on October 5, 2024, 12:24 am
Before we watched TV
Ian Sansom discovers how high culture was not always the preserve of the elite, no matter how hard they tried to make people think so, in Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Sat 14 Jul 2001 01.31 BST
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The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Jonathan Rose
538pp, Yale, £29.95
In 1989 John Carey, Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, was invited to give the TS Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent. Already the author of books on Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, and lead critic of the books pages of the Sunday Times, he was embarking on a second career as house anthologist at Faber, the publishing firm closely associated with Eliot (his widow is still the major shareholder). But with all this up his sleeve, Carey could afford to bite the hand that fed. In fact, he did more. He opened his mouth wide and gnawed all the way up to the elbow.
In his lectures he described the various ways in which writers and intellectuals - the likes of TS Eliot and the publishers at Faber - sought to exclude the masses from culture. Carey's iconoclastic lectures formed the basis of his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, gratefully published by Faber, in which he makes the claim, in summary, that "the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity". The book found plenty of fans among the tabloids.
Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the Working Classes might be described as a companion volume to The Intellectuals and the Masses, but it is perhaps less likely to feature on the comment pages of the Sun and the Mirror, or to earn its author a column in the Mail on Sunday or a nice lunch out with Paul Johnson. It tells the other side of the story: it's "The Masses and the Intellectuals".
Rose's one and only mistake is to include the word "class" in his title. As long ago as 1931, RH Tawney was pointing out that: "The word 'class' is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit." In an age of meritocracy, a book describing its subject as intellectual life and the working classes is about as likely to attract a readership as a publication by the Flat Earth Society. The book might rather be called "What It Was We Did Before We All Watched Telly".
What it was we did, apparently - those of us whose ancestors wiped their noses upon their elbows - was to read classic literature, go to concerts and the theatre, learn to play musical instruments, join libraries, set up mutual improvement societies and generally attempt to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Rose describes a world that remains within living memory, but which is about as remote as the culture of the Incas. This is a land of literary Ishmaels forging their way through culture.
It is an astonishing read. Based upon the evidence of almost 2,000 published and unpublished memoirs from 19th- and 20th-century Britain, Rose builds up a picture of a working class determined to achieve self-education. In 1860, for example, one of the founders of a mutual improvement society recalled: "We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s. a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling's worth of coals, had the gas (which was already in the house) laid on at the cost of a few shillings, and started our College." A Nottingham hosiery worker, remembering his childhood at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote: "We loved nothing so much when I was a kid as going to my auntie's and listening to her records - the Messiah , the 'Triumphal March' from Aida, Il Trovatore. And a lot of people read Shaw, the pamphlets and the plays, Robert Blatchford, HG Wells, Dickens, Thackeray."
Rose sifts and collates all this evidence and much, much more - he tabulates and ranks and rates, he pulls out old school reports and library records, and he piles up his evidence. His most provocative claim, on the basis of this great hoard of information, is about what constitutes the canon. It has become an axiom of cultural studies that the dominant class defines and maintains the value of high culture - live white males choosing dead white males for the rest of us to admire. Rose suggests that, given a choice, the working classes in fact chose exactly the same Great Books to canonise, from the Odyssey to Dickens. Indeed, on the evidence of the borrowing records from Welsh miners' libraries, the only books that no one wants to read are the works of the literary modernists.
One does still occasionally come across people who seem to assume that the words "working class" are a synonym for "stupid" or "wicked" or "lazy" or "dumb". The people who make such assumptions would do well to read The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes , but most of them are probably too busy working in TV, or on newspaper colour supplements, or writing fancy books that nobody wants to read.
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