twain) but also Dickens, Scott, Trollope, the Brontës, George Eliot, even Prescott’s The Conquest of Peru and The Conquest of Mexico. He picked The Canterbury Tales out of a odd pile of used books for sale, gradually puzzled out the Middle English, and eventually adopted Chaucer as his favorite poet. The Royal Readers school anthologies published by the firm of Nelson in fact “made only slight concessions to youth” in their verse selections. Though we regard W. H. G. Kingston as a children’s writer, his lavish use of nautical jargon was a challenge to the young reader: “In common with other Victorian authors, he made no concession by way of a simplified vocabulary for children. The age of ‘pappy’ children’s books had not yet come. If I had time I’d look up hard words in a dictionary, but more often than not I guessed their meaning from the context.” In 1971 Williams argued that such a sturdy literary diet stretched the minds of Edwardian schoolchildren. He denounced “a deplorable tendency in the last 30 years to keep the child away from difficulties. Too many failed teachers have become inspectors with power to institute easy reading and working in all subjects. Every child is a shorn lamb, for whom all winds have to be tempered. It is the failures who get the V.I.P. treatment. In my day we took the hard stuff neat.”³⁶

In fact younger plebeian readers often tackled difficult books, even if they read them through an unsophisticated frame. W. E. Adams enjoyed Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Arabian Nights at quite a young age, though “the religious meaning of the first, the satirical meaning of the second, and the doubtful meaning of the third were, of course, not understood. The story was the thing—the trials of Christian, the troubles of Gulliver, the adventures of Aladdin.”³⁷ George Acorn read George Eliot at age nine, but “solely for the story. I used to skip the parts that moralized, or painted verbal scenery, a practice at which I became very dextrous.”³⁸ Bookbinder Frederick Rogers read Faust “through from beginning to end, not because I was able at sixteen to appreciate Goethe, but because I was interested in the Devil.” Moving on to Don Quixote, “I did not realize its greatness till long after; but its stories of adventure and its romance and humour appealed to me strongly enough.”³⁹ Stella Davies’s father would read to his children from the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Walter Scott, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickens, The Cloister and the Hearth, and Pope’s translation of the Iliad, though not in their entirety: “Extracts suitable to our ages were read and explained and, when we younger ones had been packed off to bed, more serious and inclusive reading would begin. . . . We younger ones often dipped into books far beyond our understanding. It did us no harm, I believe, for we skipped a lot and took what we could from the rest.”⁴⁰

Harry Burton (b. late 1890s), a housepainter’s son who became a Cambridge don, affirmed that “a child can never be too young for almost any work of genius—provided it is a work of genius. . . . Hamlet, for example, undoubtedly touches on problems with which little boys or girls cannot, or certainly should not, be familiar by experience,” but educators had to take account of “the incredible elasticity of the child’s understanding, which at one moment will fail to grasp some of the simplest conceptions and at the next seems to encompass the profoundest mysteries.” There were few books at home when he was a boy, but one of them was Don Juan. He read it before he was eleven—through a prepubescent frame, of course.

I saw nothing in it but comic adventures, sunny shores, storms, Arabian Nights interiors, and words, words, words. Many of the words I did not understand, but I did not therefore jump to the conclusion that they were indecent! All of them—or nearly all—jogged happily through my unreceptive brain leaving vaguely pleasing sensations in their wake. . . . Genius speaks to all hearts and to all ages; the very greatest work in any medium brings its own credentials and is its own interpreter, and even if it says something different to every single worshipper, what it says is always valid and always true.⁴¹

In fact some uneducated readers had an uncanny knack for recognizing greatness in literature. Growing up in Lyndhurst after the First World War, R. L. Wild regularly read aloud to his marginally literate grandmother and his completely illiterate grandfather—and it was his grandparents who selected the books. Wild’s mother, who “never read a book in her life,” would also periodically bring home a 6d. volume from Woolworth’s.

I shall never understand how this choice was made. Until I started reading to them they had no more knowledge of English literature than a Malay aborigine. . . . I suppose it was their very lack of knowledge that made the choice, from Quo Vadis at eight, Rider Haggard’s She at nine. By the time I was twelve they had come to know, intimately, a list of authors ranging from Shakespeare to D. H. Lawrence. All was grist to the mill (including Elinor Glyn). The classics, poetry, essays, belles lettres. We took them all in my stride. At times we stumbled on gems that guided us to further riches. I well remember the Saturday night they brought home The Essays of Elia. For months afterwards we used it as our road map.

“Now, this ’ere Southey bloke,” [Grandad] would say, after an evening with Lamb. “We ain’t ’ad ’e, ’ave us? This ’ere Mr. Lamb, ’e seems to go for ’n, don’t ’e?”

Perhaps that’s how we got round to poetry. I don’t know how often they would want to listen, again and again, to Lawrence on Poverty.

The only people I ever heard talk about my Lady Poverty

Were rich people, or people who imagined themselves rich.

Saint Francis himself was a rich and spoiled young man.

Being born among the working people

I know that poverty is a hard old hag,

And a monster, when you’re pinched for actual necessities.

And whoever says she isn’t, is a liar.

The family silently took that in, until Grandad spoke: “God, ’e must ’ave known what it was like, eh, Matey?”⁴²

Thus it was possible for a naive reader, flying blind, to home in on the classics. George Howell, bricklayer and trade unionist, explained how: “I read promiscuously. How could it be otherwise? I had no real guide, was obliged to feel my way into light. Yet perhaps there was a guidance, although indefinite and without distinctive aim.” Howell groped his way through literature “on the principle that one poet’s works suggested another, or the criticisms on one led to comparisons with another. Thus: Milton—Shakespeare; Pope—Dryden; Byron—Shelley; Burns—Scott; Coleridge—Wordsworth and Southey, and later on Spenser—Chaucer, Bryant—Longfellow, and so on.”⁴³ By following these intertextual links, autodidacts could reconstruct the literary canon on their own.

