The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose

The working classes seemed to be catching up. The classics came in its reach in series of cheap editions. It encompassed about 25% of the working population. The highpoint of autodidact culture and the mutual help societies was in the years leading up to the first world war. As teaching materials were out of date, being an autodidact continued to make sense. In historiography schools often have been put down, but many children liked their heated and clean school buildings, a far cry from conditions at home. The Education Act of 1870 was followed by universal compulsory education. In clubs and production sites workers discussed often amazingly sophisticated literature, even when they also read what we now would call pulp fiction. From about the middle of the nineteenth century mutual help became the norm. First they had to develop an understanding of literary conventions, like the distinction between a factual and a fictional account. Initially, individual workers, often wretchedly poor, had to make do with religious tracts, old newspapers and second hand books. The urge to read literature did not come from the invisible hand of the market, from the pressure of government or even from education, but from the urge of working people themselves to understand where they stood in the world, and, most importantly, to become an individual. It transforms our understanding of a driving force behind intellectual history. It is a historians’ history, packed with information and references.

Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes uses much autobiographical material to tell us how the workers experienced their quest into written knowledge, roughly from 1760 to 1960. One of the first countries where this took place was Great Britain. The spread of literacy to the masses is arguably the most far reaching cultural change of the last two centuries. THE WORKING CLASSES DROVE THEIR OWN INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT Yale University Press, New haven and London, 2010 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose