Chapter Two Mutual Improvement
A Coventry millworker once proclaimed that “The Labour movement grew out of Mutual Improvement Societies.”1 We need to be reminded of that, for these institutions are scarcely mentioned in studies of labor history. Richard Altick and E. P. Thompson appreciated the critical role they played in adult education, but could locate very little information about them.2 Though they were ubiquitous in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, they left few surviving records. In most cases, they can only be reconstructed through the memoirs of their members.
The mutual improvement society was a venture in cooperative education. In its classic form, it consisted of a half dozen to a hundred men from both the working and lower-middle classes who met periodically, sometimes in their own homes but commonly under the auspices of a church or chapel. Typically, at each meeting one member would deliver a paper on any imaginable subject—politics, literature, religion, ethics, “useful knowledge”—and then the topic would be thrown open to general discussion. The aim was to develop the verbal and intellectual skills of people who had never been encouraged to speak or think. There was complete freedom of expression, the teacherpupil hierarchy was abolished, and costs were minimal: about 2s. per member per year in the case of a Gallatown society in 1912.3 In addition to the mutual improvement societies per se, the working classes organized innumerable adult schools, libraries, reading circles, dramatic societies, and musical groups. They all belonged to the mutual improvement tradition, in that they relied on working-class initiative rather than state provision or middle-class philanthropy.
In turn, these collaborative cultural activities were but one branch of a vast popular movement of voluntary collectivism. Nineteenth-century workingmen organized an array of friendly societies, clubbing together to offer basic health and unemployment benefits, savings banks, job referral services, and burial plans. Perhaps a quarter of all male workers belonged to some kind of friendly society by 1830, 75 to 80 percent by 1880.4 A mutual improvement society could be defined simply as a friendly society devoted to education.
David Vincent found that the term “mutual improvement” had been used in a working-class context as far back as 1731, when the the plebeian poet Stephen Duck met regularly with a servant to discuss literature and arithmetic.5 The phrase had been adopted even earlier by the Easy Club, which Allan Ramsay founded in 1712, and it became a commonplace among the societies of the Edinburgh Enlightenment.6 Unsurprisingly, mutual improvement was Scottish in origin. Perhaps the earliest recorded group discussed literature, history, and philosophy at the home of Kinnesswood weaver Alexander Bruce (b. 1710), father of the poet Michael Bruce.7 But at first, Scottish mutual improvement expressed itself chiefly in libraries.
John Crawford has located fifty-one Scottish working-class libraries founded by 1822, which charged annual subscriptions of 6s. or less, and were governed democratically, mostly without interference by the middle classes. Few such libraries existed in England at the time. All of these Scottish libraries were in towns with a population of less than 10,000, and all were in the Lowlands, with a large concentration in the southwest. The Leadhills Reading Society (founded 1741 and in use until about 1940), the Wanlockhead Miners’ Library (founded 1756), and the Westerkirk Library (founded 1792) were the first working-class libraries in Britain, and all incorporated mutual improvement principles in their rulebooks.8
Craftsmen in Lowlands Scotland enjoyed particularly high literacy rates between 1640 and 1770: 74 percent for weavers (compared with 52 percent in northern England) and an amazing 94 percent for wrights. These groups patronized one of the first true public libraries in the world, the Innerpeffray Library in Perthshire near Crieff. Of 287 borrowers with identifiable trades between 1747 and 1800, twenty-six were weavers, compared with only twenty-two teachers. (By the end of the century, there were only ninety-two weaver heads of households in Crieff.) In the decade 1747–57 the library was used by seven wrights, out of perhaps ten in the area.9
Weavers and lead miners were well-paid and had short work hours: six hours a day for miners, four days a week for weavers. Weavers had to be literate for their work, and mining companies wanted an educated work force. Both trades had a history of friendly society activity and self-education. Scottish miners—like the South Wales colliers who would set up their own network of libraries more than a century later—lived in isolated villages with stable populations, and upheld strong traditions of working-class independence.10
In 1796–97 the Scots Chronicle reported the existence of thirty-five reading societies, mostly in and around Glasgow and Paisley, many of them based in weaving communities. They usually had thirty to forty members and assessed a monthly subscription (typically 6d. or 9d.). Acquisitions were decided democratically and some book collections approached 1,000 volumes. They generally stocked the standard histories and travels, along with the Spectator and other periodicals, but not much poetry, fiction, science, or religion.11