Certainly, some readers selected authors simply because they had picked up their names from critics and schoolteachers. Edwin Muir (b. 1887), an Orkney crofter’s child, admitted he “followed up with a sort of devotion every reference I found in my school-books or in the weekly paper to great writers. I worshipped their names before I knew anything of their work. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Swinburne, Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin—these names thrilled me.” But this canon was hardly a hegemony imposed on Muir. On the contrary, everything in his cultural milieu conspired against the pursuit of literature. Books were still expensive: a coveted biography of Carlyle was on sale in Kirkwall for 1s. 3d., which was 3d. more than he had. There was a lending library in town, but with no education or guidance in English literature he wasted valuable reading time. Then there was opposition from his father, who made him return a study of “the Atheist” David Hume. And when his brother gave him 3d. to spend, he was almost insulted to learn that the money had gone to purchase Penny Poets editions of As You Like It, The Earthly Paradise, and Matthew Arnold. At home there was nothing to read except the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, an R. M. Ballantyne tale about Hudson’s Bay, back numbers of the Christian World (“They contained nothing but accounts of meetings and conferences, announcements of appointments to ministries, and obituary notices; yet I read them from beginning to end”), a large volume documenting a theological dispute between a Protestant clergyman and a Catholic priest, a novel that was probably Sense and Sensibility (“I could make nothing of it, but this did not keep me from reading it”), The Scots Worthies in monthly parts (a thousand pages in all), the People’s Journal and other cheap magazines. “I read a complete series of sentimental love tales very popular at the time, called Sunday Stories,” as well as a raft of temperance novels. Consequently, when he stumbled across Christopher Marlowe or George Crabbe in that literary junkyard, “it was like an addition to a secret treasure; for no one knew of my passion, and there was none to whom I could speak of it.”⁴⁴

The most heroic chapter of this history recounts the struggle of ordinary readers, in the face of tremendous obstacles, with no meaningful help or preparation, to discover literary greatness on their own. The education Neville Cardus received at his Manchester Board school was worthless. His parents (who worked in a home laundry) owned no books other than East Lynne, the Bible, “somebody’s Dream Book,” a Marion Crawford novel, and an odd volume of Coleridge poems. Cardus read only boys’ papers until quite suddenly, in adolescence, he dove into Dickens and Mark Twain. “Then, without scarcely a bridge-passage, I was deep in the authors who to this day I regard the best discovered in a lifetime”—Fielding, Browning, Hardy, Tolstoy, even Henry James. He found them all before he was twenty, with critical guidance from no one: “We must make our own soundings and chartings in the arts . . . so that we may all one day climb to our own peak, silent in Darien.”⁴⁵

“Reading for me then was haphazard, unguided, practically uncritical,” recalled boilermaker’s daughter Marjory Todd. “I slipped all too easily into those traps for the half-baked—books about books, the old John o’ London’s Weekly, chit-chat of one kind or another.” Yet in a few years she had advanced to Moby Dick, Lord Jim, Crime and Punishment, and Wuthering Heights.

Whether I knew it or not, curiosity was being sharpened, knowledge absorbed, mental frontiers pushed back. Sitting alone on a seat on the Common one Sunday afternoon, putting off the time when I must go home and get the tea, I remember I experienced that sudden awareness of identity and purpose which I suppose comes to most adolescents. Perhaps to some it comes only gradually. For me the moment was caught and held on that Sunday afternoon, so that now [1960], nearly forty years later, I can remember exactly the angle of the slanting sun, a clump of pine trees, the rough worn grass and a few small pine cones at my feet.

The revelation was almost negative—or rather, it showed me that what I had been up to that moment I would never be again. Colours would be bolder, outlines more sharply defined; the new energy which was tingling through me would demand new outlets, the nature of which I could not yet guess. I did not want to go home immediately to the bustle of getting tea; I wanted to be alone. Something was going to happen; I did not yet know what. I would, I suppose, have been ripe for revivalism, for conversion, had any proselytising force been at hand, but it was not. I might even, I dare say, have fallen in love.⁴⁶

Derek Davies (b. 1923) could not recall that his mother had ever read a book. His father, a die-caster in an automobile factory, read only local and sports papers and two novels a week—a Western or a detective thriller.

Yet quite unintentionally he gave me . . . a love of reading. . . . He never seemed to vary the diet, he never discussed either the books he read or newspaper items, and he never urged me to read for myself. Often my mother would accuse him of being “dead to the world with your nose stuck in a book,” yet behind her chiding lay a note of admiration for an achievement which for her was incomprehensible. I rapidly assumed that reading was manly, cheerfully risked the same forgiving rebuke, and was soon reading everything he read. By the age of eleven or twelve I must have read a couple of hundred of his novels. . . . Obviously nobody moulded my reading habits. I never had stories read to me at bedtime, and the children’s classics remained for me to discover when my own children came along. In one unplanned leap I plunged into reading and found myself simultaneously reading voraciously on several widely differing levels.

In addition to the newspapers and his father’s novels, he consumed books for younger children and travel books for adults (“Tibet, I remember, was one passionate preoccupation”). He jumped from the Wizard and Hotspur, which his parents considered “trash,” to their twenty-two bound volumes of The Illustrated News History of the 1914–18 War.

Undeterred by the fact that I had neither the space nor the money to embark on even the most modest layout, I consumed book after book on the building of model railways. Gradually, as I found out how to use the School Library and the Public Library, some degree of selection took place, but as nobody at school before the Sixth Form advised me what to read the selection remained distinctly erratic. I remained ignorant of whole areas of likely books, and I constantly read books far ahead of my understanding. At about fourteen, for example, I read every word of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, although I had only the faintest glimmering of its real significance.

