Chapter Six

Cultural Literacy in the Classic Slum

When German autodidact Carl Moritz visited England in 1782, he was impressed by one especially striking contrast between the two cultures. At home German authors were rarely read outside the educated classes, but “It is plain beyond all comparison that … the common people of England read their English authors!” His landlady, a tailor’s widow, enjoyed Milton: her late husband fell in love with her because she read him aloud so well. “This single example would mean nothing by itself,” wrote Moritz, “but I have spoken with more of the common people, all of whom know their English authors and have read some of their works. This improves the lower classes and brings them nearer the higher, so that there are few subjects of general conversation among the latter on which the workers are not able to form an opinion.” The laboring classes took advantage of the British Museum and the broad availability of cheap literature. Secondhand dealers sold The Vicar of Wakefield for 6d. and Shakespeare for 1d. or ¹/₂d. Circulating libraries advertised all the standard English authors, as well as translations of French, Spanish, Italian, and German novels. Consequently, “The commonest man expresses himself in the proper phrases and anyone who writes a book at least writes correctly, even if the matter is poor.” As Moritz concluded with some astonishment, “Good style seems to have spread all over England.”¹

From the beginnings of industrialization, the British working class enjoyed a reputation for self-education. That demand made for the success of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a compendium of “useful knowledge”: what we now call “cultural literacy.” It offered (for instance) some remarkably sophisticated literary discussions, turning to Homer, Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Chaucer, and Defoe. The first issue (4 February 1832) sold 25,000 copies, all in Scotland; nationwide circulation would peak at 87,000 in 1844.² Chambers’s Journal was followed by several successful series of cheap educational texts: Chambers’s Information for the People (begun 1833), Chambers’s Educational Course (1835), and the twenty-volume Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts. Robert Chambers’s History of the English Language and Literature and his Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844) were, respectively, the first history and annotated anthology of English literature aimed at a popular audience. Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (ten volumes, completed 1868) was the crowning achievement, offering more and shorter entries than earlier encyclopedias and at a cheaper price.

While it is difficult to generate a socioeconomic profile of the readers of Chambers’s Journal, scattered evidence suggests that they were largely working-class. In its early years a bookseller reported its popularity among country milk-boys. The editors claimed that they sold eighty-four copies weekly to a cotton mill near Glasgow, and mentioned letters received from “a mechanician, assistant draper, bootmaker, tailor, coal miner, farmer, weaver, millhand.”³ In the 1870s it was still among the most frequently borrowed magazines at a Newcastle workingmen’s club.⁴ In 1836 a Banff clergyman had noted that the journal was often bought by local farm laborers and artisans, and perceptively explained why that audience was at last ready for it. The advance of capitalism and technology “makes every profession more difficult of acquisition, furnishes new occupation for ingenuity, new aims for mental activity, new subjects of emulation.” All that had called into existence “new desires, new ideas, new sources of excitement,” and an unprecedented popular demand for information: “Newspapers are circulated as long as the texture of the paper holds together, or its colour can be distinguished from that of the printer’s ink.” Banff, a town of less than 4,000 inhabitants, could therefore support at least four church and chapel libraries as well as a tradesmen’s library, all open to the working classes for free or a nominal subscription. Recent political controversies over the Reform Act, the New Poor Law, and labor unrest had excited public interest not only in politics, but in all kinds of practical knowledge, “there being few political questions that do not, at least indirectly, excite a curiosity, and lead to enquiries, touching a variety of extrinsic subjects in history, geography, statistics, arts, commerce, &c. A man who sets up for a politician finds occasion to learn a great many things besides politics.” Full participation in the political and social life of a modern society was impossible without the “useful knowledge” served up by Chambers’s Journal.⁵

Well into the twentieth century, radicals (Thomas Cooper, Alexander Bethune, W. E. Adams, G. J. Holyoake) and self-improvers testified to the value of the Journal and other Chambers publications.⁶ Chartists and Owenite socialists relied on Chambers’ for scientific information.⁷ As late as the First World War, a Manchester boy could find an epiphany in an old volume of the Journal rescued from a rubbish bin: “It was dog-eared and pages were missing but never before had I seen and held such a volume of reading matter and it provided months of utmost delight and interest. It was my introduction to life through the written word. The sciences, philosophy, religions, politics, literature, poetry, much of it far beyond my understanding.”⁸

John Cassell, a Manchester millworker and carpenter’s apprentice turned entrepreneur, matched the Chambers brothers’ achievement with his Popular Educator, published in penny weekly parts from 1852 to 1854. Early Labour politicians (Keir Hardie,⁹ Ramsay MacDonald,¹⁰ John Wilson,¹¹ Robert Smillie¹²) and countless other workingmen¹³ used it to teach themselves mathematics, science, English literature, modern languages, Greek, and Latin. Cassell’s students included two eminent proletarian lexicographers, Joseph Wright and James Murray, who respectively became editors of The English Dialect Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary.¹⁴

All the impressionistic evidence suggests that, fertilized by such publications, autodidact culture flourished in the years leading up to the First World War. Frank Goss (b. 1896) remembered that time as a golden era for men like his father, a pianomaker and activist for the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. The proliferation of public libraries, the high tide of the Victorian ethic of mutual improvement, and the lack of other distractions (the cinema, radio, television) were all contributing factors; but two other developments in particular made

reading for the masses an exciting interest probably to a greater degree than it had ever been before or is likely to be in the future. One was the tremendous increase in literacy arising from the various Education Acts of that period, and the publication of cheaper books and pamphlets about every subject under the sun; and the second was the bursting out of scientific thinking on subjects which previously had been accepted as inexplicable mysteries. Future history may record this period and the early years of the twentieth century as the age of reading for pleasure and enlightenment. Later on reading was to become an escape from monotony or an occupation undertaken to acquire specialised knowledge which might prove useful to one’s business or career. There was little thought, by most of these readers of my father’s time, that the knowledge acquired would qualify them to get a better job, more money, or a higher social status; like a child’s discovery of the new and exciting world which being able to read opens up, these new literates discovered a world of infinite depth and scope beyond their dreams, a world where, previously, talking had been the only medium of exchanging ideas.

My father read everything he could lay his hands on: history, geography, science, economics, poetry, fiction, drama, and enjoyed his hobby purely from the mental excitement he gathered in the assimilation of knowledge, perhaps sometimes confused, sometimes not adequately digested but always broadening his outlook and developing his personality.¹⁵

In 1906 Pearson’s Weekly published “How I Got On,” a series of mini-autobiographies by twenty-six new Labour MPs. Their prime emphasis was not on economic or professional advancement: rather, all twenty-six discussed their education and/or their reading experiences. They too hailed “the cheapening of good and useful literature” in their lifetimes, and described a lifelong effort to read “everything I could lay my hands on.”¹⁶

Sheffield 1918

But how typical were such working people, and how much did they know? What of the overwhelming majority who never wrote memoirs, never engaged in any serious political agitation, never became a government or trade union official? Unfortunately, we cannot assess levels of cultural literacy with any precision before the First World War. The testimony we have from Moritz and others is sketchy and subjective. We have only a rough sense of Victorian levels of participation in adult education. We have statistics of literacy, but none for the actual readership or name recognition of particular authors. We can say something about the reading of “working-class intellectuals,” but even if we could define such a slippery term, we could not know how many intellectuals there were in the working class. In fact we can say very little about working-class cultural literacy until 1918, when a remarkable survey was carried out in Sheffield. The city had a long tradition of independent working-class education. The Sheffield People’s College, founded in 1842, was governed democratically by its students: in 1849 the president was a shoemaker. The College taught geography, history, modern languages, Latin, Greek, science, and philosophy, and students were encouraged to discuss politics.¹⁷ Thanks to the People’s College, observed one radical artisan, “There is a peculiarity in the town of Sheffield above all others that I have noticed: in that town, all classes of labourers dare to speak out the truth that is within them, ay, and labour while they think.”¹⁸

The 1918 survey was organized by Arnold Freeman, son of a tobacco importer, warden and founder of the Sheffield Educational Settlement. His investigators interviewed and assessed 816 adult manual workers, a random sample representative in terms of sex, age, and income strata within the working class. They were asked to identify local government officials, landmarks in English history such as the Battle of Hastings and the Industrial Revolution, and a long list of important artists, writers, and scientists from the past and present. This survey gives us a sense of what working people read and (equally important for a history of audiences) what they knew.

Based on the answers received, the investigators sorted their subjects into three categories: 20 to 26 percent were judged intellectually “well-equipped,” 67 to 73 percent were “inadequately-equipped,” 5 to 8 percent were “mal-equipped.” Freeman was trying to separate out the working-class intelligentsia, the more-or-less respectable but unphilosophical masses, and what would today be called the “underclass.” (We will simply designate them Intellectuals, Respectables, and Underclass.) As might be expected, his attempts to define these three species were subjective and sometimes hilarious. The “mal-equipped” were “unemployable,” “rotters,” “wastrels,” “Yahoos,” and in some cases “not all there.” The whole survey might be written off as bourgeois prejudices masquerading as social science, but when it turns to the “well-equipped,” the definitions become more helpful. Investigators were instructed that “A worker in this class would read good literature; have an active and well-informed interest in politics; be keen on Trade Union, Co-operative Society, Church or Socialist Club; live in a really pleasant home; understand the value of education; show signs of aesthetic sense; have elevated ‘root desires’; make a good Tutorial Class Student or WEA worker.”¹⁹ Though most of the 816 completed questionnaires have been lost, fifty-six were reproduced and another 190 summarized in Freeman’s published report. They convey a more specific sense of cultural activities and levels of knowledge among Sheffield working people, without demanding that we accept Freeman’s arbitrary classifications. The following sums up eight men from the Intellectual group:

1. Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes, attending public lectures at the university. Has attended art school, visits Mappin Art Gallery frequently and Ruskin Museum sometimes, particularly admires Turner. Has almost never visited any other town, but knows Sheffield local politics fairly well. Enjoys orchestral and choral concerts. Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Two Years Before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary, and Scott of the Antarctic.

2. Skilled engineer, age twenty-two. Takes singing lessons, performs individually and in a choir, frequent concertgoer. Occasionally visits art galleries and museums. Knows Bible well, but has only rarely seen Shakespeare performed. Has read some Dickens and lesser writers, borrows light literature from library.

3. Engine tenter, age twenty-seven. Broad knowledge of local politics and recent economic history but knows little about other towns. Supports Labour Party, active in National Union of General Workers and Co-operative movement. Often attends operas (Tales of Hoffmann, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Il Trovatore, Gilbert and Sullivan) and concerts. Visits museums and art galleries about twice a year. Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull’s Other Island, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil’s Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H. G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J. A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on economics, and Plato’s Republic. Attends WEA Tutorial Class and university lectures, and has taken classes in theology, logic, and botany.

4. Munitions worker and ex-porter, age twenty-eight. Thoroughly respectable but has read little beyond a few Dickens novels and the newspaper.

5. Grinder, age thirty-three. Attends opera and concerts at every opportunity, superb amateur pianist. Sometimes goes to museums, galleries, and the theater. Has read a few Shakespeare plays.

6. Fitter, age thirty-five. Seems to have read little but the Bible and few novels: he enjoyed Ivanhoe and Ouida’s Under Two Flags.

7. Gasworks engineer, age forty-five. Interested in local politics, good knowledge of history. Has read some Shakespeare, Dickens, Ruskin, and Stevenson as well as the Bible, but little else in the way of serious literature. Occasionally visits the theater.

8. Gas stoker, age sixty. Thorough knowledge of local politics and fair knowledge of history. Owns only a Bible and a few other books, occasionally borrows from the public library a volume on social issues or history.

Of the fourteen women in the Intellectual group, perhaps five had serious intellectual interests:

1. Munitions worker, age eighteen. Attends WEA lectures and a settlement house social study circle. Has read Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty and a basic economics textbook as well as Little Women. Enjoys opera, visited the Weston Park Museum, but never uses the public library.

2. Machinist in a shell factory, age twenty-four. Attended a WEA tutorial class in economics, active in the Co-operative movement. Often visits art galleries, loves concerts and sacred music. Has read Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Scott, Tennyson, Dickens, Vanity Fair, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, biography, and history.

3. Machine file cutter, age twenty-five. Occasionally goes to art galleries, the theater, and the opera. Attended a Girls’ Club study circle on economics. Has read The Old Curiosity Shop, Innocents Abroad, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Bible.

4. Housewife, age twenty-eight. Occasionally visits an art gallery or the public library. Has read David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, Lorna Doone, Louisa May Alcott, and the travels of Livingstone and Darwin.

5. Cutlery worker, age seventy-two. Knows history and local politics well, active in trade unions, sang in chapel choirs. Fond of Longfellow, Stevenson, Ruskin, William Morris, and Charles Dickens.

The nine other women in this category seem to have read almost nothing above the level of Gene Stratton Porter.²⁰ The investigators apparently counted as “well-equipped” some respondents who were respectable and moral but devoid of any intellectual interests. These full questionnaires, along with the larger number of summarized questionnaires, suggest that about one-fifth of the men and two-fifths of the women that Freeman judged “well-equipped” really belonged in the “inadequately-equipped” category. That adjustment leaves roughly one out of six workers—one in five men and one in eight women—in the working-class intelligentsia, with cultural backgrounds and interests similar to those listed above.

A few years earlier Florence Bell had conducted her own investigation of working-class reading in Middlesbrough, and arrived at similar conclusions. More than 25 percent of workingmen read books and newspapers, almost half only the papers, a quarter nothing at all. As in Sheffield, women tended to read less than men.²¹ In fact, Lady Bell was surprised to find so many women above age fifty (and some who were younger) who not only could not read, but were almost glad to have never learned. “Nearly all women of the working-classes have a feeling that it is wrong to sit down with a book.”²²

The Sheffield survey also asked a series of identification questions. Table 6.1 (p. 194) counts correct answers in the surviving questionnaires: eight male and fourteen female Intellectuals, nine male and twelve female Respectables, seven men and six women in the Underclass.

The survey revealed a striking ignorance of working-class history. Only two respondents correctly identified Robert Owen, two the Chartists, none at all Francis Place, though seven (all Intellectuals) knew of Sidney Webb. By 1918 the working classes were evidently losing their Victorian passion for Shakespeare: his totals include anyone who could name one of his plays. (Only three respondents could name as many as six.) Anyone who identified Edison as an inventor was counted correct, though several mistakenly credited the telephone to him. The fact that the Ruskin Museum and Edward Carpenter were two of Sheffield’s leading cultural institutions undoubtedly contributed to their high scores. But Ruskin also clearly had a national following; and at a Norwich bookshop with a working-class clientele, Carpenter’s Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure was one of the most frequently requested books.²³ Of course, not everyone who recognized the name of an author had read him, but six or seven of the eight Intellectual men had read Dickens.

