Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read
them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls,
classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies,
imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What
was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate
themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they
know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and
sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they
pursue the life of the mind?
These intriguing questions, which
until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this
book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of
unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the
rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era
to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural
historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of
readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners.
Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not
expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws
on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school
records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and
challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to
politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two
centuries of British working-class experience.
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