All this wildly random reading had concrete value for Davies. Even his father’s rubbishy novels “provided me with a reading fluency and a vocabulary which gave me a flying start in the Grammar School.” For his first public speaking engagement, before his chapel mutual improvement society, he offered to lecture on T. E. Lawrence. “I can still remember the polite disapproval of the elderly Secretary . . ., for in my youthful audacity I started the talk like a sensational newspaper with the moment of Lawrence’s dramatic death on the speeding motorcycle.” But perhaps his dad’s newspapers had taught him a cinematic sensibility: years later he was astonished to find the same opening in David Lean’s film.⁴⁷

Any consideration of twentieth-century mass culture must take into account the most popular proletarian author of all time. Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called “intellectual manna.” Once, in New York, he suggested that someone ought to compile a new kind of dictionary that would specify the precise word for every idea, whereupon a black truck driver directed him to Roget’s Thesaurus. Then there was the waiter at the Alexandria Hotel who quoted William Blake and Karl Marx as he delivered courses to Chaplin’s table; and the acrobatic comedian who advised him to read The Anatomy of Melancholy, explaining (in a Brooklyn accent) Burton’s influence on Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson. Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll’s secularist propaganda, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (“I felt I had been handed a golden birthright”), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch’s Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud’s Psychoneurosis, Lafcadio Hearn’s Life and Literature, and Henri Bergson—his essay on laughter, of course. Bergson had argued that the essence of comedy is the mechanization of human 'font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'> . .; and the more familiar, informal, boy-managed it seemed to be, the more likely they were to use it.

If I wanted them to become real readers, I argued, then I must ask myself what made anyone whatever a real reader. And surely part of the process was the discovery, for yourself, of bad, better, best. Literature, like life, was a mongrel business. That was the delight of it. So I must have a mongrel library.⁴⁹

Boys’ Stories for Girls

Female reading was no less mongrelized. Alongside the Gem and Magnet, girls had their own parallel universe of school stories, where a miner’s daughter could imagine herself “the Heroine of St. Catherine’s, and even the Richest Girl in the School.”⁵⁰ But as Orwell correctly guessed, many girls chose to read boys’ weeklies. Some of them passionately identified with the young gentlemen of Greyfriars,⁵¹ even to the point of mimicking their manners and catchphrases.⁵²

Like more canonical male authors, Frank Richards and other boys’ writers could have a liberating influence on their girl readers. As a railway clerk’s daughter, Muriel Box (b. 1905) enjoyed borrowing her brother’s Magnet, Gem, and Boy’s Own Paper: she later became a leading feminist activist and a pioneer woman film director.⁵³ That hunger for adventure, according to M. K. Ashby, may explain why girls as well as boys fought over the Boy’s Own Paper: “Perhaps the long voyages of the boys in the stories, over mountains or in sailing boats, and the wonderful expeditions to collect tropical birds and plants compensated the children for their continually interrupted adventures and the severe usefulness of their errands.”⁵⁴ Domestic servant Dorothy Burnham (b. 1915) never read girls’ stories (“I found them insipid and meaningless”) but she and her older sister were fixated on the Magnet, to the point of mimicking the school uniform (blazer, straw hat, shirt and tie). This partly reflected their new found interest in the opposite sex. Dorothy identified particularly with that subversive fellow the Bounder, who smoked, gambled, and even “split an infinitive or two.”⁵⁵

Just as their foremothers had been inspired by Pope, Carlyle, and Lord Chesterfield, these girls suffered no psychological damage when they assumed the male perspective. At a time when literature offered few truly emancipated heroines, girls could leap out of constricting female roles by identifying with adventurous male characters. As a child Pat Phoenix found escape in Arthurian legends, assuming the role of Arthur rather than Guinevere.⁵⁶ One chauffeur’s daughter alternated effortlessly between heroes and heroines: “I have plotted against pirates along with Jim Hawkins and I have trembled with Jane Eyre as the first Mrs. Rochester rent her bridal veil in maddened jealousy. I have been shipwrecked with Masterman Ready and on Pitcairn Island with Fletcher Christian. I have been a medieval page in Sir Nigel and Lorna Doone madly in love with ‘girt Jan Ridd.’”⁵⁷ Jennie Lee likewise worked through her family bookcase, and “Before I quite realized what was happening I was the Count of Monte Cristo tapping away desperately in an effort to establish communication with the prisoner in the next cell. Or I was Liza fleeing from slavery across the broken ice and carrying a child in my arms. Or Burning Daylight swaggering into town, the toughest and whitest man in all the North.”⁵⁸ None of that prevented her from becoming an admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Olive Schreiner, and George Sand, as well as a Labour MP.⁵⁹

Schoolgirl crushes on romantic poets were not unusual, but Angela Rodaway (b. 1918), whose father worked in a garage and a soap factory, fully assumed their personae: “I ‘lost’ my tie so that the collar of my school blouse gaped Byronically. I was determined to die by the time I was thirty [like Shelley] and to look pale and ethereal for most of the years preceding this. I learnt that Byron had fed himself on rice and vinegar in order to achieve such an effect and I tried to do the same.” Her adolescent appetite soon got the better of her and, having read Boswell on Johnson, she decided to emulate instead the great doctor’s diet and personal hygiene. Yet between meals, she was capable of assuming a feminist spirituality, writing poems to an “unknown, unnamed goddess, a mysterious and omnipotent ‘she.’”⁶⁰ Even Annie Kenney, the most militant of the working-class suffragettes, began her autobiography by quoting “A man is not all included between his hat and his boots” (Whitman) and “Man, know thyself.”⁶¹ The fixation on ungendered language was a late twentieth-century fetish: an earlier and sturdier generation of feminists concentrated their energies on more meaningful issues.