The name of Darwin was widely recognized, even by two of seven men in the Underclass. How well his work was understood is another matter. For one collier among the Respectables, he was vaguely associated with “the missing link.”²⁴ Flora Thompson wrote that the postmistress was the only inhabitant of her Oxfordshire village who had read The Origin of Species, but the locals seem to have appreciated a Negro Minstrel number that assumed at least a superficial familiarity with evolutionary theory:

A friend of Darwin’s came to me,

A million years ago said he

You had a tail and no great toe.

I answered him, “That may be so,

But I’ve one now, I’ll let you know—

G-r-r-r-r-r out!”²⁵

Table 6.1: Name Recognition in Working-Class Sheffield, 1918
	Intellectuals		Respectables		Underclass
	8 Men	14 Women	9 Men	12 Women	7 Men	6 Women
Battle of Hastings	3	3	2	1	1	1
Magna Carta	5	3	3	1	0	1
French Revolution	5	4	2	0	0	0
Industrial Revolution	8	3	0	0	1	1
1832 Reform Act	5	2	1	0	1	0
Evolution	7	2	2	1	0	0
Aristotle	5	3	3	0	1	0
Beethoven	5	3	2	1	0	0
Arnold Bennett	3	2	0	0	0	0
Edward Carpenter	6	3	1	1	0	0
G. K. Chesterton	6	1	2	0	0	0
Columbus	8	5	4	1	1	2
Oliver Cromwell	7	4	4	0	0	0
Dante	1	0	1	0	0	0
Darwin	7	3	5	1	2	0
Dickens	7	9	4	4	1	2
Edison	8	4	6	1	3	1
Gladstone	5	5	4	1	2	0
Goethe	4	0	1	0	0	0
Haeckel	3	1	1	0	0	0
Huxley	5	2	2	0	0	0
Sir Oliver Lodge	6	1	3	0	0	0
Maeterlinck	2	0	0	0	0	0
Milton	7	5	2	2	1	1
William Morris	4	3	0	1	0	0
Napoleon	6	4	3	2	1	1
Sir Isaac Newton	6	2	2	0	1	0
Plato	3	1	2	0	0	0
Raphael	2	3	1	0	0	0
Ruskin	7	5	1	1	1	0
Bernard Shaw	6	2	3	1	0	0
Shakespeare	7	6	4	2	0	0
Herbert Spencer	3	0	1	0	0	0
R. L. Stevenson	5	2	1	1	1	0
Sir Arthur Sullivan	4	4	3	1	1	0
Tolstoy	5	2	2	1	0	0
Turner	3	1	1	0	0	0
Virgil	1	0	0	0	0	0
Watt	6	3	2	0	1	1
H. G. Wells	6	2	2	1	0	0
Wolsey	7	3	2	1	0	0

Wilfred Wellock (b. 1879) claimed that many of his fellow Lancashire millworkers could discuss The Origin of Species.²⁶ Whether they had actually read it is unclear. One memoir recalled a Lancashire ironmoulder of the 1890s who attempted to explain the origin of language in Darwinian terms, as a set of linguistic conventions agreed upon by groups of monkeys:

Terrific arguments used to spring up among working people at the mention of Darwin’s name. Nobody had read any of his books, nobody knew anything about the origin of species. But that was all the better. If you only have a small amount of exact knowledge, and if you are a truthful sort of person, your knowledge limits your arguments. But when you know nothing at all you can argue north, south, east, and west, just as your fancy takes you.²⁷

The high level of recognition for John Milton might have been matched by other standard poets, which the Board schools had taught to a generation of children by 1918. The labor movement had also done much to popularize poetry. Chris Waters found that in nine socialist songbooks published between 1888 and 1912, 15 percent of the songs were by canonical poets such as Whitman, Blake, Burns, Lowell, and Shelley. Lowell’s “True Freedom” appeared in all nine, Shelley’s “Men of England” in six.²⁸ In 1955 Manny Shinwell—who read all of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to his children, and had consoled himself in prison with Keats and Tennyson—regretted that that poetic heritage had been surrendered to the cinema and radio: “In the early days of the [socialist] movement it was a common practice of speakers to recite poetry. Some of our well-known propagandists like W. C. Anderson, Dick Wallhead, Russell Williams and even the severely practical Philip Snowden rarely wound up a speech without some snatches of poetry. I remember a number of popular speakers whose orations consisted entirely of poetic excerpts which their audiences loved.”²⁹

Wilfred Pickles (b. 1904), a bricklayer turned radio announcer, proved that poetry could find a mass audience. While Harold Acton was declaiming The Waste Land through a megaphone from his Oxford balcony, Pickles—with as much éclat and perhaps a more receptive audience—was reciting A Shropshire Lad to laborers working on a sewer fifteen feet underground. Though BBC staff warned him it would never play on the Light Programme, in 1949 Pickles began broadcasting poetry on his show The Pleasure’s Mine, which won a huge response from “managers, mechanics, miners and housewives. … We gave them Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, Chesterton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Hardy, Francis Thompson,” as well as the proletarian poets of Lancashire, Ammon Wrigley and Samuel Laycock. Its success “convinced me that the BBC had made a big mistake in making poetry the preserve of the ‘arty’ clique who dwell in a never-never world sealed off from everyone else.”³⁰ Actually, the show’s high ratings undoubtedly owed a lot to Pickles’s own stupendous popularity. In 1941 only 15.4 percent of working-class listeners felt “Enthusiastic” or “Favourable” toward poetry broadcasts, compared with 28.2 percent of the middle classes and 30.9 percent of the well-to-do. Still, those figures translated into a potential audience of 2 million poetry fans, half of them working-class.³¹

Wagner and Hoot Gibson

The relatively high recognition of Beethoven is hardly surprising. Sheffield steelworkers participated widely in choirs and orchestras, many of them supported by their company directors.³² A working-class culture of classical music had long flourished in the same regions and trades where the autodidact tradition was strong, notably among Welsh miners and Lancashire weavers. James Leach, a weaver born near Rochdale in 1762, became a notable (though untrained) composer of hymns. Weaver-poets like Joseph Hodgson (b. 1783) published their songs as broadsides.³³ William Millington, a millwright-bassoonist, compiled a collective biography of minor Lancashire musical celebrities from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including thirty-four handloom weavers, eight colliers, seven carpenters, five powerloom weavers, five metalworkers, four shoemakers, four engineers, three spinners, three warpers, two coopers, two crofters, a butcher, pavior, tailor, gardener, coal carter, turner, laundryman, boatbuilder, blacksmith, printer, and gravestone letterer.³⁴

For most working people, only the Sunday schools offered opportunities for serious musical education, performance, and composition, via hymns and oratorios.³⁵ Poverty virtually barred John Shinn (b. 1837) from formal schooling, but his father, a London cabinetmaker, somehow acquired a violin and was given an old piano to store. John bought cheap instruction manuals and taught himself to play both. Starting at age ten he had to work with his father six days a week from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., yet he found time to practice in the workshop after hours by candlelight. He received his first formal musical education in a singing class at Sunday school, where he was allowed to practice once a week on a small organ with only four stops. Eventually he was invited to play at evening services. His instructor, the chapel organist, introduced him to the London Sacred Harmonic Society at Exeter Hall: there, and later with the Polyhymnion Choir, he received his first really rigorous vocal training. At twenty-six he was appointed church organist at St. Jude’s Whitechapel at £25 a year, and began to consider abandoning the cabinet trade. He supplemented his earnings by taking on pupils, opening a small and eventually profitable music shop on Holloway Road, and composing music for Sunday schools, which sold quite well. At fifty-two he passed the examinations for a Mus. Bac. from Cambridge University. In his eighties he began writing a Lent Cantata, until failing eyesight forced him to give it up.³⁶

Light classical music was also widely broadcast by thousands of string and brass bands. German string bands of twelve to fourteen players strolled from town to town playing Strauss, Offenbach, and Gilbert and Sullivan. One Suffolk village boy recalled that he memorized their tunes and played them on his father’s organ: he went on to become a church organist himself.³⁷ Military bands did not play with much expression or imagination, as one performer admitted, but the repertoire could be impressive: Lohengrin, Aida, the Peer Gynt Suite, Suppé, Rossini, Berlioz, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Brahms, Weber, Chopin’s “Polonaise,” the William Tell Overture, the Soldiers’ Chorus from Faust, and the 1812 Overture.³⁸

One of the most vital expressions of working-class culture was the brass band movement. Originating in the early nineteenth century, it was organized mainly by workingmen, though many bands were sponsored by employers. In 1913 the British Bandsman reported on 230 bands in Yorkshire and ninety in Durham in the early twentieth century: extrapolating those figures yields a minimum of 2,600 bands throughout Britain, or one band for every 15,500 people. Concentrated in the smaller industrial towns and coalmining regions, they performed in parks, at seaside resorts, and at massively attended competitions. At first the repertoire drew heavily on Italian opera, giving way to more classical and romantic symphony pieces in the twentieth century, with a leavening of musical comedy and Gilbert and Sullivan.³⁹

The Thompson–Vigne interviews reveal that, around the turn of the century, there was some kind of family musical activity in 86 percent of all working-class homes: Sunday singalongs, playing a violin or accordion, banging away at a piano or harmonium (with or without lessons), playing gramphones, singing in a choir, attending the opera or a band concert. “We larked about and sang in the kitchen because we had no other way in which to express ourselves, and we seemed always to quarrel unless we sang,” recalled boilermaker’s daughter Marjory Todd (b. 1906). She had one brother who learned soprano solos from the Messiah before his voice broke, another who took piano lessons from a cinema accompanist. The family’s musical library was typical:

Item: a Star Folio volume of operatic overtures arranged for the piano, including Tannhäuser, Zampa, Martha, Faust, The Bohemian Girl and so on.

Item: some volumes of music issued in fortnightly parts by Newnes, including waltzes by Waldteufel, Songs Without Words by Mendelssohn, a sentimental ballad or two “as sung by Dame Clara Butt”, Whisper and I Shall Hear and Ora pro Nobis and arias from I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana.

Item: The full score of The Mikado, which we knew by heart.

Item: a copy of the Pink Lady Waltz, a favourite of 1917–18, bought by my father when he was drunk.

Marjory Todd offered that list as evidence of cultural impoverishment, but its breadth is fairly impressive. She never attended a concert until she went to London and heard Moiseiwitsch perform sonatas by Beethoven: “I felt as though I had been drugged. I walked all the way back to the East End, and I am only surprised that I was not run over.” Just possibly, singing in the kitchen prepared her for that experience.⁴⁰

From the later nineteenth century, philanthropic efforts would bring music to the masses. In 1878 the South Place Ethical Society began its series of free Sunday evening concerts, supported by voluntary contributions. At about the same time Jesse Collings launched the Birmingham Musical Association, and the Working Men’s Concerts were inaugurated in Manchester, with most seats selling for 4d. and an average audience of 3,400. Later, J. M. Dent would persuade Toynbee Hall to sponsor a successful series of Sunday afternoon concerts.⁴¹ While most of these programs were based in cities, E. V. Schuster of New College mobilized his Oxford University Musical Club to offer penny concerts in North Oxfordshire villages. The programs were uncompromising: Purcell, Beethoven, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Scarlatti, Lully, John Blow, as well as more contemporary work by Dvořák, Stanford, and Saint-Saëns. Schubert appealed the most to these audiences, particularly his Trio in B Flat for Piano, Violin, and Violoncello. Even in small villages the performances would attract fifty to 150 concertgoers, mostly working people, more from the artisan classes than tenant farmers or poor laborers. As a WEA class leader reported in 1909,

out of a few cottage doors there float in the evening, when work is done, strains by Handel or Bach—so well indeed as a harmonium or an old piano and fingers not yet perfect in the art can send them forth. Horses have been groomed to a whistled rendering of Schubert’s “Who is Sylvia?” Best of all, it is quite certain that the audience is getting more and more able to enjoy difficult music. Brahms, at first unintelligible, is getting to be liked, if not yet altogether understood.⁴²

The Welsh working class, of course, boasted the strongest tradition of popular music, as well as the foundryman-composer Joseph Parry. Miners commonly named their children after classical composers, explained Walter Haydn Davies (b. 1903): “In fact, in one family there was a Handel, Haydn, Elgar, Verdi, Joseph Parry, Caradog, Mendy (short for Mendelssohn) and an unforgettable Billy Bach, together with an only daughter Rossini (called Rosie for short).”⁴³ The Second World War forced the suspension of many of these activities, but even at the end of the conflict, Wales still had 104 choral societies, sixty-five music clubs, twelve gramophone societies, thirty-five school music festivals, four professional and ten amateur chamber music groups, three major orchestras, four theater orchestras, forty-eight semi-professional and amateur orchestras, and eighty-three brass bands.⁴⁴

Perhaps it was in the nature of mining communities to develop great musical traditions, and not only in South Wales. While Jennie Lee (b. 1904) practiced Tannhäuser, Il Trovatore, and Aida, her father and other colliers always attended the D’Oyly Carte and Carl Rosa companies when they passed through Cowdenbeath. “Whether it was Gilbert and Sullivan or Verdi, Mozart or Puccini, the companies that came to our mining town to play to mining audiences could depend on a full house.”⁴⁵ Walk through any North Staffordshire coal town on any evening, wrote Harold Brown (b. 1906), and “You will not pass many houses before you hear a piano being played, someone practising singing exercises, others working hard at some brass instrument preparing for contest day.” The churches and chapels would be lit up, rehearsing for Sunday services or some musical competition. Down in the pits, a collier-cellist explained that “It makes it possible for one to express finer feelings and I think that the cello is a beautiful instrument for one to display these inner, intimate feelings. … When you are doubled up here for seven hours a day with nothing but darkness and nasty smells, you can go home, get out your instrument, close your eyes and enter another world with music.” For miners, wrote Brown, music “is their only means of balance. Without … some means of expression…, they would go mad working as they do under such pressure and under such horrible conditions.” And perhaps they found a political message in classical music as well. After the failure of the 1921 strike, one miner-choirman quoted from Handel’s Israel in Egypt : “They oppressed them with burdens and made them serve with rigour.”⁴⁶

Great music as much as great literature could stir up unrest among the working classes, even when it conveyed no overt political message. Millworker James Whittaker (b. 1906) was the son of a cooper and washerwoman, and an activist in the Labour League of Youth. He traced his ideals and his discontents to the days when he would dodge school to attend organ recitals at Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall:

After most recitals I came away with my head in a whirl, and my emotions and feelings in a state of tumultuous rebellion. The music used to get hold of me and carry me away and away into a realm which defies description: it was a realm of pure feeling, not of sights or sounds. …

My soul clamoured for solid brightness, enduring, uplifting, edifying, real and splendid. I went down, engulfed completely, before music that had strength in it, and I liked to feel myself upborne, on an oceanic surge, leaving all the beastly sordidness and muck of the life I knew far behind.

