The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by Jonathan Rose

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,
by Jonathan Rose;
Yale University Press, 2003, US$23.

The working class—steeped in darkness, ignorance and bad taste—or downtrodden nobility? A bit of both, according to this book, an astonishingly detailed survey of British working-class literary and educational ways over 250 or more years, principally based on the reading attainment and tastes and to some extent politics of industrial, agricultural and mining manual workers as revealed through a host of reminiscences and records.
There are no great surprises, but the book will be of little comfort to Marxists and postmodernists. It shows a generally conservative taste in “good” literature—as well as of course the usual—and increasingly “promiscuous”—preference at the same time for popular crime, romance and the like. There was also much Christian influence and support for moderate Labour and unionism.
But how many of the workers had intellectual tastes? This is always a difficult question, but fortunately a respectably constructed survey of 816 adult manual workers in the industrial city of Sheffield in 1918 gives us a good idea of how things stood just as Britain’s native working class was beginning its long decline to minority status, with a rapid increase in secondary education and white-collar work beginning.
The Sheffield investigators judged 20 to 26 per cent to be intellectually “well equipped”, 63 to 73 per cent “inadequately equipped” and 5 to 8 per cent “mal-equipped”. With the “well-equipped” minority: “A worker in this class would read good literature; have an active and well-informed interest in politics; be keen on Trade Union, Cooperative Society, Church or Socialist Club; live in a really pleasant home; have elevated ‘root’ desires; make a good Tutorial Class Student or WEA [Workers Educational Association] worker.”
The survey, however, “revealed a striking ignorance of working class history. Only two respondents correctly identified Robert Owen, two the Chartists … though seven (all ‘well equipped’), identified [Fabian guru] Sydney Webb”.
A one-woman inquiry at Middlesbrough a few years earlier arrived at similar conclusions, as did one in Germany. At Middlesbrough, also a Yorkshire steel town, some 25 per cent of working men read books and newspapers, almost half only the paper, a quarter nothing at all. In both cities women read less than men. Many women, especially those aged over fifty, could not read and were “almost glad to have never learned”. “Nearly all women of the working classes feel that it is wrong to sit down with a book,” was one comment.
This was a trend throughout. Men generally were more “autodidactic” or interested in adult education than women. Off-duty education of various kinds was more common in the northern England and lowland Scotland industrial cities than in the country. East End London Jews were ardent self-educators. After-work education was most common among more skilled and higher-paid groups.
Such “improvement” had a long history of close association with religion, particularly Methodism and other non-Anglican “dissenters” and in earlier centuries was often based on the Bible and religious works such as Pilgrim’s Progress. Shakespeare was long popular, though Rose points out that in the Bard’s day there was not much other entertainment on offer.
Dickens and other “classics”—what some would now deride as the middle-class canon—were popular from the late nineteenth century. As more and more literature and then radio and films became available, more people became interested, but perhaps taste became less deep as it broadened.
Marxism comes over mainly as a disagreeable nuisance, though its adherents were well represented among WEA instructors of old. Predictably, the jargon, arrogance, rigidity and lack of loyalty to monarch, country and culture usually turned the self-educating workers off, with Communist Party members the most self-defeating of all. Looking back over copious records, Rose finds the Communist Party members of old to be an unpleasant lot personally. The party usually gained a foothold only where, for a particuar local reason, moderates had failed. The coolness towards communism was as much based on its local adherents as on the great world events surrounding it.
Even in Germany, supposedly much more doctrinal, Marxian texts borrowed from a library had the first twenty pages or so well thumbed and the rest hardly read. Rose notes that while the pre-war German Communist Party had a large membership, it also had a large turnover. (Others have noted the influx of disillusioned young communists into Nazi “brownshirt” ranks in the Depression years.)
Rose also finds a British educational irritant in the more militant Christians, who wanted religion to infuse all. And he notes that many of these crossed over into communist ranks as they lost one faith.
He says the primary motive of autodidacts had always been intellectual freedom. Other motives included the pleasure and satisfaction of reading, thirst for knowledge and socio-economic upward mobility.
Surveys showed that the majority were satisfied with their school days, though big minorities expressed various kinds of dissatisfaction. There was not much disssatisfaction, however, with curriculum content. Most attended “Board” primary schools established after the Education Act of 1870.

Rose traces the artisan autodidactic tradition back as far as the Lollards, the pre-Protestant religious reformers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their often illegal reading of the first English-language Bible “threatened to break a doctrinal monopoly on knowledge and throw scriptural interpretation open to artisans”.
He finds that, ever since, intellectual elites have continued to protect their position by keeping literature above the heads of the masses, through to academic modernists and postmodernists. Modernism, he says, was “a body of literature and art deliberately made too difficult for a general audience”. Some writers “dispensed with the masses through fantasies of extermination, often rationalised on eugenic grounds”. But modernism was “a more practical means of restoring their elite status”. And “when modernism became mass culture, the avant-garde had to move on to something more modern still—postmodernism, which strove to recapture the opacity and difficulty which once cloaked modernism”. Intellectuals also

strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, machine-like, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food.

Rose is scathing about the twentieth-century disdain for clerks and suburbia and names some prominent intellectual (and often social as well) snobs. James Joyce is arch-highbrow and Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury set double snobs. The workers did not feel at ease in bohemia. Cultural conservatism was an “inseparable barrier … Working people could not afford permissiveness.”
The workers were never much interested in the British empire and even at the height of officially-nurtured enthusiasm could not name many of its countries, other than the emigration-oriented dominions such as Australia. They often wondered why, if Britain owned so much, they could not own a house. They had little awareness of most of the world outside their locality until the mid-1930s brought radio and the descent into the Second World War.
While there was much elite and middle-class disdain for America, however, the workers were more likely to admire it and want to emigrate there—for the higher living standards and the space and freedom from Old World class pressure. Unbelievably to those in Lancashire, pre-war New England textile mills had carparks for the workers.
The story thins out after 1945, but the author indicates little sympathy with much of what, culturally, has happened since.
What comes across as a lot of working-class common sense over a lot of centuries is rather heart-warming for this reviewer.

Robert Murray is a frequent contributor to Quadrant on historical issues. His latest book is 150 Years of Spring Street: Victorian Government: 1850s to 21st Century (Australian Scholarly Publishing).