Nor were these exceptional cases. A 1940 survey of working-class girls aged thirteen and fourteen found that about a quarter of the adolescent magazines they read were, in fact, written for boys. Adventure stories accounted for 54 percent of books read by working-class boys aged twelve and thirteen, but also 21 percent of books read by girls, compared with less than 7 percent for love stories.⁶² In an 1888 survey of mainly middle-class adolescents, the favorite book among girls turned out to be Charles Kingsley’s preposterous Westward Ho! Jules Verne, W. H. G. Kingston, and Whyte Melville, who are generally typed as adventure writers for boys, were actually more popular with girls than Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, and all the Brontës. The girls rated The Girl’s Own Paper their favorite magazine, but The Boy’s Own Paper took second place. As one young woman remarked,

A great many girls never read so-called “girls’ books” at all; they prefer those presumably written for boys. Girls as a rule don’t care for Sunday-school twaddle; they like a good stirring story, with a plot and some incident and adventures—not a collection of texts and sermons and hymns strung together, with a little “Child’s Guide to Knowledge” sort of conversation. . . . People try to make boys’ books as exciting and amusing as possible, while we girls, who are much quicker and more imaginative, are very often supposed to read milk-and-watery sorts of stories that we could generally write better ourselves. . . . When I was younger I always preferred Jules Verne and Ballantyne and Little Women and Good Wives to any other books, except those of Charles Lever.⁶³

Marjory Todd was initially put off by the title of Little Women (“it sounded like just another goody-goody book such as those . . . which were all our Sunday School could provide”) but discovered a new and exciting world in Marryat’s Poor Jack.⁶⁴ The 1888 survey concluded that many girls’ books sold well only because they were given as presents by adults: “If girls were to select their own books . . . they would make a choice very different from that which their elders make for them.” Sure enough, when London elementary schoolchildren of both sexes selected prize books in 1910, the only “girls’ book” high on the list was Little Women (1,625 choices), along with Robinson Crusoe (2,283), David Copperfield (1,114), Ivanhoe (1,096), and Westward Ho! (1,136).⁶⁵ All this parallels what Barbara Sicherman found among female readers in late Victorian America: they were equally fond of “boys’ books” which, far from indoctrinating them in any male ideology, reinforced their independence.⁶⁶

The Dog That Was Down

Popular literature and movies have also been indicted for communicating racist attitudes to their audiences. Boys’ papers in particular stand condemned for routinely depicting the Chinese as villainous and blacks as comical or vicious.⁶⁷ George Orwell cataloged the predictable stereotypes:

FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.

SPANIARD, MEXICAN etc: Sinister, treacherous.

ARAB, AFGHAN etc: Sinister, treacherous.

CHINESE: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.

ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.

SWEDE, DANE etc: Kind hearted, stupid.

NEGRO: Comic, very faithful.⁶⁸

Yet that list, on the face of it, is unfair to Frank Richards. Though his stories were densely populated with ethnic cartoons, the least attractive were arrogant white Americans. Richards forthrightly condemned Jim Crow laws in the United States and public-school anti-Semitism in Britain, and he introduced an Indian school-chum to make a statement against racism:

The dark eyes of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh had a flash in them now. “Did you call me a nigger,” he asked quietly. . . . “I have a great respect for negroes, as much esteemfulness as I have for other persons. . . . But if the intention is to insult—”⁶⁹

Even artifacts of British popular culture that seem obviously racist may, on closer examination, appear more ambiguous, especially when we consider the response of the audience. In nineteenth-century Sunday school literature one can certainly find contemptuous treatments of Eastern religions and horror stories about the Sepoy Mutiny, but also denunciations of racial bigotry.⁷⁰ “Nigger” minstrel shows were enormously popular in the Victorian period, but how were they read by working-class spectators? As Michael Pickering suggests, the answer is not as clear as it might seem today. A tradition of blackface performers can be traced back to the court of Richard II, not to mention Othello, and they often affirmed universal or antislavery themes.⁷¹ When a minstrel pranced about the stage wearing the costume of an aristocratic dandy, whose pretensions were being mocked: the “nigger’s” or the gentleman’s? Unlike his white American counterpart, the British workingman was not yet competing with a large black labor force, and consequently did not need to proclaim his racial superiority. On the contrary, Chartist agitators and trade unionists frequently compared the condition of free English workers with that of American slaves. Joseph Arch, organizer of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union and staunch anti-imperialist, protested that “the life of poor little Hodge was not a whit better than that of a plantation nigger boy.”⁷² Given that most minstrel singers were whites in blackface (Henry Mayhew found that only one of fifty “Negro Serenaders” in the streets of London was actually black),⁷³ it is not improbable that working-class audiences identified with “Jim Crow.” In Victorian Britain, blackface minstrelsy may have represented a poor white homage to and appropriation of black American music—not so very different from what Elvis Presley did a century later. In that spirit, the millworker-poet Joseph Burgess adopted a minstrel song as his personal anthem:

I will live as long as I can, ha! ha!

 Or I’ll know de reason why,

For as long as dere’s breff in pore old Jeff,

 Dis nigger will never say die, ha! ha!⁷⁴

Though the labor press (e.g., Reynolds’s Newspaper, the Bee-Hive, the Working Man) supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War, their readers tended to side with the North.⁷⁵ One ex-weaver from Stockport enlisted in the Grand Army of the Republic, partly because he was unemployed, but also because “I detested slavery of every kind whether among the white factory operatives at home or among the negroes of America. I always went with the dog that was down.”⁷⁶

Those sentiments were fired by the spectacular popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It captivated working-class audiences like no other literary work of the nineteenth century, and it continued to rouse them well into the twentieth. It appears in the catalogs of ten out of twenty South Wales miners’ libraries, not counting the translation Caban F’ewyth Twm.⁷⁷ As late as 1940, it was one of the most widely read books among working-class schoolgirls. When they recalled the dark ages of child labor, workingmen often framed their protests in those terms: they had been treated as brutally as Uncle Tom.⁷⁸ The book inspired radicals like Samuel Fielden, an emigrant from Lancashire, executed in connection with Chicago’s Haymarket riot of 1886,⁷⁹ as well as Communists Willie Gallacher and Helen Crawfurd.⁸⁰