He thrilled to Bach and Beethoven, but Grieg especially spoke to him

for, under all his music, I constantly felt a weird note running that struck an answering chord in the lostness and desolation within myself. … Going home from these recitals, up the narrow, squalid length of poverty-ridden Scotland Road and Byrom Street, I used to shiver and feel miserable. The beauty of the hours I had just spent only accentuated the dirt, misery, poverty and cruelty about me.

Folk who know me to-day … cannot understand, nor can I make them understand, just what real music, by the masters, meant to a ragged slum kid. I was empty in body and soul when I went to listen to those wonderful compositions, and that music did for me all the things food, comfort, security and beauty would have done had I had them. I was starving in more ways than one at the time.⁴⁷

While many autodidacts looked to Everyman’s Library to emancipate themselves, for others music was the high road to a better world.⁴⁸ To emphasize “that Socialists were interested in the higher things of life,” the Glasgow ILP organized a small orchestra to play classical interludes before its lectures, including a talk by Charles Manners (of the Moody-Manners Opera Company) which attracted an overflow crowd of 7,000.⁴⁹ For a Nottingham hosiery worker (b. c. 1910) the people’s music proved that

The working class did have the capacity to be creative. … They had the ability to enjoy some of the good things of life; I don’t mean having culture rammed down their throats, but we loved nothing so much when I was a kid as going to my auntie’s and listening to her records … the Messiah, the Nuns’ Chorus, the Triumphal March from Aida, Trovatore. And a lot of people had read Shaw, the pamphlets and the plays, Robert Blatchford, H.G. Wells, Dickens, Thackeray. Ordinary working people, some of them who’d left school at thirteen or fourteen. Above all, they weren’t afraid of ideas. We went to see travelling performances of operas; we saw Carmen I remember. We had to queue for hours to get a seat in the gallery. There was this hunger for something that was better, you could feel it, it flowed like blood through the people. Now [1978], well, I know all those things still exist, only it’s somehow harder for the working class to find them, they’re offered so much that’s superficial and empty.⁵⁰

Classical music was not always easy to find a half-century earlier. Other than Handel’s ubiquitous Messiah, hardly anything else was available in the depressed shipyard town of Jarrow after the First World War, only a school excursion to a symphony concert in Newcastle City Hall. Arthur Barton doubted that his Standard Five classmates would take to it, but he was wrong:

These weren’t at all like the plaintive strains that drifted from the Sunday bandstand or the undifferentiated racket Uncle Jim’s gramophone made. This was music, adding a new dimension to our poor little street-circumscribed lives. Suddenly it was over, and as we clapped I looked round at the audience, and noticed that except for us they were all posh people—“Done up like ninepenny rabbits” as sharp-eyed Herbert was observing at that very moment. Was such music only for them? I wondered rather uncomfortably, as the doomladen opening of Beethoven’s Fifth silenced us once more.

I searched the faces of my friends. There was at least no boredom anywhere. Their faces were alight and alive and on one—Alf’s—a rapture that even a child like me could recognize. Alf, backward reader, potential street sweeper, butt of so many masters’ easy sarcasms had escaped us all and entered into his kingdom.

Twenty years later, during the Second World War, Arthur ran into one of those classmates and discovered that they were both on the way to hear Barbirolli conduct.⁵¹

Manchester, in contrast, offered a thriving musical culture that cut clean across class lines. Walter Greenwood remembered a young man from a Pennine village just twenty miles away who deeply envied him on that count: “Eight theatres in three streets, all number one dates—all on your doorstep. I don’t think you realize just what you’ve got.” In fact he did: Greenwood loved Hallé Orchestra concerts and borrowed The Perfect Wagnerite from an engineering worker. His father received free opera tickets for displaying playbills in his barber shop, and his mother (a former charwoman and waitress) was a fan of Sir Thomas Beecham (“If I ever came into a fortune I’d give it to Tommy Beecham for all the pleasure I’ve had”).⁵²

This was a city where Neville Cardus, whose parents took in washing, could become music critic for the Guardian. He could lecture on the songs of Hugo Wolf in a small depressed factory town to a roomful of millworkers: “I have never since spoken to an audience so quick of apprehension, and so absorbed and moved at times.” Cardus’s training consisted of tonic sol-fa lessons, reading the music reviews of Ernest Newman and James Agate in the Guardian, and gorging on all the concerts and operas that the city could offer:

I cannot imagine that any young man today [1950] will be equal to grasping the astonishing mixed state of excitement and of reverence which young men of those years felt when they knew that Elgar and Strauss and Richter were each and all actually present in their city’s midst, and likely to be seen with one’s own eyes any day going here or there between the Midland Hotel and Peter Street.⁵³

In an important sense Cardus was educated for his career, for opera permeated even the slums of Manchester. There was no piano at home, but his mother sang him to sleep with tunes from Norma. Arrangers cannibalized Bellini, Donizetti, and Wagner for the background music to Christmas pantomimes, one of which concluded with the company singing the Hunting Chorus from Der Freischütz. “The point,” said Cardus, “is that producers of this, the lowest nineteenth-century form of public entertainment, thought the public liked it all, and they did.”⁵⁴

By the early twentieth century a taste for classical music could spring from the most barren environments. As an ironworks clerk A. E. Coppard (b. 1878) found “several men in that shop who were music enthusiasts and it was astonishing to me, and deeply moving too, to hear them one day chanting above the uproar of the machinery, of all things the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhäuser.”⁵⁵ In the mills of Blackburn weavers rehearsed the Messiah and Elijah over the roar of the looms.⁵⁶ In the worst streets of Sunderland, tough kids heard and appreciated classical records played by the local pawnbroker.⁵⁷ Derbyshire millgirl Elsie Gadsby (b. 1912) recalled that her mother, who had “arms like a navvy and a vocabulary to match,” bought a Victor gramophone through 1s.-a-week instalments and an astonishing selection of records:

Now up to this time there was never any music in the house, apart from our singing. … Her choice amazed me at first. Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” “Peer Gynt Suite,” “Poet and Peasant Overture,” and some of Gilbert and Sullivan’s music. No bawdy pub songs, or anything like that.

She would sit there at the side of the table turning the gramophone handle. Then the music would start and a dreamy, wrapt expression would come over her face, and she’d be in another world.⁵⁸

There was nothing extraordinary in a gasworker hearing Tales of Hoffmann sung in a proletarian pub on a Saturday night.⁵⁹ In 1924, as deputy leader of the House of Commons, former textile worker J. R. Clynes wanted to secure a government subsidy for opera, knowing that it had a following among his constituents.⁶⁰

Given all those influences, it is hardly surprising that someone like C. H. Rolph should end up with an impressive fund of musical knowledge. His father was a solo flautist in the City of London Police Band. The family owned two big volumes of Star Folios containing the standard classical pieces: “The names at the page-tops were truly exciting—Masaniello, Crown Diamonds, Fra Diavolo, Poet and Peasant, Rosamunde, L’Italiana in Algeri, The Caliph of Baghdad, La Gazza Ladra, The Barber of Seville, The Magic Flute, Oberon.” On the gramophone they could play Caruso, Tetrazzini, Zampa, William Tell, and The Merry Wives of Windsor: “Never since, among the superb reproductions of modern hi-fi technology or even in any concert hall, have I been so excited and engulfed by the power of music.” When his older brother was ditched by a girlfriend, he spent the money he had been saving for marriage on records of all nine Beethoven symphonies.

True, not everyone in working-class communities owned a gramophone, but classical music was literally in the air. Rolph recalls that the milkman would whistle (flawlessly) the entire waltz from Delibes’s Naïla. Lift operators and street boys whistled tunes from Carmen: they had seen Cecil B. DeMille’s film of the opera and bought the records.⁶¹ One of the greatest thrills of Rolph’s childhood was supplied by the four-piece “orchestra” that accompanied Charlie Chaplin and Westerns at the Putney Bridge Cinema. “The sound of that little ensemble tuning-up when it was about to begin the Overture to Raymond or the William Tell ballet music has lodged in my memory as more exciting than any music ever written, an ecstasy of anticipation which no performance in the world could have surpassed,” he remembered. They “would go straight through the Rosamunde Overture, Luigini’s Ballet Egyptien, or Allan Macbeth’s Love in Idleness whether it matched the picture or not, with results that were sometimes comic to everyone but me.”⁶²

“I learnt to whistle the classics” at the cinema was a common refrain in plebeian memoirs.⁶³ “We got a good knowledge of Beethoven during the cowboy pictures of Tom Mix and W. S. Hart,” wrote a London butler’s son, who also recalled hearing selections from Elgar, Carmen, and Aida Sunday evenings at the Regents Park bandstand.⁶⁴ As a boy, colliery worker Sid Chaplin was bombarded by classical music every Sunday morning. First he heard cinema accompanists appropriate Wagner (who seemed to serve Emil Jannings and Hoot Gibson equally well), then he walked through the streets of his Durham mining town:

Each walk was a musical education. All the folk would be sitting outside on crackets or rocking chairs, and the big horns of the gramophones inside would be belting out everything, from Caruso, John McCormack and the great Chaliapin in opera to Dame Clara Butt in Handel’s Messiah or, along with the grand old songs of the English music hall and such commercial syncopation as Yes, We Have No Bananas and Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, snatches of the purest jazz. … For years I listened to the best without knowing it.⁶⁵

Once the movies acquired soundtracks, studios began churning out biopics for the great composers. In 1945 surveys, many working-class moviegoers reported that they had acquired a new taste for “serious” music from A Song to Remember (Chopin), The Great Mr. Handel, Battle for Music (London Philharmonic Orchestra), and Song of Russia (Tchaikovsky), as well as the “Warsaw Concerto” in Dangerous Moonlight.⁶⁶ Some were introduced to the classics through what we would now dismiss as laughable kitsch. Michael Stapleton, son of an Irish navvy, grew up during the Great Depression in Clapton. The only books at home were some “dull looking old volumes, gathered from goodness knows where,” one of which was Pictures from the World’s Great Music.

I opened it in the middle, and there was a wonderful picture of a horse, galloping madly across a desolate plain with a naked man tied to its back. Great dark clouds glowered in the distance and steam issued from the horse’s nostrils. Under the picture was just one word, Mazeppa. This struck me as being a funny name for a horse, even if it was a strange sort of horse. I puzzled over it for a moment, trying to understand why he was running off with that poor man tied to his back without any clothes. I gave it up and turned the page. The next picture I saw was of a man and woman leaning against each other in a dungeon. An Egyptian dungeon, it must be, because it showed you outside the dungeon as well and the buildings were just like the things I saw in the British Museum when I saw the mummified body. The dungeon had a flat roof and there was a woman kneeling on it, wearing Egyptian clothes. The people in the dungeon were wearing nightdresses. The words under the picture made no sense at all. O Terra, Addio! What did it mean?

There was no wireless or gramophone at home: “Music was little more to us than hymns, popular songs that other people sang, and the band on Hackney Downs.” But there was the public library, where benevolent librarians broke the rules to allow Stapleton into the adult reference room, in spite of his ratty clothes. The Oxford Companion to Music was brought out, and “I spent the rest of the summer holidays exploring this wonderful new world.”⁶⁷

Thus, when the wireless arrived in working-class communities between the wars, it built on an existing familiarity with popular classics. Percy Edwards, a Suffolk ploughmaker who later became a broadcaster himself, described its impact: “The day after the BBC broadcast The Magic Flute from Covent Garden in 1923 you’d have thought the Martians had landed there was such excitement.”⁶⁸ Though some criticized BBC classical programming as elitist, it was lavishly praised in the memoirs of all sorts and conditions of working people. “When I heard the works of Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky for the first time, I was transported to a realm I had never entered before,” recalled a Kimbolton tailor, “and I regretted the wasted years without the ‘inarticulate, unfathomable speech’ of music.”⁶⁹ Growing up in Shadwell, Louis Heren regularly listened in to the “Foundations of Music” series. “Later I was taken aback by the sneers at Lord Reith’s crusade to improve the quality of listening, and of life itself. No sneers were heard in our house .… I can remember doing homework to Bach and Mozart…, and the first time I was emotionally overwhelmed by Beethoven’s Fifth.”⁷⁰ Music hall star “Wee” Georgie Wood, though barely educated, was a dedicated fan of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and Schubert; and he hailed the BBC for bringing “first-class music, played by great orchestras” to the masses. “They have been given a taste for good music, and have learnt that music which is good is not of necessity music which is ‘highbrow’ and beyond the comprehension of any but those minds which have been musically educated.”⁷¹

By the outbreak of the Second World War, radio reached 79.1 percent of all homes: 97.4 percent in the upper middle class (where the chief breadwinner earned £10 or more weekly), 92.4 percent in the lower middle class (£4–£10), 84.4 percent in the upper working class (£2 10d.–£4), and a majority of 57.7 percent even in the lower working class (under £2 10d.).⁷² A July 1938 survey, which asked listeners what kinds of program they liked, found that working-class demand for classical music, while less than the middle-class, was still considerable (Table 6.2, p. 205). Given that working people outnumbered the middle classes among listeners by about two to one, the respective audiences for grand opera and recitals were roughly equal in absolute numbers. Remarkably, half of all working-class listeners tuned into orchestral music. When the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts offered its popular factory concerts during the Second World War, it was catering to an audience that already existed. CEMA was so successful that it aroused bureaucratic jealousies in the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), which offered lowbrow programs of popular songs and vulgar humor.⁷⁴ In 1944 more than 1.5 million people attended a total of 6,140 CEMA concerts, and the majority were held for working-class audiences, including 3,169 at factories, 371 at war-workers’ hostels, and forty at camp construction sites.⁷⁵ In 1946 the Gallup Poll found 52 percent of the public favored continued government funding of the arts, with only 27 percent opposed.⁷⁶ Electrician Frank Chapple, who picked up a taste for classical music from his barber’s adopted son, militantly defended that perk. Called up for army service in 1943, he religiously attended recitals near his base in Croydon. One evening he was outraged to learn that the concert had been replaced with a “brains trust” featuring the Bishop of Croydon, and he “gave the poor old Bishop a particular grilling over how much he got paid for doing his job.”⁷⁷

Table 6.2: Expressed Interest in Radio Programs, 1938 (in percent)73
	Middle Class	Working Class
Variety	88	97
Theatre or Cinema Organs	74	91
Military Bands	65	77
Musical Comedies	62	77
Dance Music	59	78
Plays	70	69
Light Music	73	61
Brass Bands	43	63
Orchestral Music	62	49
Talks	61	45
Discussions	53	45
Running Commentaries on Cricket	49	48
Serial Plays	32	52
Light Opera and Operetta	47	30
Recitals — Singers	32	29
Running Commentaries on Tennis	34	19
Recitals — Piano	28	14
Grand Opera	27	15
Recitals — Violin	24	12
Serial Readings	12	11
Chamber Music	11	4

Table 6.3: Cultural Interests of Newspaper Readers, 1948 (in percent)
	Daily Herald readers	All newspaper readers
Interested in classical music	17	26
Interested in books	40	50
Read books	54	61

