The reading poor.(The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes)(Book review)

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.