In the memories of ordinary readers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin stands out as a devastating experience. It was practically the only literary work that moved a Forest of Dean colliery storekeeper to comment in his diary: “Was struck most impressively with some of its beautiful contrasts and the extensive range of mind of the author.”⁸¹ A warehouse clerk kept it open under his desk lid, “snatching a few pages in the intervals of working a numbering machine. Many a salt tear fell into the desk, or was with difficulty concealed when duty called.”⁸² “Oh, the reality of the escape over the crackling ice, and of black Topsy who wasn’t born but ‘just growed’—never, never to be forgotten!” recalled a Dundee bookkeeper’s daughter. “And the sense of sin—never to be quite expiated.”⁸³ “Reality” may not be the word that Uncle Tom’s Cabin brings to mind today, yet audiences before the First World War found in it a heart-stopping realism. In stage versions it could effectively abolish the proscenium, erasing the boundaries between drama and life, actors and spectators. In one North Wales mining village, audience identification with black slaves was complete and thoroughly harrowing:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin played absolute hell with our emotions. We felt every stroke of the lash of the whip. It cut us to the quick, heart and soul. In the audience some people wept unashamedly like the Greeks of old who considered it manly to give vent to their feelings when moved. Others with obvious effort restrained themselves by the exercise of great control from rushing on the stage, taking the whip out of the hand of the cruel task master and giving him a taste of his own medicine. One or two were only repressed with the reminder that it was on the stage—and not in real life. Not so Mrs. Whalley. In the middle of the sixpennies . . . she was loudly sobbing, looking up and calling out, “Oh, oh” as each lash discordantly cut the air and Tom’s poor body. At one juncture her grief was awful to behold and as she was sympathetically escorted out to the back . . . she was still sobbing and crying and would not be comforted. As if motivated all the more by the compassion of the audience, the cruelty on the stage was intensified and the accompanying words were savagely added on as salt to the wounds. There was not a dry eye in the Pavilion that night. . . . [Afterwards] the people moved out into what was to them the unreality of the world outside, to such a degree had the events of the past two hours taken hold of them. Outside Mrs. Whalley was still giving vent to her feelings as the crowd gathered round, some people had come running from near the Miners’ Institute over a hundred yards away. Again sympathizers were trying to tell her that it was only a play, on the stage. “It wasn’t for real,” they pleaded. And then she moved off into the night homewards, still crying and moaning.⁸⁴

C. H. Rolph recalled that his father “had a romantic admiration for the Zulus, even though they killed his father (a private in the South Wales Borderers) at the Battle of Isandhlwana.” There may well have been a touch of class resentment behind that sentiment: “My father used to say that . . . Isandhlwana and its 900 British dead showed ‘the blacks’ that spears and courage could win against rifles, and that well-trained impis could outwit upper-class English duffers like Lord Chelmsford.” Rolph himself picked up a similar message from S. Clarke Hook’s stories of Jack, Sam, and Pete in the Boys’ Friend Threepenny Library. Jack and Sam were white boys, and their friend Pete was a black superhero, “who was not only stronger than Samson but richer than Croesus. Pete picked up objectionable characters with one hand and dropped them into ponds, and if a railway company refused to put on a special train for him he bought the railway and ran it himself.”⁸⁵

There is some evidence that British working people were able to identify with other colored races as well. The American Indian in particular offered a romantic escape from dreary industrial civilization. James Fenimore Cooper and (after 1907) the Boy Scout movement both had armies of working-class followers, and both idealized American Indian culture.⁸⁶ For a boy in a Lancashire mining village around 1880, where there were few books to read (other than twenty volumes of Methodist Conference minutes), W. H. G. Kingston’s Dick Onslow among the Red Indians could be hypnotic: “I was entranced. I no longer lived in Hindley. In imagination I turned native and lived among red men and hunters, tomahawks and scalps.”⁸⁷ Ramsay MacDonald was one of a number of poor boys who, when playing Cowboys and Indians, chose to be the latter.⁸⁸ Once the Hollywood Western reached British screens, attitudes began to change. “We cheered the cowboys like mad and hissed and booed the Indians, for they were always the baddies” is a typical comment.⁸⁹ One Bermondsey boy could not bring himself to shake hands with an actual Indian, having seen too many scalpings at the flicks: “It was difficult for us to understand that the pictures we saw at the movies were all make-believe.”⁹⁰ “Them be devils, them be,” exclaimed a woman at a South Wales cinema, “but don’t you worry, boy bach; ours will be here in a minute.” (“Ours were the cowboys,” a miner explained helpfully.)⁹¹

My point, then, is not to exonerate any social class of racism. The complicated reality is that prejudice against and identification with nonwhite people could coexist in working-class culture, often in the same individuals. Patrick McLoughlin, growing up in Depression-era Sunderland, had a friend, Ernie, who fancied himself a kind of White Oriental. “Ernie avidly read any story that had to do with the Chinese.” Though he picked up the worst pulp-fiction bigotries (“he always wanted to see a Chinese woman stripped . . . to see if it was true what they said”) at the same time

He liked the inscrutable Orientals. I’m sure he would have wished he was Chinese, or maybe Red Indian. The only real Chinese we knew were a family who kept a laundry about a mile from [our] street and any time we were passing we’d spend a full half hour with our noses pressed up against the window, watching the expressionless faces as they plied their smoothing irons to shirts and underclothes, wondering what was going on in their Oriental minds. There was something about them that fitted in with Ernie’s own outlook on life. We went to see all the Fu Manchu films they ever made and read all the Sax Rohmer novels. Ernie even started to pull at his right ear lobe with his fingers, the same as Nayland Smith did in the Fu Manchu stories.⁹²