In 1946 a Mass Observation survey found a 97 percent recognition of the name of Beethoven, even if he was only vaguely associated with music, a level equal with Sherlock Holmes. Allowing for the fact that this sampling was more representative of the whole population, it still represents a dramatic improvement over the 1918 Sheffield survey. (By comparison, about 90 percent knew Bernard Shaw, an impressive three-quarters recognized John Gielgud, and less than half were familiar with Cecil B. DeMille.)⁷⁸ A sampling of the audience at a cheap classical concert at Central Hall, Westminster in 1948, featuring Haydn and Mozart on the program, turned up eighteen middle-class and forty-five working-class enthusiasts.⁷⁹ That year a survey of Daily Herald readers (nearly all manual or clerical workers) produced commensurate results (Table 6.3, p. 205).⁸⁰

These figures suggest that, while there was a substantial working-class audience for Beethoven, British autodidact culture was more literary than musical. That was partly a matter of availability: secondhand bookstalls and Sunday school prizes could be found in the smallest and remotest communities, unlike symphony orchestras. Choir groups commonly used tonic sol-fa musical notation, which had the virtue of simplicity for untrained singers but seriously narrowed the repertory of available sheet music. There was also the hangover of a Puritan tradition which exalted the printed word and frowned upon secular music and art. For Stan Dickens, raised by strict Nonconformists, hearing Sir Henry Wood conduct at Queen’s Hall was terrifically stressful. He was told to follow the theme and tried his best, “but it always gave me the slip. On one occasion the strain was such that I had to go to the toilets and be sick.” As he put it, he never developed a taste for fine music for the same reason that he never learned to like caviar: “To someone reared on Moody and Sankey, songs from the classic operas and music from Bach and Beethoven were, at the time, unappreciated.”⁸¹ This was a culture that produced men like George Tomlinson, Lancashire weaver and minister of education under Attlee. He studied Hamlet over his looms, but confessed that he completed his first visit to the National Gallery in five minutes: “I should have done it in three only the floor was slippery.” He attributed his insensitivity to his years at the Rishton Wesleyan School, which had only one picture in the building, The Landing of the Danes. He also liked to tell the story of two gentlemen who hailed a taxi and said they had a pressing engagement to play chamber music at the BBC. “Well,” replied the driver, “walk.”⁸²

Working-class cultural conservatism also manifested itself in total resistance to modern music, which never enjoyed a place in the brass band repertory. During the Second World War, the Army Educational Corps discovered that lectures on L’Après-midi d’un faune wasted everyone’s time (“Seen any phones lately?” “What the hell do they look like, these phones?” “Are there any girl phones about?”).⁸³ Instructor Sidney Harrison—concert pianist, composer, and tailor’s son—was genuinely eager to make the subject accessible, but even he was hard put to explain serial music to Welsh soldiers trained in tonic sol-fa.⁸⁴

Aristotle and Dr. Stopes

It is significant that twelve respondents to the Sheffield survey (about 20 percent of the total) recognized the name of Aristotle, of which five (including a 72-year-old female trade unionist) identified him as the author of a sex manual. When Roy Porter and Lesley Hall chronicled “the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain,” they had difficulty answering a related question: How much of that knowledge was transmitted to a mass audience? What did the working classes know about sex, and where did they read about it?

Popular almanacs of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries contained advice (or, more often, warnings) about sexual profligacy, abortifacients, aphrodisiacs, and anti-aphrodisiacs.⁸⁵ The same kind of information could be found in Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a handbook of folk gynecology and obstetrics by an unknown author (certainly not Aristotle). Several versions were frequently reprinted through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Porter and Hall conclude that “The profile of the readership is largely guesswork,” but the book was fairly inexpensive,⁸⁶ and evidence supplied by the Sheffield survey and autobiographers (when they are willing to discuss such matters) suggests that Aristotle’s Masterpiece had a large working-class audience. It pops up incongruously in a list of dissenting tracts read by an eighteenth-century apprentice shoemaker.⁸⁷ In the late nineteenth century it was circulating surreptitiously even among Welsh Nonconformists.⁸⁸ V. S. Pritchett’s parents kept it behind the bedroom chamberpot.⁸⁹ In the early twentieth century, it was something you might purchase at secondhand bookstalls,⁹⁰ pass around your workmates,⁹¹ or send to an open-minded girlfriend.⁹² Since his sex education was limited to warnings that “there were certain habits cultivated by sinful boys that must be avoided at all costs lest I end a physical or mental wreck,” Stan Dickens clubbed together with other children to buy under-the-counter volumes in brown paper covers from a bookstall in Nunningford market. “Judged by modern [1975] standards the books were innocuous and no doubt similar books are being presented as Sunday School prizes today,” he granted, but “There was one book that we all thought was sensational”—Aristotle’s Masterpiece. “At last we understood what was meant when, during Scripture lessons, reference was made to ‘the mother’s womb.’”⁹³

Whether the book provided much enlightenment beyond that is another question. “It was all about curing warts, worms, ringworm, delivering babies, and symptoms of pregnancy,” recalled Edith Hinson (b. 1910), a Stockport mill girl who found it under her mother’s mattress. “I didn’t understand a word.”⁹⁴ Mary Bertenshaw (b. 1904) had been told nothing about sex except the vague horrors of venereal disease, which only left her terrified of the local Manchester VD clinic. The girls at the hat and cap factory where she worked would huddle round at dinner to read Aristotle’s Masterpiece over general giggles: “It contained explicit pictures of the development of a foetus; in turn, we read out passages. This went on until our boss Abe interrupted us. We felt so ashamed and from then on kept even further away from the VD clinic and became very dubious about the male sex.”⁹⁵

It may be simplistic to write off the Victorian era as one of sexual repression, but the circulation of sexual information in print was certainly constricted. On that point the evidence supports Porter and Hall and contradicts Michel Foucault. In the nineteenth century, Aristotle’s Masterpiece was bowdlerized.⁹⁶ Even so, allusions to the book, not uncommon in pre-Victorian and post-Victorian autobiographies, disappeared in the intervening period. As David Vincent found, workingmen’s memoirs of the early nineteenth century were so reticent that no useful information about sexuality could be gleaned from them.⁹⁷ Sexual references that appeared in the 1855 edition of J. D. Burn’s The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy were cut from the 1882 version.⁹⁸ Similar deletions were made from William Cameron’s Autobiography of a Gangrel, written in the 1840s but not published until 1888.⁹⁹ Michael Mason has described a sexual puritanism among Victorian workers that developed independently of middle-class influences. Any suggestion that Owenite socialism involved an advocacy of sexual freedom deeply alienated working-class women from the movement. And when Charles Bradlaugh disseminated birth control information he was frequently attacked by workingmen, who associated contraception with the dismal demographics of the Rev. Thomas Malthus.¹⁰⁰

In contrast, Francis Place (b. 1771), an early birth control advocate, recalled that he was “pretty well acquainted with what relates to the union of the sexes” by age thirteen. Looking back on the 1780s from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he noted that “Conversation on these matters was much less reserved than it is now, books relating to the subject were much more within the reach of boys and girls than they are now, and I had little to learn on any part of the subject.” Obscene penny prints were commonly sold to laboring people, and Place read Aristotle’s Masterpiece: as a result, he could not accept the Gospels’ account of the conception of Jesus. He felt a near-erotic thrill when his school-master showed him an anatomy textbook, “which strongly excited me, and made me desirous of information on the subject.” He would often ferret out and read surgical texts at bookstalls until the owner chased him away.¹⁰¹

The atmosphere was more repressive for Joseph Barker, a solider’s son born thirty-five years later. At about age fifteen he found an old folio on anatomy and surgery by Helkiah Crooke (physician to James I) and was delighted by “certain parts of the work which treated on subjects which are generally wrapt in mystery by people, and which my [Yorkshire Methodist] parents would have been least disposed for me to think about or understand.” When he indiscreetly shared his knowledge with some friends, there was a general uproar and even death threats. His angry parents confiscated the book, then returned it “on condition that I would paste up two particular parts of it. But I soon took the liberty to break loose the sealed-up parts, and read them again.”¹⁰² James Bonwick (b. 1817) recalled that, at Southwark’s Borough Road School, “a stray book of a lascivious order occasionally came into our play hour, but was not lent about as in later and more cultured school days.”¹⁰³

One sex manual was universally available even to the most pious Victorians. Thomas Okey (b. 1852) remembered that girls and boys would relieve the tedium of Methodist services by passing around the Bible opened to passages “which do not form part of the lessons in school or of the church services.” They were introduced to “wores” (as they pronounced it) and “the wicked Mrs. Potiphar, [who] victimized the good Joseph because he would not tell a lie with her.”¹⁰⁴ For that reason, nineteenth-century Bibles were often edited for children: adultery was erased from the story of David and Bathsheba, and if Mrs. Potiphar did not disappear entirely, her agenda was left unclear.¹⁰⁵ James Bonwick’s Scripture lessons “contained no doubtful references to a more ancient, darker, lower age, as we never handled the whole Bible.”¹⁰⁶ But the edition that V. W. Garratt (b. 1892) studied at St. James Church School in Birmingham was wonderfully explicit: “Fascinating as the Old Testament was in the graphic descriptions of battles, murders, and floods, the sex lore of Leviticus was our chief attraction, for it inspired earnest inquiry into the full meaning of adultery, fornication, and childbirth, the information being communicated to each other by gestures and whisperings that cleared up some of the mysteries that puzzled our inquisitive minds.” Other points were clarified by scribbled marginal notes, which were “anything but decent.”¹⁰⁷

Abroad, in Indian bazaars, where there were no Ten Commandments, soldiers could buy the semi-pornographic Paul de Kock and Droll Stories of Balzac. “As for the Decameron of Boccaccio, in my time every soldier of the British Forces in India who could read had read this volume from cover to cover,” according to an enlisted man stationed there from 1901 to 1909. “It was considered very hot stuff; but the Prayer-wallah used to say that in this respect it did not come within shouting distance of certain passages in the Old Testament, once you got the hang of the Biblical language.”¹⁰⁸ For a boy as young as seven, they could offer a syllabus of dirty words.¹⁰⁹ Atheist propagandists made wicked use of such passages in their tract 101 Obscenities in the Bible, for example Ezekiel 23:20: “And she doted upon their Egyptian paramours, whose members are as big as donkeys’ and who come with the abundance of stallions.”¹¹⁰ For Tom Barclay (b. 1852), son of a Catholic rag-and-bone collector, the erotic episodes in the Douay Bible “aroused my curiosity as to sexual matters.” He found some answers in secondhand schooltexts of Ovid, Juvenal, and Catullus: though he knew no Latin beyond the Mass, the English notes offered plenty of background on the “filthy loves of gods and goddesses.”¹¹¹

The erotic information available in the Bible and other sources was, however, fragmentary and often inaccurate. Working-class children growing up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suffered from notoriously low levels of sexual literacy, a fact confirmed both by oral history¹¹² and by autobiographies. For the daughter (b. 1890) of a London compositor, “Sex was a well-kept secret. Any visitor or neighbour who got anywhere near the subject in conversation was silenced by sign language by my Mother. We didn’t discuss things with our parents. We were told what to do, or not to do, and were not allowed to answer back.”¹¹³ Kathleen Woodward was the daughter of a puritanical washerwoman who would tell her nothing about sex. She learned a little from the women she worked with at a shirt-collar factory, from the couples lurching from pubs at closing time, and, “as a child, prowling down the canal bank in the dark—furtive, sly, silent, wrapped in an inexpressible and fearful ugliness from which I by early training shrank and covered my face. … Passionately, obscurely, sex came to mean for me all that was horrible and revolting, all that was inexpressibly ugly; and only a little less strong than my horror was my curiosity.”¹¹⁴ In Jim Bullock’s (b. 1903) Yorkshire mining village, “One thing the children talked about a great deal was sex, and what they did not know, they imagined.” They endlessly and ignorantly debated how babies were made, and engaged in some childish sex play, but the subject was never discussed at home.¹¹⁵ When Herbert Hodge (b. 1901) asked about it, his father (an upholsterer) reluctantly and “haltingly described the motions. Just like that. No word of desire, delight, attraction, or repulsion. No word of any life. Merely the motions. It sounded duller than the excretory motions—and without even their urge.”¹¹⁶

At that level of ignorance, it could be difficult to decipher sexually suggestive literature. Allen Clarke (b. 1863), the son of Bolton textile workers, found physiology books in the public library incomprehensible. A newspaper reference to Rabelais motivated him to borrow Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was no more helpful: “Love passages in the tales were meaningless and boring and I skipped them.”¹¹⁷ Harry Dorrell (b. 1903) read his brother’s copy of George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife, but “I could not understand why the lady who was undressed said to the man ‘Bite me’ and also got into bed with no clothes on. Mother always wore a nightdress in bed.”¹¹⁸ Mary Bentley’s father, who worked in a soap factory, at first took Jude the Obscure away from her, but relented when an uncle advised him that she would only read it under the sheets. “It didn’t do me any harm because”—even at age fourteen—“most of it I didn’t understand and I didn’t like it anyhow. I didn’t cry over it as I did over Tess when she christened her baby.”¹¹⁹ Margaret Wharton’s parents were highly literate, and with their encouragement she entered a teaching training college in 1936, but they taught her nothing about sex:

Though we read books like Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Hatter’s Castle both dealing with the defloration of innocence and an ultimate baby, we drew no parallels and made no application to ourselves. I even read Radclyffe Hall’s classic story of lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness, without having the faintest idea of what it was about. At the age of nineteen in college, in common with my contemporaries, we anxiously awaited a much touted lecture by the college doctor on the facts of life. While she gave a graphic description of the birth process, she made no mention of the part the father played in how the baby got there and I remember the disappointment in which most of us seemed to share.¹²⁰

The sexual themes in these novels may seem obvious, but without the appropriate frame, the reader will not know how to decode the allusions. Norman Nicholson recalled that a friend,

who had been instructed by a girl cousin,…informed me fairly accurately of the basic method and anatomy of sex, but, though I was immensely curious, I scarcely associated this with girls at all. The beautiful and disturbing feminine shapes which I sometimes saw in the photograph section of The Sketch and The Tatler, turning over the pages furtively in the Public Library, did not immediately strike me as being what might lie beneath a gymslip. I still thought of sex mainly as a process married people had to go through to get children, and I felt, on the whole, that it was rather hard on them.

Nicholson had no sex education except a puritanical pamphlet handed out by the vicar, which “struck me as being just silly. … It was not until several years later that I discovered, to my immense surprise, that the Gay ’Twenties were supposed to have been a period of new sexual liberation.” In his mind love was almost entirely divorced from sex:

“Love” was something I had learned about from David Copperfield and Under the Greenwood Tree and from the stories in The Woman’s Weekly, which my mother occasionally bought. And, of course, from the poetry I was just beginning to enjoy. I was naively oblivious to the sexual innuendoes of Keats and Tennyson but their romantic raptures set me trembling like a tuning fork. “Come into the garden, Maud” roused nothing of the derision, or even downright ribaldry, that it would surely rouse in a boy of today [1975]. I thought it said just what I would have felt in the circumstances. And put it very nicely too.¹²¹

In his essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell ridiculed the Magnet and Gem for ignoring sex, but as one reader remembered, “The total absence of sex as a story ingredient was never even noticed.”¹²² “I doubt whether the fact that Harry Wharton and his merry band were denied any sexual contact with either boy or girl confused or troubled his innocent readers,” wrote charwoman’s son Bryan Forbes. “Certainly I never detected any sense of sexual deprivation within my own circle of friends, avid followers of the stories like myself. We had all the normal urges and curiosities but there were few outlets for practical field studies in those halcyon pre-war days, for we did not grow up in an age sated with sex.”¹²³ Leslie Paul (b. 1905) reminds us that boys of his generation actually did talk like Frank Richards characters (“You must believe in God, you must, you rotter”). Thus “it was possible to grow up in a curiously sexless world in that age so unlike our own, and to prove incapable of reading the plain signs under one’s nose, like the twelve-year-old Leo in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. … I read about love in the romantic novels I pored over—I would read anything—without ever suspecting it had anything to do with sex.” He remembered a preacher lecturing on the dangers of masturbation, but his warnings were so vague that the boys could only guess (incorrectly) what he was alluding to.¹²⁴

That ignorance could produce fear, loathing, and trauma. Sex was never discussed when Edna Bold (b. 1904), a baker’s daughter, was growing up in Manchester. Yet on a barely conscious level, an unmistakable message was sent by the four layers of skirts and petticoats she was dressed in, starting with “an unmentionable undergarment that never went on display on the washing line, but was hung on a rack near the ceiling amongst other articles of washing. Vaguely, slowly, haphazardly I sensed the layers of petticoats that hung down like drawn blinds had a significance I did not yet comprehend.” The shock of discovery came one summer day when, on her way to school, she was accosted by another child who, quite unbidden, told her where babies came from. That “torrent of obscenity” created a “fear and revulsion of ‘Seks’” which was only aggravated by her reading. When they were alone at home, she and her cousin Dorothy extracted from the kitchen bookcase and read, side by side, a medical book and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The intertextuality was profoundly scarring: “Childbirth and martyrdom were synonymous. We suffered the torments of the damned. Neither my cousin Dorothy nor myself ever underwent such physical torture as we discovered in those two hideous books. We never ‘reproduced.’ On this score she went unrepentant to the grave as I shall go to mine.”¹²⁵ Sexual ignorance made Edith Evans (b. 1910), a seaman’s daughter, “terrified of the opposite sex. I had no desire for a boy friend, in fact I made sure I was never alone with one. I was a very romantic minded girl and enjoyed reading love stories, and hoped to marry one day and have children. I loved babies, but the thought of how one was conceived made me decide to remain childless,” and she did until age thirty-eight, some years after she had married.¹²⁶

It was different for rural children, like East Anglia farm boy Spike Mays (b. 1907). He inevitably learned a great deal observing farm animals, spying on spooning couples, passing around lewd sketches, and playing doctor:

As far as we were concerned old Sigmund Freud was not far out when he postulated that experience relating to sex enters into a child’s life from infancy. … Many local girls had practical experience before puberty … sometimes with schoolboys, but more often with uncles and cousins. Nor were they in the least ashamed. Some even bragged about personal experiences, considering it their duty to inform the virginal minority who had preserved that intact and immaculate state thus far to the ripe old age of twelve years. … Despite their advanced knowledge, some of the bigger boys would ask questions specifically designed to embarrass our headmaster …. “Now, Donald,” said Mr. Tuck, putting on his angry voice. “You know perfectly well where babies come from. Any more of this and I will have you out in front to lecture about it.”¹²⁷

In Oxfordshire fieldhands exchanged traditional bawdy tales: “A kind of rustic Decameron, which seemed to have been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as it rolled down the generations,” recalled Flora Thompson. She could not offer any details, since these stories were not repeated in front of females, but overheard snippets suggested that “they consisted chiefly of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’, together with a lavish enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as ‘the unmentionables.’” In any case, they would have hardly shocked her: as a young girl she had once come across a bull “justifying its existence” and walked on “without so much as a kink in her subconscious.”¹²⁸

Britain was a mainly urban society, however, and soon an expanding range of sexual literature became available in the cities. Mark Grossek (b. 1888), the son of a Jewish immigrant tailor in Southwark, acquired his knowledge from grafitti, scandalous stories in the local press, Lloyd’s Weekly News, Measure for Measure, the Song of Solomon, some old plays a fellow student had dug out of his father’s library, General Booth’s In Darkest England, Tobias Smollett, Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine, as well as Leviticus (“For myself, the most subtle aura of enticement was wafted from the verb ‘begat’ and the noun ‘concubine’”). There was also Ovid, but unfortunately the popular translation published by Bohn “had left all the tasty chunks in Latin.”¹²⁹

One could consult popular textbooks, such as Dr. Foote’s Plain Home Talk and Cyclopaedia. “This book made a great impression on me,” wrote Glasgow foundryworker Thomas Bell (b. 1882), “and I handed it round my workmates until it was as black as coal, and the batters torn.”¹³⁰ Elsie Gadsby and her mother secretly studied a similar book on pregnancy and women’s health, which some neighbors had left behind when they moved away.¹³¹ Joseph Stamper (b. 1886), an ironmoulder’s son, picked up quite a lot about obstetrics from an anatomy text.¹³² The pro-chastity Alliance of Honour taught hygiene and sex education via two volumes by Dr. Sylvanus Stall, What a Young Man Ought to Know and What a Young Woman Ought to Know, though readers’ responses were mixed: some found them helpful,¹³³ while others thought they only purveyed myths and fears.¹³⁴

The beginning of the twentieth century is generally treated as an era of erotic liberation, driven by the socialist and feminist movements, the pioneering sexual studies of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, the return of the repressed in modern literature, and (a bit later) the popularization of Sigmund Freud and birth controller Marie Stopes. Some emancipated working-class women were caught up in these movements. In her Bolton Socialist Sunday School, Alice Foley heard a phrenologist offer “uninhibited talks on sex, with never the blinds down; we seemed to take the problems in our stride and were not unduly bothered with emotional upsets.”¹³⁵ Yet these currents of liberation reached only a tiny fraction of the proletariat. A 1912 survey located only 108 Socialist Sunday schools with a total of 12,656 pupils, half of them adults.¹³⁶ Even the most intellectually active working women confronted mountains of sexual ignorance and anxiety. Margaret Bondfield (b. 1873), a shop assistant who became Britain’s first female cabinet minister, was raised by a radical mother and a father (a foreman lacemaker) who had taken evening courses in science and classical literature. Nevertheless, she was terrified by the onset of menstruation: “All I knew of sex was the shaming gossip of schoolgirls. I felt hot all over if I saw a pregnant woman, because one was not supposed to know anything about a baby until or unless it appeared—and as a result of marriage.” Later in life she was delighted to see the Woolwich Women’s Co-operative Guild offer classes in physiology: “We haven’t any words to tell our children about birth,” the students told her.¹³⁷

Ethel Mannin (b. 1900) was an exceptionally liberated letter-sorter’s daughter, an early reader of Freud who made something of a career championing sexual freedom in the popular press. But when she approached the subject as a girl, she was far more fearful than informed:

At the board-school all the girls were morbidly interested in parturition, menstruation, and procreation. The older girls talked of little else. We raked the Bible for information, and those of us who came from homes in which there were books made endless research, looking up in encylopaedias and home medical works, such words as “confinement,” “miscarriage,” “after-birth,” “puberty,” “menses,” “life, change of.” We were both fascinated and horrified. At the age of twelve I ploughed through a long and difficult book on embryology. My brother did likewise at the same age. God knows what either of us got as a result of our search for knowledge. … Apart from the purely scientific aspect, which was beyond our comprehension, everything was “all along a dirtiness, all along a mess … all along of finding out, rather more or less.”

She copied passages from the Song of Songs into her commonplace book, but was disgusted when she came across the phrase “Esau came forth from his mother’s belly”:

It seemed unspeakably dreadful, conjured up visions of sanguinary major operations. I was very miserable .… After that … I looked at every woman who passed us in the street to see if she was going to have a baby. … I was unhappy for a long time about the whole thing, and not until I was fifteen did I know how parturition took place, and horror was heaped on horror’s head. Menstruation was another shock. It all seemed dreadful. One took refuge more and more in one’s secret self .… For a long time I refused to believe that the father had anything to do with the creation of a baby—in spite of all the funny little indecent rhymes and the assertions of the girls who had it on good authority from home medical books and older brothers and sisters.¹³⁸

As Harry McShane explained, early working-class Marxists had thoroughly bourgeois sexual mores:

Although the average socialist looked forward to some vague equality in the new socialist society, on the whole they seemed to think that the family would continue. Its abolition never occurred to them, although some did read Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Morgan’s Ancient Society on which it was based. It seems that when they read these books they were more interested in tracing the origins of society from savagery onward, and the other argument passed them by. Marx mentioned the family in The Communist Manifesto but, again, most socialists didn’t grasp all that was in it. The ideas they got out of it were about class struggle and international solidarity.¹³⁹

Radical politics were not incompatible with strict sexual puritanism. At age thirteen or fourteen John Edmonds (b. 1911), who was reading The Cloister and the Hearth with a lower-middle-class girlfriend, asked her how Margaret had become pregnant. (He assumed that pregnancy followed automatically from marriage and cohabitation). She laughed, told him he was silly, and offered a “surprisingly accurate” explanation. He now understood why his father (a staunch socialist and Daily Herald reader) had angrily thrown out a jam jar in which he was raising a few beetles (“I’ll not have you watching those things breed!”) and demanded the return of a school library book with illustrations of classical sculpture. “He expressed a mixture of horror and indignation when some years later he learned from me that my school’s curriculum had included lectures illustrated with lantern slides, dealing with human anatomy and physiology.”¹⁴⁰

Even those who read widely about sex often learned very little. In the 1920s Jennie Lee won a psychology degree from the University of Edinburgh, where she learned about abortion methods in forensic medicine classes. She went beyond the syllabus to read Ellis and Freud. While her collier father could not quite bring himself to discuss the subject, he was progressive enough to leave a book by Marie Stopes where she was likely to find it. All the same, Jennie was still capable of chatting with a prostitute on Princes Street without realizing what was going on. Stopes on sex “was all a bit remote and unattractive,” she found. “Some of us at that time went in for a great deal of poetry to carry us through our adolescent phase, what was then called sublimation.” She might talk a good game with a girlfriend (“provided my inclinations were sufficiently aroused, I cannot see myself running away from life. … Please God, lead me into temptation”) but He had other plans for her, and for a while she remained virginal in every sense of the term.¹⁴¹ At nineteen Marjory Todd (b. 1906) liked discussing birth control with her WEA and ILP friends, until “one evening I was suddenly afraid that it would be discovered that I had not the faintest idea how such control was achieved.” Nor did she entirely understand why it was necessary: “Did you know—I didn’t, that men kiss you on the mouth?” she asked her sister, who confessed that she had only recently discovered that herself.¹⁴²

These women had achieved, not sexual freedom, but some freedom to talk about sex, with a mixture of fervor and confusion, audacity and fear, sophistication and bluffing. The most remarkable records of that working-class sexual discourse are the letters and diaries of Ruth Slate (1884–1953), a packer who worked her way up to clerkdom, and Eva Slawson (1882–1917), a domestic servant who became a typist. Ruth was raised a Methodist, but in her first diary entry, at age thirteen, she frankly writes “I am rather fond of taking notice of boys (most of my companions do it),” and discusses their attractions in some detail. She organized a mutual improvement society, vigorously debated political and social issues with fellow salesgirls at a London grocer’s, and embarked on a voracious course of reading, with a special passion for George Eliot.¹⁴³

Both women recognized in Charlotte Brontë their own ambivalence between two rival passions: marriage and motherhood versus the intellectual freedom that had long been the lodestar of male autodidacts. They felt trapped between the social conservatism of their own class and the arrogance of middle-class feminists. Ruth explained to Eva

how from my earliest years I have longed to study and learn, how it has been my fairy dream often, and occasionally such dreadful moods overcome me, that I feel fit for no one’s company. I want to read and study, and yet at the same time to be helpful at home, and spare Mother all the work I possibly can, and between the two feelings I am often sorely vexed.¹⁴⁴

On the other hand she felt intimidated by educated women who flaunted their “college connections by calling one person a ‘fool’, and speaking cynically of mankind as a whole.” She quarrelled with a boyfriend over women’s suffrage: “I told him that I could not go on as I have been doing, for I felt the best in me was being starved. I want to live.” Years of reading had made her tired of the squabbling between competing religious sects, and it was Tolstoy’s Resurrection that finally gave her the courage to plow her own furrow: “I must be different, or the best in me will die! This is no idle rhapsody—I would ‘Live’!” When she embraced the modernist “New Theology” of R. J. Campbell, her family nearly “ostracised” her. She astonished her parents (and herself) when she “declared with vehemence that what the revival people had been praying for had come, though not in the way they expected.”¹⁴⁵

With an evangelical zeal freed from the moorings of dogma, Ruth plunged into the post-Victorian “sex question.” She heard lectures on eugenics and women’s diseases and read Auguste Forel’s Sexual Ethics, though she could scarcely bear to glance through The Great Scourge, where Christabel Pankhurst insisted that the vast majority of men were infected with venereal disease. She was intrigued when a woman argued in the avant-garde New Age that the temple prostitutes of the East were a much better arrangement than the “unsanitary” way of ordering these things in the West. She gravitated to Françoise Lafitte and the Freewoman magazine, which agitated for the sexual emancipation of women.¹⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Jude the Obscure, Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli and Ann Veronica, as well as the examples of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot all made Eva think furiously about free love, wavering between acceptance and apprehension. Carpenter’s manifestos for homosexuality plunged the two women into an earnestly muddled discussion: “We wondered whether the great teachers Christ and Buddha belonged to this category, having in themselves the experiences and nature of either sex—then we talked of the procreation of children by the intermediate sex either naturally or by thought and ended in a confusion of ideas, having lost the thread of our discussion.” They had once talked about exploring London disguised as men, and they both experienced a polymorphous erotic fascination with dancers, male and female. Ruth loved Isadora Duncan as a revolutionary. Eva was infatuated with an Indian girl dancer (“Here was dancing expressive of body, mind and soul—my idea of ‘redemption’ exemplified—harmony is unity!”) and fascinated by a performance of Hiawatha where the war dancers appeared to be men, but in fact were “fine athletic women.” She was equally enthralled by an amateur production of The White Boys: “The vigour and activity of the men appealed to me in a most curious way as they fought and leapt—I felt (I think almost for the first time in my life) distinctly attracted by the male body with its squareness, sinew, muscle and vitality. Following upon this came the old heart sickness—the longing for one love and the bearing of children.”¹⁴⁷

In 1909 Peter Pan had an almost Freudian impact on the women’s collective subconscious. “Confused images haunted our dreams,” Ruth noted, “the lissom”—not to mention transvestite—“form of Peter Pan, the crocodile, the pirates and all kinds of things.”¹⁴⁸ In 1913 Eva records her belief in an unconscious childhood sexuality,¹⁴⁹ and a year later Ruth was telling her about the “Origin and Meaning of Taboo.”¹⁵⁰ Possibly they had picked up some of the early reports of Freud’s work to reach England, or perhaps they absorbed these ideas from Havelock Ellis and his circle. The larger point is that a few working women were swept up in the post-Victorian cultural revolution, with all its fervent and unfocused notions about sexuality, and this rush of new ideas was bound up with the kind of passionate individualism that had always driven male autodidacts. “I have felt lately something like a traveller on a voyage of discovery—books have lately been opening up to me new worlds,” Eva told Ruth in 1907. “I believe our hearts and minds are so formed for the infinite that things finite cannot possibly satisfy us.”¹⁵¹ For all her social conscience, Ruth felt that intellectual freedom was more important to the working classes than welfare legislation: “The aim of progress is to make self-realisation—fullness of life—possible to all. … The fundamental thing I believe to be knowledge and education, and until these are open in equal measure to all, as part of humanity’s natural heritage, I believe social legislation to be prejudicial to the individual.”¹⁵² Ruth and Eva could enjoy that kind of emancipation because their educational opportunities, though still limited, were distinctly better than those available to their parents’ generation. They both took evening classes and later attended the Woodbrooke Settlement, a Quaker adult education center near Birmingham. There Ruth studied social philosophy, economics, industrial legislation, comparative religion, education, and anthropology with a feminist spin (“the prevalence of the ‘witch’ in fairy tales is probably a relic of the Matriarchate period”).¹⁵³

Ruth and Eva were still exceptional, but after the First World War there would be a wider working-class audience for sexual science. Marie Stopes’s Married Love, published in 1918, sold more than half a million copies by 1925.¹⁵⁴ Her works, according to Robert Roberts, were beginning to appear in the rubber shops “snuggling between the works of Paul de Kock and Balzac’s Droll Tales.” True, for most workingmen her name “was always good for a mindless guffaw. Yet we had the few journeymen, too, and the odd woman in the mill and sewing shop, who would quietly lend out their own copy of Married Love or Wise Parenthood to anyone genuinely seeking enlightenment.”¹⁵⁵ Gladys Teal’s parents never discussed sex (after all, they were caretakers at a Harrogate Conservative Club) but when Gladys took a job at a draper’s shop around 1930, a female assistant gave her a Marie Stopes book on birth control, which she gratefully read.¹⁵⁶ Houseservant Margaret Powell (b. 1907) was unusually daring: she left Marie Stopes, along with the Kama Sutra and Havelock Ellis, on the bedside table for her husband. (Eventually she was forced to conclude that the books went unread, or at least unheeded.)¹⁵⁷

Dr. Stopes clearly had a large working-class following. Although Married Love and her other books were expensive, she also published articles in John Bull and other popular papers. Literally thousands of readers wrote in response, asking for advice on birth control. Claire Davey has sorted the letters (mostly from 1919–27) into those who responded to Stopes’s books (mainly middle-class) and those who responded to her articles (mainly working-class), and the differences between the two are striking. The book readers were far more likely to use birth control methods that required some education in contraception, such as caps and pessaries, sheaths, and douches. The article readers relied more on traditional and unsophisticated methods: abstinence, abortion, breastfeeding, or no method at all.

The latter group protested that the medical profession was largely responsible for this relative ignorance. When doctors warned working-class women that pregnancy could be dangerous, they usually declined to explain how it could be prevented. (With middle-class patients they were far more forthcoming.) Moreover, article-readers accounted for only 30 percent of Stopes’s correspondents, far less than the proportion of working people in the general population.¹⁵⁸ The working classes, then, not only knew less about contraception: they were more reluctant to ask, and far less likely to receive a straight answer. It was this inequality of information that Stopes’s correspondents resented, even more than economic poverty. One man who could not afford books on contraception wrote, “I don’t begrudge wealth but I do its value of knowledge.” A compositor’s wife, who lived in a lodge on a country estate, feared that the lady of the “big house” might intercept Stopes’s reply: “The rich seem to think a working woman has no right to know anything, at least that has been my own experience.” One desperate mother of three (“My Doctor has warned me that if I have any more he will not be answerable for me, but even he does not tell me what to do”) put it in these terms: the birth control movement was a “fight for common knowledge.”¹⁵⁹

At the same time, there was much hostility to contraception within the working classes. It was one thing to read Dr. Stopes surreptitiously, but it took some courage to walk into the free clinic she opened in Holloway in 1921. The decor was warm and unintimidating, the staff entirely female: nevertheless, an average of only three women a day used it during its first year of operation. When the Malthusian League set up its own clinic later that year near the Elephant and Castle, local people pelted the building with stones and rotten eggs, smashed windows, and defaced the walls with obscene graffiti.¹⁶⁰ “At that time birth control was not a subject of discussion, the women would pass this shop almost with their head lowered in case anyone would think they were interested,” recalled one Camberwell resident.¹⁶¹ “Husbands on learning of their wives visiting Dr. Stopes would in many cases punish their wife with blows, how dare she show him up with his pals, they would taunt him about his virility.”¹⁶²

An emancipated working woman like Elizabeth Ring was free to read the works of Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Bertrand Russell in the late 1920s, but she was familiar with those books only because her schoolteachers had her exchange them at the Finsbury Public Library. And she was clearly an unusual case, the only woman in her office who knew the meaning of the word “orgasm.”¹⁶³ That fact should be borne in mind when we consider the results of early sex surveys. In a 1943–46 study of 100 working-class wives, mostly from London and under age forty, forty-nine reported having orgasms always or frequently, thirty-six infrequently, five never, and ten supplied no information. But as the investigators conceded, many of these women may not have understood the question.¹⁶⁴

Still, some real progress toward mass sexual literacy had been accomplished by the end of the Second World War. That same survey found that contraception had become almost universal among younger working-class couples in London, excepting those who were infertile or planning pregnancies. True, coitus interruptus was still the most popular method, followed by the condom. Yet the investigators felt justified in sounding a note of triumph: “Enlightenment has filtered down to the masses, at any rate in a sophisticated urban area, through the pioneer work of Marie Stopes, through improved education, and—more recently—through public discussion of population problems.”¹⁶⁵

A 1949 national sex survey conducted by Mass Observation confirmed that attitudes had become more liberal in all social strata. It was significant, first of all, that nearly everyone questioned was happy to cooperate. Only 9 percent of the middle class and 17 percent of the working class now completely disapproved of sex education.¹⁶⁶ Yet only 6 percent of the whole sample had learned about sex primarily from schoolteachers, and only 18 percent had received any formal sex education at all: the proportion was lower among the less educated and those over age forty-five. Seventy-one percent now knew the meaning of “birth control,” though only 55 percent of those with an elementary education approved of it, as opposed to 70 percent of those with higher education. The less educated were also somewhat more opposed to divorce, while the middle classes and the highly educated were less likely to think that moral standards were declining. In sex as in literature, the working classes still tended to be conservative. Girls were actually more likely to be told “the facts of life” than boys, perhaps because they had to be warned about menstruation and pregnancy, and it was assumed that boys would pick it up. In fact, “picking it up” was still the main source of sexual knowledge for one out of four respondents. Thirteen percent were taught by other children, 11 percent by mothers, 6 percent each by fathers and workmates, 5 percent “when I got married,” 4 percent in the army. Only 8 percent learned primarily from reading (including the Bible), while for another 12 percent it just “came naturally.”¹⁶⁷ Though this section has focused on sex in print, one should not forget that working people always relied far more on friends, parents, and the street for answers to their questions.

Current Affairs

The low level of working-class sexual literacy is hardly surprising. What may be more remarkable is the lack of knowledge of current affairs, even in a century when the daily newspaper habit became almost universal. C. H. Rolph was in retrospect amazed by the dimness of political consciousness in his family, though they were all great readers. His happiest memories were of the “countless evenings on which five or six of us would be thus absorbed, each with his own book, for two or three hours at a time.” Yet even in that unusually literate working-class parlor, the degree of ignorance was stunning. Only his grandmother had any awareness of politics, and what she knew “seemed mainly to have been absorbed, and was exclusively expressed, in the kind of clichés and catch-phrases with which the Northcliffe Press was newly nourishing a readership that could be satisfied or fobbed off with outlines and jeering witticisms. Mr. Asquith, to my Grandma Hewitt, was ‘Old Wait-and-See.’” In the months leading up to the First World War, Rolph learned shorthand by taking dictation as his father read from the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Referee, and John Bull. That exercise drilled into his head words like the Schlieffen Plan, Entente Cordiale, the Balkans, Triple Alliance, Mesopotamia, Little Englanders, women’s suffrage, tariff reform, passive resistance, Sarajevo, mobilization. Yet there were all meaningless to him and to other boys his age (twelve) because they were scarcely mentioned or explained in school. Instead, Rolph and his family swallowed whole the bumptious politics of Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull:

I knew about the assassination at Sarajevo on 28 June, I knew that the shots were fired by a Serbian student (I even knew his name), I knew that the dead man was called Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and that he was soon to be an Emperor of somewhere. … The newspaper articles and the John Bull rhetoric I was regularly committing to Pitman’s shorthand at the back-parlour table made it seem that the Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor were sub-human monsters intent on either dominating or destroying Europe, while Britain was blessed with far-sighted statesmen who could see the horrors that would attend any great war in the twentieth century and were determined to find “peaceful solutions.” But the idea of a solution suggested that there must be a problem, and I could never understand what problems they were trying to find peaceful solutions to. If the problem was really one of “naked aggression” (I can see the Pitman’s outline for that now), I didn’t see how that could be peacefully solved. And I didn’t know anyone to ask.¹⁶⁸

In Camberwell the newspaper more commonly served as a tablecloth. “The information on its pages was seldom read,” according to a bus conductor’s son, “most parents could not read, and the general news meant nothing to those who had nothing, even the paper was not of course bought, it was found.”¹⁶⁹ Aubrey Hicks (b. 1900) offers an illustration of how little world news reached even the best-informed workers. His father, a painter on the Rothschild estate at Waddesdon, had attended night school and read widely, and unlike most of his neighbors he took in a quality newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. Young Aubrey read it avidly, and took advantage of the reading room Lord Rothschild provided for his employees. Of course he was most interested in cricket scores. The Wright Brothers’ first flight, the 1910 London–Paris air race, the Titanic, Dr. Crippen, Lloyd George’s National Health Insurance Scheme, the assassination of the Portuguese royal family, the tragic death of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison—all these made some impression. But in the midst of those sensational events, he only had the vaguest recollection of reading something about Sir Edward Grey’s diplomacy.¹⁷⁰

And Hicks was far more knowledgeable than the average rural reader. Labour politician Harry Snell (b. 1865) recalled that, as a young farm laborer in a Nottinghamshire village, he never saw a book and “never heard any one mention the names of Lincoln, Wilberforce, or Lloyd Garrison.”¹⁷¹ In Surrey George Bourne’s gardener, who never read books or newspapers, first heard of the American Civil War some thirty years after Appomattox, when he learned that a relative was collecting a widow’s pension for her husband, who had fought and died in the conflict.¹⁷² Even in 1900, the Suffolk village of Langham only received one newspaper per week: the owner would read it on a street corner to his neighbors before Sunday dinner, and that one copy would supply conversation for the rest of the week.¹⁷³ The diary of one Cornish farmer, typically, is concerned mostly with religious reading and activities between 1892 and 1912. Only occasionally did he notice current events: the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese conflict, the 1912 coal strike and a hard winter for the poor in London, a local lecture on Irish Home Rule, the death of Queen Victoria and the Titanic disaster.¹⁷⁴ “I don’t remember ever seeing or reading a newspaper during my school days,” wrote W. J. Paddock (b. 1898), who was raised by a Hampshire sawmill worker. “It must have been two weeks before I heard of the sinking of the Titanic. Our teacher, Miss Jerrett, would bring the monthly illustrated magazine to school and that’s how we got the news. I remember seeing pictures and reading about the Balkan War and I thought what funny hats they wore.”¹⁷⁵

As late as 1937 Roger Dataller, ex-collier and WEA tutor in South Yorkshire, reported that

it is possible to converse with alarming numbers of working people without ever hearing the slightest mention of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Some years ago, when European affairs had reached a stage of great economic tension, I made the practical experiment of noting during a given term of days such comment as was made in the course of general conversation. It was negligible, and it confirmed the feeling that the “masses” (like sailors) simply do not care.¹⁷⁶

Yet even as Dataller wrote, the impending world crisis was beginning to break through that barrier of inattention. In January 1938 the BBC found that 60 percent of working-class listeners regularly tuned into the 6 p.m. newscast, compared with 54 percent of middle-class listeners.¹⁷⁷ In March 1942 Mass Observation reported that at least the upper working classes did not lag too far behind the middle class in their ability to name government ministers:

Table 6.4: Ability to Identify Cabinet Members, 1942 (in percent)178
	Middle	Upper Working	Lower Working
Chancellor of the Exchequer (Kingsley Wood)	60	40	22
First Lord of the Admiralty	59	50	33
Minister of War	32	13	14
Lord Privy Seal	36	13	14
Minister of Labour (Ernest Bevin)	86	73	66
Minister of Food	89	82	72
Minister of Information	41	29	16

During the Second World War, the Army Bureau of Current Affairs was set up to correct these deficits, offering the troops lectures and discussion on political issues. Early reports in 1941 found much boredom, ignorance, lazy cynicism, and resistance in the ranks to ABCA activities. While most armed forces units had libraries, they consisted mainly of thrillers and Westerns, and very little serious reading was accomplished.¹⁷⁹ One Royal Tank Corps officer who organized a discussion circle in his unit found “Men who were vague about the whereabouts of Poland (this is no exaggeration), who did not know the difference between Dominion and Colonial status, who had never heard of the Low Countries, who were uninstructed in the elementary workings of Parliament and who were wholly ignorant of the meaning of Local Government.” As the war progressed, however, soldiers became more receptive. Surveys in 1943 and 1944 found that ABCA activities were being carried on regularly in at least 60 percent of home units, irregularly in another 10 to 24 percent; among North African units the figures were 30 percent and 45 percent. Though soldiers rarely mentioned educational activities in letters, when they did the comments were nearly always positive. One survey of 8,500 service men and women found 78 percent interested in the discussions, with 17 percent indifferent and only 5 percent bored. Of another 5,000 soliders in transit camps and convalescent depots, fully 83 percent said they would still attend ABCA sessions if they were voluntary.¹⁸⁰

The Right to Language

The ABCA and BBC newscasts made political discourse intelligible to the undereducated, something that “quality” newspapers, weekly reviews, and most statesmen had failed to do. Even Herbert Morrison, the populist Labour politician and former shop-assistant, was liable to talk over the heads of his listeners without realizing it. After he delivered a speech in Lancashire in 1939, an audience survey found that it contained more than fifty words not generally understood by those who had left school at fourteen. In fact, of every hundred words spoken, three were unintelligible and seven ambiguous. One local Labour Party activist was baffled by “conceive”, “demeaning”, “emancipation”, “issues”, “lineal”, “deflected”, “evolution”, “integral”, “pliant”, “suppliant”, and “fundamental”.¹⁸¹

Had these words been spoken by a Conservative, they would have aroused much more resentment. Vocabulary was a class barrier, and this particular form of cultural illiteracy effectively cut off the less educated from the political arena. For as long as writing has existed, the literate classes have attempted to preserve a closed shop through exclusionary languages. In ancient Mesopotamia scribes were a privileged and exclusive caste, and they commonly concluded cuneiform tablets with the epigram “Let the wise instruct the wise, for the ignorant may not see.”¹⁸² Granted, not all sophisticated vocabularies represent conspiracies of the learned. Some concepts simply cannot be adequately framed in basic English, a point driven home by George Orwell’s Newspeak, and the example of Herbert Morrison shows that even a loyal son of the proletariat could inadvertently talk above his audience. Nevertheless, Latin tags, professional vocabularies, and postmodernist jargon have all been used in turn as forms of encryption, permitting communication among elites while shutting out everyone else.