The conventional working-class idea of Africa at the time was equally cartoonish: a remote place “where the people were black and lived in the jungle. It was very hot there, and these people, who were called niggers, didn’t wear clothes. Some of them were savage and carried spears, and some would even eat you if they caught you. Also living in the jungle were wild animals like lions and tigers and elephants which would also eat you if they got the chance . . . . ”⁹³ Yet however demeaning these attitudes were, they were not imperialistic: no one who thought Africa was like that would want to spend his life policing the continent. And while East-of-Suez movies were loaded with stereotypes, working people could view them skeptically. “Such films as Rainbow Island, Sudan, Kismet, Cobra Woman and The Thief of Bagdad are to me just ridiculous, and an insult to our intelligence,” complained a young female textile worker.⁹⁴ One eighteen-year-old girl was “revolted” by White Cargo: “Not the immorality of Tondalayo who can hardly be blamed for it. But the contemptuous way men seem to seduce and undermine coloured girls in a way that they wouldn’t have the courage to try on European girls, and yet they are as much entitled to respect as we.” She offered a perceptive reading of a scene in Son of Fury, where Ben (Tyrone Power) “is teaching one of the island girls how to eat with a knife and fork; she drops the food and exclaims I am stupid, Ben reflected and said he was the stupid one for trying to alter their way of life. With all that they lack in culture, this film brought home to me, that the uneducated people are the happiest, provided their associates are equally ignorant.”⁹⁵

Before the First World War, the working classes in Britain were considerably less racist than the governing classes. They rarely engaged in racial violence, and they had not absorbed the scientific racism fashionable among the university-educated. Black American abolitionist speakers and Africans who visited England in the mid-nineteenth century generally reported a high level of racial tolerance. After 1918, as racism became less acceptable among educated people, it became more common among British workers, as they increasingly competed with immigrants for jobs.⁹⁶

Uses and Gratifications

If the classics were an unambiguously emancipating force for working-class readers, it is far more difficult to generalize about the political effects of the much vaster body of literature that was less than classic. Throughout most of the twentieth century, leftist intellectuals regarded “mass culture” with suspicion. The Frankfurt School and the postwar American critics of consumer culture had their precursors among the pre-1914 generation of British socialists, who warned that music halls, the cinema, professional sports, and the popular press were narcotizing the proletariat.⁹⁷ Politically motivated workers like Bert Coombes were careful to explain to their brother miners “the difference between a serious novel and one of the ‘hug me, sugar’ romances.” (The former category might include Zola’s Germinal or Jack London.)⁹⁸ A more benign view of mass culture is offered by the “Uses and Gratifications” school of sociologists. Through audience interviews, they have shown that viewers of (for example) soap operas are neither passive nor brainwashed, but actively engaged in what they are watching. Entertainment that seems empty to academics may be stimulating, socializing, and educational for a less sophisticated audience.

This study clearly has a much closer affinity with the “Uses and Gratifications” approach, which has rescued us from the habit of treating mass audiences as herds of pathetic sheep. All the same, its limitations must be acknowledged.⁹⁹ If you ask viewers what they gain from soap operas, they will naturally emphasize the positive: they are not likely to mention (or even be aware of) subtle forms of indoctrination. Though most working-class memoirists defended low literature as harmless and enjoyable, they were probably more discerning than the average reader, who may well have been more passive and credulous. And while the autobiographers are generously forthcoming about responses to some forms of popular literature (such as school stories) they tell us almost nothing about others (notably women’s magazines). In any case, the realm of “mass culture” is so vast and various that even an army of sociologists could not reliably generalize about its political effects. The most we can do is focus selectively on a few literary or nonliterary works, and even then we may find their political influence was mixed.

It is reasonably safe to say that certain kinds of popular literature communicated profoundly conservative values to working-class readers. Especially effective were the pious works of Hesba Stretton, Mrs. O. F. Walton, and Amy Le Feuvre, stories with titles like Little Meg’s Children, Jessica’s First Prayer, Christie’s Old Organ, and Froggy’s Little Brother. In an Oxfordshire village of the 1880s, Flora Thompson recalled that children and mothers alike borrowed them from the Sunday School library and cried over them. Though these sentimental tales dealt with slum life, they served “not so much to arouse indignation at the terrible conditions as to provide a striking background for some ministering lady or child.” The dual message was, first, that benevolent ladies and clergymen were doing their best for depraved and almost subhuman slumdwellers. And second, “Saddening as it was to read about the poor things, it was also enjoyable, for it gave one a cheering sense of superiority. Thank God, the reader had a whole house to herself with an upstairs and downstairs and did not have to ‘pig it’ in one room; and real beds, and clean ones, not bundles of rags in corners, to sleep on.” It all reinforced the sense, so common among the “respectable” working class and even Thompson’s impoverished rural laborers, that they were “typical,” at the midpoint of the economic pyramid rather than at the bottom. “On one side of that norm were the real poor, living in slums, and, on the other, ‘the gentry’. They recognized no other division of classes.”¹⁰⁰

Growing up among the Plymouth Brethren in the late 1920s, Patricia Beer drew the same conclusion from the same books: the working classes were incapable of moral improvement, intellectual culture, or spiritual salvation without the intervention of the altruistic upper classes. In poor families, fathers left their children “in unsavoury lodgings to starve, while mothers were produced only that they might immediately die or go off on a permanent spree, abandoning their children to destitution.” Their slum neighbors

were always a “bad crew” who drank, brawled and cursed. They neglected the sick of their community, leaving them to die with no food, no covering and no light, and if any inmate’s children appeared decently dressed they would be stripped before they reached the shelter of the larger streets so that their clothes might be pawned for gin. The women ill-treated and over-worked any child who might be running errands or drudging for them.

The rich, in dramatic contrast, were self-evidently

superior beings, marked out by their manners and their attitude to life, particularly their attitude to the poor. They had been brought up on the motto, “Remember the poor,” and the good rich did remember them, systematically, though they found it difficult to remember their names: even Miss Mabel, when she knew Christie quite well, tended to address him as “organ-boy,” while Miss Winnie and Miss Jane always called Jessica “little girl”. . . . It never once occurred to them, as it never occurred to me, or to my parents, or to Hesba Stretton, Mrs. O. F. Walton and Amy Le Feuvre, that anything could or should be done beyond tears and the hand-out and the prayer in the wretched attic. Into neither the world of books nor the real world in which I lived did ideas of socialism and social reform ever enter. The authors of the books not only believed, as did the Brethren, that being washed in the blood of the Lamb was the only thing that mattered but also that God Himself had ordained who should be rich and who should be poor, so that to tamper with the existing social order would have been both a frivolous sideline and a grave sin.