Since the Lollards, the working classes had seen through this game. The seventeenth-century waterman-poet John Taylor had read More’s Utopia, Plato’s Republic, Montaigne, and Cervantes in translation, but he never mastered a foreign language and he relentlessly satirized latinate prose:

I ne’er used Accidence so much as now,

Nor all these Latin words here interlaced,

I do not know if they with sense are placed,

I in the book did find them.

Taylor once offered to give lessons in a concocted “Utopian” language, and he spoofed the pretensions of scholarly apparatus by interlarding his work with bogus references, fake bibliographies, and citations from “Books which I never read.” The value of any commodity can be inflated by creating an artificial scarcity, and Taylor recognized that jargon could enhance the prestige of literature by rendering it less accessible to a mass audience:

Yet I with Non-sense could contingerate,

And catophiscoes terragrophiocate,

And make myself admired immediately,

Of such as understand no more than I.¹⁸³

Henry Mayhew found that Victorian costermongers reacted negatively to any use of foreign words—even a reference in one of Edward Lloyd’s papers to noblesse.¹⁸⁴ When Leicester Chartist Thomas Cooper set out to master Greek he aroused intense suspicion among his neighbors. Even his shift from the Lincolnshire dialect to standard educated English made them uneasy: “To hear a youth in mean clothing, sitting at the shoemaker’s stall, pursuing one of the lowliest callings, speak in what seemed to some of them almost a foreign dialect, raised positive anger and scorn in some, and amazement in others. Who was I, that I should sit on the cobbler’s stall, and ‘talk fine’! They could not understand it.”¹⁸⁵

In the nineteenth century, working-class participation in botanical research had been made possible by the Linnaean system of classification, which was relatively easy to master. In place of a confusing welter of local names for plants, it offered a common language for gentlemen and artisan botanists. Gardener James Lee had published a cheap guide to the system as early as 1760, and that knowledge was constantly expanded and reinforced at the meetings of local botanical societies, where specimens were brought in and identified. William Withering’s Botanical Arrangement (1776) and William Jackson Hooker’s Muscologia Britannica (1818) were written in accessible English, because the authors depended so heavily on the contributions of plebeian naturalists. Even when experts conceded that Antoine Laurent de Jussieu had developed a better mode of classification, they often stuck to the Linnaean system for that reason. As Hooker protested in 1846, to change the vernacular of botany would only “increase the difficulty … & you cannot render the study popular.” Linnaeus had created a “universal language,” proclaimed Edward Forbes, professor of botany at King’s College London, in 1843. An “easy means of acquiring and arranging information is a great help to the workmen of science, and no department has gained more thereby than botany.”¹⁸⁶

By the twentieth century, university-trained professionals had taken over the business of science. In their laboratories and their private scientific languages, there was no place for either genteel or proletarian amateurs. In adult education, science became increasingly difficult to “popularize”: a zoology lecturer in the 1920s advised against the use of Greek and Latin in botany courses.¹⁸⁷ The same stumbling block could arise in the pursuit of philosophy. One Kimbolton tailor dedicated himself to studying Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, but could not understand why they resorted to indecipherable words like “idea,” “essence,” and “categorical imperative.”¹⁸⁸ Adult educators in rural areas had to be even more careful with language. In 1931 a couple who had taught in Devonshire warned that

the very nature of modern life tends to create forms of expression uncongenial to the countrymen’s rhythm of thought. The extent and complexity of modern expert knowledge forces the objective thinker to modify, qualify, relate this to that idea to avoid dogmatic assertion; subjectively, the artist’s style is often allusive, staccato, built up, like the kindred modern arts, out of new rhythmic clashes, and disharmonies. Much modern expression of modern ideas is as incomprehensible to the countryman as D. H. Lawrence might be to Sir Thomas Malory.

One had to avoid the vocabulary and issues surrounding modern industrialism, which dominated urban WEA courses. Though rural counties certainly had their share of substandard housing, the word “slum” was meaningless here. Unfamiliar with the conventions of modern drama, country people responded well to amateur productions of medieval miracle plays, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, even Riders to the Sea, “but to attempt Sheridan or Shaw or Coward would be disastrous from the outset because these write in an idiom which is entirely foreign to their mode of thinking. Verbal wit, abstract idea, symbolize an idiom of thought that expresses itself in an entirely different key from their own.”¹⁸⁹

For generations, self-taught authors had resorted to William Cobbett’s Grammar of the English Language, which laid down rules for writing basic, crystalline English. Anticipating Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” Cobbett warned his readers away from classical allusions or quotations, arguing that “what are called the learned languages, operate as a bar to the acquirement of real learning.”¹⁹⁰ He was admired for just that reason by a host of proletarian authors and politicians, from John Clare to J. R. Clynes.¹⁹¹ “If any don has beaten that book as an exposition of English I have yet to see his work,” testified best-selling novelist Howard Spring.¹⁹² In his own style guide, Robert Blatchford advised readers to buy a 2s. Cobbett and to model their prose on English literature that stuck closest to “the plainest Saxon”: the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare, Milton, and William Morris.¹⁹³

Blatchford’s accessibility made him, of all the socialist propagandists, the most successful in reaching a mass working-class audience. If T. A. Jackson was more engaging than most Marxist critics, it was partly because he modeled his style on Blatchford.¹⁹⁴ “Blatchford was no orator,” wrote Labour MP Manny Shinwell, “but his language was simple, clear-cut, easily understood and for a person like myself, with limited education, more likely to be of value in forming ideas than the writings and speeches of some of the Labour politicians of the period.” This was a testimonial from one of the most accomplished autodidacts of the twentieth century. In the public library he doggedly tackled volumes “whose contents I usually failed to understand”: Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, Herbert Spencer’s Sociology, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Shinwell’s whole intellectual career was an exciting but laborious exercise in decoding. All his life he used a dictionary to correct his pronunciation. The future Minister of Fuel and Power even faulted plain-spoken Keir Hardie for his “somewhat prosy, economic jargon.” From the moment he entered Parliament in 1922, Shinwell was painfully conscious of this language barrier. It was not a matter of being intimidated by Eton and Harrow men:

Having seen and heard them I was consoled, at any rate for a time, for my lack of education. Yet it must be made clear that the lack of a sound education, the struggle to acquire knowledge, the need to be able to understand the meaning of every paragraph one reads in a book or periodical, created an inhibition which I suffer even to this day [at age ninety-six]. Two years of schooling in London, nine months in South Shields, a year and a half in Glasgow and leaving school before the age of twelve, and then what? Reading, much of which I failed to understand, without guidance or advice, maybe unconscious of ignorance; just forcing one’s way through the jungle, the hustle, bustle and rivalry of political life, yet throughout it all seeking to retain the characteristic to which I attach most importance, that of being independent—all of these impediments could have been avoided.¹⁹⁵

Which of the early Labour MPs did not feel that sting? Those Latin quotations sprinkled through parliamentary debates sent J. H. Thomas to the House of Commons Library to look them up. “It was a tremendous handicap,” one that impressed him with “the supreme value of education. Critics, cartoonists and others have made much capital of my shortcomings in this respect; although I have accepted it all with philosophy, the hurt has been there all the same.”¹⁹⁶ Will Crooks was a passionate fan of Homer in translation, but when Arthur Balfour used a Latin tag on the floor of the House of Commons (as prime ministers are wont to do) Crooks sharply reminded him that some of those present had not had the privilege of a classical education.¹⁹⁷

Farm boy Richard Hillyer (b. c. 1900) was a rare example of a classical autodidact, who acquired some Latin from old textbooks found in a junkshop. It helped that the previous owner had scribbled translations between the lines, and an abridged Roman history text provided enough context to make the pursuit interesting. But the real motive was a desire to break the code, to gain access to privileged information:

There was the satisfaction of solving a puzzle, as meaning began to emerge from the chaos of unknown words. But there was more than that. Latin gave me self respect. Plodding my way through this noble old language, feeling that I was breaking into a secret which brought distinction to those who possessed it; and that I was doing this without the help or even knowledge of others, kindled a pride that was very good for me just then. Where it would lead to, or if it would lead anywhere, I could not tell. What earthly use Latin would be to a farm labourer it was impossible to see .…

In fact it led to a scholarship at Durham University.¹⁹⁸ On the other hand, as Marjory Todd noted, the mastery of any foreign language marked the point when a scholarship pupil would irreversibly leave his parents behind:

… soon after he went to his grammar school he was “showing off” at the table. He said that sugar and bread in French would be masculine things but others might be feminine. His father, who up to this point had been his absolute authority on everything, told him this was nonsense, and he felt for the first time that they would henceforth drift apart. His French teacher he knew was right; his father disagreed with his teacher; both could not be right.¹⁹⁹

Language did not prove to be a difficult barrier for the children of Jewish immigrants who escaped the Czarist empire between 1881 and 1914. The gentile manager of three predominantly Jewish East London elementary schools reported that “The keenness of those Hebrew parents for the education of their offspring was astounding. No Jewish child ever gave our attendance officer any trouble; none made any demand on our local organization for the feeding and supplying of boots and warm clothing to East End school-children.”²⁰⁰ The immigrants, mainly skilled and semiskilled urban workers, already enjoyed high levels of literacy in Yiddish and/or other Eastern European languages. Many of them were socialist or anarchist intellectuals, eager to wean Jewish workers away from their rabbis and educate them into a common secular culture shared by the international proletariat.²⁰¹

By the 1920s, the Jewish East End was an intellectual hotbed. Harry Blacker (b. 1910), the son of a Russian immigrant cabinetmaker, admitted that artistic tastes generally ran to Edwin Landseer on the milkman’s calendar and sentimental Pre-Raphaelite reproductions, but some ghetto children became artists, thanks to classes available at local institutes. A number won university scholarships, not surprising in an environment where education was encouraged, teachers were highly respected, and the kitchen table was cleared for homework. Blacker had access to a good local reference library and “a wonderful selection of books and magazines” owned by his uncle, a printer. Landsmen’s clubs offered political speakers as well as lectures on Yiddish poetry and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While immigrants attended the raucous and sentimental Yiddish theater, their children, who had been exposed to the great English dramatists in school, ventured out to the West End to see Shakespeare, Shaw, O’Neill, and O’Casey. Blacker discovered Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert at Workers’ Circle concerts. Once his family acquired a radio, “Great international pianists became household words and my father called Heifetz by his first name.”²⁰²

The parents of playwright Arnold Wesker (b. 1932) were both immigrants, tailor’s machinists, Communists, and culturally Jewish atheists. Wesker admitted he was “a very bad student,” but his parents provided an environment of

constant ideological discussion at home, argument and disputation all the time. … All this affected my parents’ attitude to study. It wasn’t ever a question of, “Now you must study,” and “Education is a good thing because it is necessary to be a lawyer and get on,” but it was the common currency of day-to-day living that ideas were discussed around the table, and it was taken for granted that there were books in the house and that we would read.

The books mostly had a leftward political slant (Tolstoy, Gorky, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis) but Wesker soon reached out to Balzac, Maupassant, and a broader range of literature.²⁰³

That second generation assimilated with breathtaking speed and thoroughness: Harold Laski, Selig Brodetsky, Lewis Namier, and Jacob Epstein were among the many immigrants’ children who moved into the mainstream of British intellectual life. While his widowed mother (who had studied medicine in Russia) worked a market stall, Ralph Finn (b. 1912) scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at the Davenant Foundation School: “When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremendous heritage of English language and literature.” And Finn never doubted that it was his heritage: “My friends and companions, Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rossettis. All as alive to me as though they had been members of my family.” After all, as he was surprised and proud to discover, F. T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish.²⁰⁴

Language and cultural barriers could be more difficult for another group of immigrants, though they were born within the United Kingdom and generally spoke English. Bill Naughton (b. 1910), who created the proletarian unhero Alfie (1966), grew up in Lancashire among Irish colliers, whose attitude toward education was very different from East End Jews. “Ambition of any kind was suspect amongst my boyhood street-corner pals: the thing was, you knew what you were, and you left it at that, so that folk knew where they were with you,” he remembered. “You didn’t welcome anybody who began chopping and changing, or who wanted to improve himself; others were made to feel even worse by such capers.” When he repeatedly scored at the top of the class in examinations, his mother uneasily suggested that he allow someone else to take first place next time. There was

an almost inborn impression of belonging to the ignorant, the poor, and the uneducated—the ones who had nothing to give to the world but the labour of their two hands, and the best thing to do was not to expose yourself to ridicule by writing, but to conceal yourself and your thoughts—keep your mouth shut, stick to your job, and leave writing and the running of the world to your superiors and those in authority above you.

When it became known that Naughton had literary aspirations, an old coalbagger warned him “tha’ll never make a writer as long as tha has a hole in thy arse,” pausing for the words to take effect. “I’m afraid tha’rt like us all, tha’s never been eddicated to it or to usin’ thy mind. That’s where they have the workin’ man beat. There’s no harm in having a try, I suppose, but I understand that them as has had a university eddication have a job to master the art of writing. If I were thee, lad, I’d keep to coal.”

Naughton concealed his literary work as best he could. He went to bed immediately after coming home from work and got up at 11:30 p.m. to begin writing. Without a room of one’s own, “it wasn’t easy,” he recalled. “There is almost no privacy in working-class life, and any change in routine arouses suspicion.” Under those pressures, he found writing far more stressful and exhausting than manual labor. “The sight of the rows of little lettered keys on the typewriter tended to make me feel dizzy or at times faintly sick. Just as I enjoyed the familiar feel of the big coal shovel … so I disliked the sight of those keys. … I often thought, thank God none of my mates can see me.” Naughton had a circle of intellectual friends, all unemployed workers,

But we couldn’t discuss much. It was difficult for us to formulate in our own words the ideas we had understood. I remember one youth … who used to console himself after losing a game of billiards by quoting Bishop Berkeley. He used to prove in words that the game had been all imaginary, that billiard balls as such did not exist, and that even the money he was paying out was not what we thought it was.

If they did acquire the necessary language, the educated classes were likely to be unappreciative. When Naughton applied for conscientious objector status during the Second World War, the tribunal chairman found him suspiciously literate: “Where did you pick up that word ‘background’? … That word … is not one a lorry driver would use.” “I couldn’t help feeling hurt,” Naughton recalled, “that they should deny one the right to use the English language.” That hit both ethnic and class nerves: he had been born in County Mayo, of peasant stock. At any rate, he was using the language to read Locke, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Marx, and The Faerie Queene. They were not easy to decipher at first, but as he pieced together an understanding of what he was reading, he became more critical and less deferential, more inclined to see individuals where others saw only “the masses”:

After reading some few hundred pages of anthropology, and being supposed to have some comprehensive picture of a strange tribe among whom the author had lived for a couple of years, I would think: “Curious, he seems to know everything about these people, but if I write about these people I have always lived among I find they are almost every one different. And even as a whole, I don’t actually know very much about them. Each single home I visit is unlike the rest. Even my wife, whom I have known, slept beside, eaten and lived with, watched and wondered about, I dare not speak of her with as much authority as he speaks of these whole peoples.” I’m afraid this took some time—realising that writers and philosophers were ordinary people.

Once he had grasped that, however, he could see that the literary anthropologists who went snooping around his own community were equally fallible. “Almost every portrayal of working-class life and people that I read was a travesty. No wonder the different classes had such absurd notions of how one another lived. I felt it was my personal obligation to rectify this disparity, so far as possible.”²⁰⁵

The Most Unlikely People Buy Books Now

Once public libraries and cheap classics were widely available, motivated working people were able to narrow the cultural gap separating them from the educated classes, at least in the realm of literature. By the 1930s and 1940s, a large personal library was no longer a rarity in the slums. Rose Gamble, the daughter of a cleaning woman and an irregularly employed seaman, remembered that her sister acquired and read secondhand penny volumes of Conrad, Wodehouse, Eric Linklater, Jeffery Farnol, Edgar Wallace, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Arnold Bennett, R. L. Stevenson, and John Buchan.²⁰⁶ The family of one Soho dustman had, by 1930, accumulated 750 volumes, largely from a secondhand stall beneath their window.²⁰⁷ A 1932–33 survey of a mainly working-class London neighborhood within a one-mile radius of the Mary Ward Settlement found that only 6 percent of households possessed fewer than six books, while 23 percent had more than a hundred.²⁰⁸ (A century earlier, in the poor sections of Bristol, only 57 percent of families had Bibles or prayer books, and 27 percent had no books at all.)²⁰⁹ A 1944 survey found that nearly two-thirds of skilled workers and almost half of all unskilled workers grew up in homes with substantial libraries, and that many working-class parents of the previous generation had encouraged reading:

Table 6.5A: Reading in Parents’ Home, 1944 (in percent)210
	Middle Class	Upper Working Class	Lower Working Class
How many books were in your parents’ home?
Many	87	63	42
Few	12	35	54
Other and vague	1	2	4
Did your parents encourage reading?
Yes	63	48	38
No	31	45	58
Other and vague	6	7	4

Only a fifth of the current generation of parents in the lower working class (and none in the middle class) said they discouraged reading. The time spent reading books clearly declined with income, but was still fairly substantial even in the lower working class, and there was little class difference in the time devoted to newspapers and magazines:

Table 6.5B: Average Hours Per Week Spent Reading, 1944
	Middle Class	Upper Working Class	Lower Working Class
Books	8.7	5.0	3.1
Newspapers	4.3	4.0	3.8
Magazines	1.1	1.0	0.9

To get a sense of which books were being read, one can turn to a 1940 survey of pupils (634 boys, 611 girls) at what were called Senior, Central, Intermediate, Modern, or Area schools, where education terminated at age fourteen. This cohort, represented something less than the working-class average: the best pupils had already been skimmed off and sent to grammar schools on scholarship.²¹¹ The remaining students were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding those required at school. These figures, then, must be multiplied by twelve to arrive at the number of readers over the past year. Of course, if the pupils had been asked whether they had ever read these titles, the numbers would have been larger still. Though there was a large demand for Edgar Wallace and Edgar Rice Burroughs, some of the most popular books were classics:

Table 6.6: Books Read by Senior School Pupils, 1940
		Boys (N = 634)	Girls (N = 611)
	Arabian Nights	10	11
	The Bible	2	19
Blackmore	Lorna Doone	9	12
Brontë, C.	Jane Eyre	0	11
Bunyan	Pilgrim's Progress	7	7
Carroll	Alice in Wonderland	6	23
Defoe	Robinson Crusoe	33	11
Dickens	A Christmas Carol	28	31
	David Copperfield	18	29
	Nicholas Nickleby	4	5
	The Old Curiosity Shop	2	31
	Oliver Twist	22	45
	The Pickwick Papers	5	7
	A Tale of Two Cities	11	19
Eliot	The Mill on the Floss	0	8
Grahame	The Wind in the Willows	1	10
Hughes	Tom Brown's School Days	27	12
Kingsley	The Water Babies	5	25
	Westward Ho!	7	1
Stevenson	Kidnapped	4	6
	Treasure Island	62	18
Stowe	Uncle Tom's Cabin	1	22
Swift	Gulliver's Travels	13	27
Twain	Tom Sawyer	10	5

Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls read at least some poetry outside of school: some favorites were Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, and Newbolt among the boys, Blake, Browning, de la Mare, Longfellow, Masefield, Tennyson and Wordsworth among the girls.²¹² Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of boys read plays outside of school, with Shakespeare accounting for 23 percent of the plays mentioned by girls and 32 percent of the boys’ choices.²¹³ Out of school and in schooltime private reading periods, boys read about six books per month and girls just over seven.²¹⁴

In 1940 light fiction was still the staple at the public library in working-class Fulham, but the men were also borrowing Huxley’s Antic Hay, Zola’s The Downfall, Kipling’s Limits and Renewals, and Les Misérables; the women, Sense and Sensibility and The Story of an African Farm.²¹⁵ By 1944 Dickens, Hardy, and Jane Austen were the second, third, and fourth most popular novelists at the Bristol public libraries.²¹⁶ In February 1940 a Gallup poll found that 62 percent of adults were currently reading a book, settling back to 51 percent a year later and 45 percent in 1946–47. A wartime surge in working-class demand was reported to Mass Observation by London librarians and booksellers in 1943–44:

There are a great many more of the younger working class people to be seen now, taking an interest in books. I notice them everywhere I go. But a lot of them want the classics, and nearly everything is out of print. I think there never was a time when there was so much obvious hunger for books, and so few books to satisfy it. (British Museum Reading Room)

There’s quite a new interest in books on the part of the less educated section of the community,—factory hands and so on. I suppose it must be the blackout that has made them take to reading. We certainly get a lot of young people in, that you can see are quite unused to bookshops and feel rather awkward at first. We’ve had dozens of new customers among young people earning good wages in factories and so on, who come in regularly and do a suprising amount of buying. (Victoria bookshop)

I should say that there have been big changes in the trade since the war .… There are two quite new classes who are buying books; the people who have been making money out of the war and who are really quite ignorant about books, and the factory workers. We get a lot of mechanics in here, constantly buying books. It’s partly that they don’t cost [ration] coupons. But I think there’s a genuine desire for what one might call culture, on the part of these mechanics. They don’t buy technical books only, by any means. Some of them buy poetry, some of them buy the classics when they can get them, and quite a number buy books on painting and on different painters. Books on Cézanne or Gauguin or other painters that aren’t too modern,—these mechanics buy all those. That’s one reason for the book shortage, these new types of people all buying books. (SW1 bookshop)

The factory workers up there are all going mad on buying books, and there’s the ARP and the demolition squads quite near, and they buy books too. (SW3)

Quite a different type of person is buying books now from the ones that bought books before the war. They still do, of course, but the big extension is among people who aren’t used to buying books. You can tell that from all the letters and enquiries we get from people in the provinces. Some of them are factory workers, some of them have obviously made money during the war, and you can tell from the style of their letters that they don’t know much about buying books, it’s quite new to them. I can’t give you figures, of course, but I can assure you that we’re selling large numbers of books to people who before the war would have been the non-book buying public. (Bloomsbury bookshop)

The most unlikely people buy books now .… We’ve extended sales tremendously among the working classes. Just to give you a typical example: there’s a parcel here, we’re sending off to a factory hand in the Midlands. He used to write and ask for a book occasionally. Now he sends us a pound a week, regularly, and we send him books. Most of them are technical books, but not all. That’s fifty-two pounds a year on books; we like people like that. I should say that the skilled worker has been buying more books since the war than he ever saw in all his life before. (WC1 bookshop)

As to people reading more, well, I should say that large numbers of people who hardly read at all before the war are reading regularly now. It’s partly the black-out and the fact that they have to make their own amusements. But it’s a direct result of the war, too. People’s curiosity has been awakened,—they want to read and find out a few facts for themselves,—they want to understand the world better, and so they’ve started to read. (Chief librarian, SW)

When Mass Observation asked why they read, practically the same proportion in all classes (38 or 39 percent) said “knowledge,” though among the working classes it was still usually young men who gave this answer, not often women.²¹⁷ Big employers like the International Chemical Company responded to the wartime culture boom by offering its workers lecture series on company time. Coping with severe labor shortages, the corporation felt that these perks helped to recruit and retain good employees.²¹⁸ Meanwhile, CEMA was bringing classic theater to the proletariat. “Never had we heard such music in the human voice,” one Durham miner’s daughter recalled.

Miners and their wives sat entranced, with little smiles on their listening faces, while the Shakespearean cadences whispered and roared over them. It was a unanimous verdict that the experience was better than the pictures. Even the older miners, who had in their youth walked miles to attend the live theatre to see real actors in melodramas like Murder in the Red Barn, and therefore had standards of comparison other than those of us who had been fed on celluloid pap, added the weight of their approval to the general verdict.²¹⁹

In the words of P. C. Vigor, a worker at Vauxhall Motors, that was “How Culture Nearly Came to the Masses.” This surge of artistic ferment gained impetus from the general optimism created by the 1942 Beveridge Report and the 1945 Labour landslide. “More than this promised security, there seemed an undercurrent of something more: a fuller life based on the practise of and the appreciation of Further Education and ART in all its forms,” Vigor wrote. After the war many companies sponsored cultural programs designed to make their employees “rounded citizens who were interested in other subjects than sex, strong drink, cowboys and football.” You may detect a dash of lemon in that last sentence: as a WEA student, Vigor was amused by the presumption that workers enjoyed no higher pursuits and had to be spoon-fed culture. All the same, he admitted,

One of my friends at the time often affirmed that, although his job consisted of throwing white hot rivets to a rivetter working on a truck chassis, his intellectual field widened at the opportunity of being able to listen free to such speakers as Dr. Joad, Lord Lucas and the educationalist Dr. Livingstone, in the works canteen.

He joined the theatrical section of the recreation club, the debating section and the art section. At an exhibition one of his pictures was accepted. It hung in the works canteen and showed blue grass, mauve trees and purple sheep and cows under a pinkish sky. It was commended by the eminent Sunday Times critic, Mr. Eric Newton .…

At one period nearly everybody went on a course of some sort or other. I … enjoyed week-ends in colleges at Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham and in other cities and boast to acquaintances of my experiences at “my” university. … There was talk of hanging copies of masterpieces on the [factory] walls, but although this became a feature in many offices as a counterblast to the usual pin-ups of Betty Grable and thrilling calendars, it never took off.

Even if it did not displace calendar girls, the “Art for the People” movement clearly “sprang from the grass roots,” Vigor asserted: “Ordinary folk wanted it.” The Vauxhall canteen was decorated with murals and hosted concerts. “For one shilling to hear the London Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult or Basil Cameron and other international conductors was wonderful.” The experience transformed Vigor from a self-described “philistine, and musical pariah” into a music lover who helped organize local concerts in Luton.²²⁰

In his postwar sociological surveys, Ferdynand Zweig estimated that 20 to 25 percent of workingmen could be considered self-educated, much the same proportion that Arnold Freeman arrived at thirty years earlier. His case studies included a blacksmith who enjoyed H. G. Wells, travel books, and films like Caesar and Cleopatra and Jane Eyre; two sailors who were fans of Joseph Conrad; a gasfitter who bought 5s. seats for the Albert Hall, and particularly liked Strauss, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and La Bohème; a fitter and turner who read biographies, autobiographies, and philosophers like Marcus Aurelius; a retired electrician who almost daily attended lectures at the South Kensington Science Museum; a public park sweeper who read Dumas, Dickens, and Jack London. In a pub Zweig overheard two hotel kitchen workers debate whether religious faith and morals are innate or socially conditioned, and why God permits human suffering. When Zweig asked his subjects “What in your view is the greatest factor in workers’ progress and betterment?” the answer “invariably” was “Education,” though different respondents variously emphasized vocational, liberal, political, or moral education.²²¹

Thanks largely to the postwar expansion of secondary and higher education, cultural literacy continued to improve. When Zweig returned in the late 1950s to survey workingmen, he found roughly 40 percent recognition of Marx and Einstein, 35 percent for Darwin, 25 percent for Tolstoy, 17 percent for Freud, and more than 90 percent for Dickens, Shaw, and Wells. (Working-class women still scored much lower.) Surely the BBC deserves some credit for the fact that practically all the men recognized Mozart and Chopin.²²² A 1975 poll found that Shakespeare was correctly identified by 92 percent, Beethoven 91 percent, Columbus 87 percent, Napoleon 86 percent, Karl Marx 59 percent, Rubens 56 percent, Freud 54 percent, Tolstoy 45 percent, Raphael 41 percent, Whistler 35 percent, Aristotle 33 percent, and 68 percent for the date 1066.²²³ The contrast with Sheffield in 1918 is striking, even allowing for the fact that the 1975 survey was not limited to the working classes. In current debates over cultural literacy, it would be a serious error to look for any golden age in the past. The WEA and Everyman’s Library did noble work, but only for a motivated minority: Britain really is better off with the Open University and Penguins in every airport bookstall. The question that still confronts us is whether this vast cultural wealth is fairly shared among all, in inner city schools as well as those that serve the affluent. In that sense, E. D. Hirsch is entirely right to criticize the maldistribution of knowledge in contemporary America. When he argues that democracy and equality are impossible without mass cultural literacy, he is only saying what generations of British working people knew in their bones.