Those lessons were reinforced by the counter-revolutionary ideology of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which Patricia’s family swallowed whole. “For one thing it was by a Baroness, and so both begetter and begotten were of noble blood. We all identified absolutely with the persecuted aristocrats of the story. It seemed not to occur to one of us that had we lived then we should by reason of our social status have been sans-culottes dancing round the guillotine, rather than vicomtes escaping in carts.” Patricia’s father, a stationmaster for the Southern Railway, belonged to the thoroughly respectable upper-working class. What he imbibed from Baroness Orczy and the Plymouth Brethren was reinforced by the Daily Mail: he “not only recited its news and views without the slightest attempt at personal judgement or interpretation, but also blindly accepted its pronouncements on matters that he could have checked from his own observation.” His company rail pass made possible occasional family excursions to London, but everything they had read left them terrified of the world beyond the West End:

It was surprisingly easy to fit in the picture of London which these books gave with the London I really knew. . . . A mile to the east of St. Paul’s Cathedral . . . were the dark gullies, the labyrinthine alleys and courts, where Jessica and Christie lived. . . . The buildings reeked with fumes of gin and tobacco and rang with the sounds of groans, curses and sobs. . . . We would mix with the fashionable people in and out of the well-appointed shops and then, when we got to a suitable place, stand fearfully at the street corners beyond which the slums were supposed to lie, peering into the dark world of Meg, Jessica and Christie, at much the same spot where they had peered out into our lighter realm and with equal panic. What went on in these poor districts was thought to be unspeakably evil and menacing, and was therefore, by definition, unstated, but the mere impression was enough to keep us safely out of its clutches. . . . Here again the books both shaped and bore out our forebodings.¹⁰¹

Yet Marjory Todd read the same literature, with very different results. “I would not now willingly expose a child of mine to the morbid resignation of any of these books,” she wrote in her mature years, “yet I think that children, when their home life is secure and happy, can take a lot of that debilitating sentiment—the implication that life is tragic here below, but a better time awaits above; even those dreadful deathbed scenes—without a lot of harm. We sharpened our teeth on this stuff and then went on to greater satisfaction elsewhere,” including Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, Captain Marryat, Kenneth Grahame, and E. Nesbit.¹⁰² While Patricia Beer was relishing Hesba Stretton and Baroness Orczy, she was also absorbing an opposing viewpoint from the Canadian stories of L. M. Montgomery. Her heroines Anne and Emily were writers, models of female emancipation, and Prince Edward Island was a classless society where everyone had chores to do.

And if some authors were doing their best to prop up the class system, they were surely undermined by Victorian melodrama, which was overpopulated with nefarious aristocrats and virtuous factory lasses.¹⁰³ Even the cheapest sentimental fiction could inspire murderous class resentment. Leslie Halward (b. c. 1904), a Birmingham toolmaker, remembered how his Aunt Clara would become engrossed in the tales of the Home Companion weekly:

One evening I was present when she was reading a chapter and she came to the bit where the young son of hard-working parents, having risen in the world, one day when walking out with a fine lady passed his old mother without any sign of recognition. At this point Aunt Clara paused, glared at me over the top of her spectacles, and said slowly and awfully: “If ever you grow to be ashamed of your mother I’ll—kill you.” I assured her that she had no cause to worry, and she went on reading.¹⁰⁴

As for the influence of the cinema, here again the evidence is mixed. Marxists and near-Marxists of the 1930s characterized Hollywood movies as capitalist dope, and surveys around 1945 suggest that audiences may in fact have absorbed attitudes congenial to the Conservative Party. Films inculcated deferential habits in employees, such as the shop girl who wanted a marriage like Mrs. Miniver’s (“Often I’ve longed to tell customers off but thought ‘the girl in the film didn’t get nasty she remained polite’”) and the messenger boy who saw An American Romance (“I suddenly decided to be good natured and hard working”). As a shorthand typist explained, “The First of the Few made me resolve to be more efficient at my work and to study more, whereas after seeing Pride and Prejudice I tried to be more sociable and pleasant with people.”¹⁰⁵ A factory girl carefully copied the smart manners and dress of screen actresses (“I think this is useful especially if one is apt to have an inferiority complex”)¹⁰⁶ and a fifteen-year-old welder’s son affirmed that

In films I have imitated lots of things in my manner. For instance since I have been going to the pictures I always touch my hat when I meet anybody. I always greet everybody with a smile. When I bump into anybody I always say I am sorry. If I pass in front of anybody I always say excuse-me. I have also learned to become better mannered at the dinner table. In dress I always have a crease in my trousers. I always put grease on my hair and have a parting in it. I always keep my clothes clean and I do not have any pins in them. I always strip to the waist when I wash. I clean my teeth every morning. . . . Films have [also] given me knowledge and a lot more ideas in lovemaking.¹⁰⁷

On the other hand, as we have seen, working-class audiences were equally impressed by Hollywood “message” films. For many young women during the Second World War, the cinema was liberating. They resolved to become an aviatrix after seeing a movie biography of Amy Johnson, or Irene Dunn as a ferry pilot in A Guy Named Joe.¹⁰⁸ Women-in-uniform films made one sixteen-year-old shop assistant want to join the auxiliary services, though she did not swallow musicals in which “the girl has both career and her man when in fiction it works out but not in life usually.”¹⁰⁹

Most of the role models were male, of course, but that presented no difficulty to female moviegoers, who could identify with ruggedly masculine characters. The same girls who crossed over to boys’ weeklies quite effortlessly imagined themselves as Ray Milland in Ministry of Fear, Joseph Cotten in Journey into Fear, Frederick March battling gladiators in The Last Days of Pompeii, even American marines in Bataan and Guadalcanal Diary (“I came out of the cinema exhausted because I had been fighting their battle for them” reported a breathless typist).¹¹⁰ A munitions worker testified that The Adventures of Mark Twain reinforced her desire to become a writer.¹¹¹ Trader Horn “awakened a yearning for travel” in a railwayman’s daughter—one of several women who said that the movie made them want to explore the world.¹¹² A number of working women identified strongly with the Gauguin figure in The Moon and Sixpence, played by George Sanders: they too were struggling to escape boring jobs and humdrum homes. “His ambition, determination to get what he wanted and his very unsettled ways impressed me very much, insomuch that I determined to achieve my ambition and become an artist also,” explained an ex-nurse. “Not to be the same as him, an artist, but something more, for the love of art itself and for the joy one can gain by expressing one’s feelings in paint.”¹¹³ One passionate fan of the film was an eighteen-year-old girl stuck at home with well-meaning but suffocating parents, who did not let her use the scholarships she won. Now studying English and elocution, with hopes of becoming an author, she felt that George Sanders

seemed to me to be in my position. Tied to a home, that was not a home to him, and to a wife who didn’t love him for what he was but for what she wanted him to be. He had the courage (I seem to lack it) to cast aside convention and pursue his course whatever the cost to himself or others. The cost was not great, the love he had for his last wife and the joy he got from his achievements made his tragic death seem worth while. This film made me realise more than ever, never to ignore inspiration, whether or not I receive acclaim.¹¹⁴

Of all popular media, advertising acquired the most poisonous reputation among the British intelligentsia.¹¹⁵ H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) portrayed the industry as an insidious and well-financed machine for mass manipulation. But here again an unconscious class bias may have been at work. Since advertising tells the educated classes nothing that they do not already know, and competes for the attention of popular audiences, they inevitably find it banal and mind-numbingly repetitive, an endless blare that drowns out the true and the beautiful. To the uneducated classes, however, it may offer much that is genuinely new and informative. An educated person can reproduce this effect by turning off the television and studying advertisements from an unfamiliar culture or historical period, which can be fascinating to sociologists and inspirational to graphic artists. The evidence here is sketchy and inconclusive, for only a few plebeian memoirists discuss the subject, but they do suggest that advertising could supply Victorian workers with much of the useful knowledge that their betters took for granted, including basic literacy. The tailor-poet Jacob Holkinson (b. 1822), with only three weeks of formal schooling, taught himself to read by studying signboards, handbills, and booksellers’ windows.¹¹⁶ Printer Charles Manby Smith (b. 1804) recognized that cities enjoyed higher literacy not because they necessarily offered better schools than rural areas, but because reading skills were taught and constantly reinforced by the billsticker:

His handiwork stares the public in the face; and it is a sheer impossibility for a lad who has once learned the art of reading, to lose it in London, unless he be both wilfully blind and destitute of human curiosity. To thousands and tens of thousands, the placarded walls and hoardings of the city are the only school of instruction open to them, whence they obtain all the knowledge they possess of that section of the world and society which does not lie patent to their personal observation. It is thence they derive their estimate of the different celebrities—in commerce, in literature, and in art, of the time in which they live, and are enabled to become in some measure acquainted with the progress of the age. Perhaps few men, even among the best educated, could be found who would willingly let drop the knowledge they have gained, although without intending it, from this gratuitous source.¹¹⁷

Even for the destitute, the shopwindows of mid-Victorian London offered a

veritable Great Exhibition, which is perpetually open to all comers, and of which nobody ever tires. It is an awful blunder to suppose that those only profit by the display in shop-windows who are in a position to purchase. Every shop-front is an open volume, which even he that runs may read, while he that stands still may study it, and gather wisdom at the cheapest source, which may be useful for a whole life. To the moneyless million, the shops of London are what the university is to the collegian: they teach them all knowledge; they are history, geography, astronomy, chemistry, photography, numismatics, dynamics, mechanics—in a word, they are science in all its practical developments—and, glorious addition, they are art in all its latest and noblest achievements. While to one class of observers they are a source of inexhaustible amusement, to another they are a source equally inexhaustible of instruction. Therefore it is that the mechanic and artisan, out of work and out of money, wanders along the interminable miles of shop-fronts, peering here, puzzling there, guessing in this place, solving in that, some one or other of the mechanical problems presented to his view. A common thing with men and lads thus circumstanced, is to sally forth in groups, to dissipate the weary hours of enforced idleness by gazing in at the shop-windows, and speculating upon this or that unknown material or contrivance; and guessing or, if practicable, inquiring into the circumstances of its produce or construction.¹¹⁸

Thomas Carter was one of the most priggish proletarian evangelists of “useful knowledge:” he extolled Addison and Steele as literary models while denouncing fairy tales as “fabulous and foolish.” But in relaxed moments he admitted that he owed his love of reading largely to chapbooks, and he seriously argued that newspaper advertisements were more informative—and not quite as misleading—as the editorial columns. Since they forthrightly trumpeted a bill of goods and made no pretense of objectivity, he could

learn more of human nature and of the tangled web of affairs from these sources than I am able to learn from the most laboured statements of either editors or paid correspondents. While these, in order to bring grist to their mill, are forced to comply with party views and to suppress their own; or are induced to mystify plain questions, so that they may seem to be profoundly learned in political knowledge; the advertising parties write for themselves—throw aside the veil of mystery—ask in good plain English for the reader’s cash, and generally give a fair view of what is going on in the regions of their inner man.

Of course advertisers sometimes resorted to “cabalistic phrases” and misleading language, but the ordinary reader could learn to decode these and, in so doing, develop his defenses against all kinds of propaganda.¹¹⁹ These few examples hardly settle the question, but they do suggest that historians should study audience response directly before they leap to conclusions about the “ideological work” of advertising or any other medium. This chapter has deliberately put forward more questions than answers, more cautions than definitive statements. But at least one clear conclusion does emerge from the available evidence: from Chambers’s Journal to The Moon and Sixpence, British common readers were remarkably adept at appropriating enlightenment and (mostly) harmless entertainment from popular culture.