There was also a large measure of working-class participation in the East Lothian Itinerating Libraries. Founded in 1817 by merchant Samuel Brown, this service rotated boxes of fifty books through a circuit of villages: mostly moral and religious volumes, but also some dealing with popular science, travels, agriculture, and the mechanical arts.12 In 1825 the twenty volunteer librarians managing the system included six teachers, two shoemakers, two smiths, two wrights, two sadlers, a weaver, a draper, a collier, a tailor, and a laborer.13
To all this must be added countless informal networks for sharing reading matter. In the first years of the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met.14 The Lochend poet Alexander Bethune (b. 1804) and his brother John could afford few books, but Alexander remembered that “After it became known that we were readers, the whole of our acquaintances, far and near, and even some people whom we could hardly number as such, appeared eager to lend us books.”15
Even in that hospitable atmosphere, the pursuit of literature could be a struggle for a man like John Bethune. A laborer whose annual earnings rarely exceeded £19, he hoped to write his way out of poverty like Robert Burns. His Tales and Sketches of the Scottish Peasantry was published in 1838, but as his brother Alexander recalled, the writing of it
had been prosecuted as stealthily as if it had been a crime punishable by law. There being but one apartment in the house, it was his custom to write by the fire, with an old copy-book, upon which his paper lay, resting on his knee, and this, through life, was his only writing-desk. On the table, which was within reach, an old newspaper was kept constantly lying, and as soon as the footsteps of any one were heard approaching the door, copy-book, paper, pens, and inkstand, were thrust under this covering, and before the visitor came in, he had in general a book in his hand, and appeared to have been reading.
Mutual improvement was useful for acquiring and sharing general knowledge, but it could not provide the privacy necessary for writing and serious study. The Bethune brothers actually went to the trouble of building a room for John, to no avail: the day after it was finished, work called him away to another town.16
Mutual improvement continued to gain momentum in Scotland through the nineteenth century. In the rural northeast region around Aberdeen, Ian Carter found nineteen such societies in 1851, and between thirty-five and fifty by 1897, many of which maintained their own libraries. In an otherwise conservative region, they were a backbone of radical Liberalism, closely linked with the Free Church of Scotland (founded 1843) and the temperance movement. Their members were drawn from the lower middle and upper working classes. A society organized in Rhynie in 1846 typically included five farmers, two merchants, a baker, a soldier, a contractor, a miller, a traveling salesman, three estate workers, and five students. Notably missing were itinerant agricultural workers: mutual improvement societies were the domain of settled tenant farmers, craftsmen, and tradesmen.
Though committed to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, their members commonly rose in the world, often into the ranks of journalism.17 William Donaldson has shown how the culture of mutual improvement in Victorian Scotland nurtured an impressive cadre of editors, among them weaver William Scott of the Montrose Review, shoemaker W. H. Murray of the Falkirk Herald, railwayman James Bridges of the Perthshire Advertiser, engineer Henry Alexander of the Aberdeen Free Press, James Macdonnell of the Times, and Alexander Allardyce of Blackwood’s. Mutual improvement was also incarnated in reader-written periodicals, such as the remarkably interactive Dundee, Perth, and Forfar People’s Journal. Its working-class subscribers contributed letters, reports of meetings, notes on Scottish folklore and history, and commissioned articles, as well as thousands of entries to fiction and poetry competitions, for prizes of 10s. to 50s. In turn, the “To Correspondents” column advised contributors on the weaknesses and strengths of rejected articles. The editor, William Latto, was an archetypal autodidact: a Chartist weaver who read from books propped against his handloom, and learned Latin from a Free Kirk minister. Founded in 1858, the People’s Journal was selling more than 100,000 copies by 1866, a quarter million by 1914. That represented the largest circulation of any weekly outside London, and a higher level of penetration in the remote areas of northern Scotland than any other periodical.18
This was the culture that produced J. Ramsay MacDonald, who won a prize of £10 for a humorous dialect story sent to the People’s Journal.19 He served as secretary to the Lossiemouth Mutual Improvement Association, which in 1884 debated questions such as “Ought Members of Parliament to be Paid?”, “Is Temperance Better than Total Abstinence?”, “Is Emigration the best remedy for the existing distress among the Highland crofters?”, “Ought Capital Punishment to be Abolished?”, “Is Competition injurious to the Community?”, and “Is Novel-Reading Beneficial?”20 Educated first in the Scottish rigor of a parish school, inspired by Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters, he grew up in a milieu saturated with mutual education. A tubercular watchmaker introduced him to Shakespeare, Burns, and The Pickwick Papers. Then there was the ragman who kept a book propped open against his barrow, and presented it to MacDonald when he showed an interest. It was a translation of Thucydides.21
The mutual improvement societies often took the form of a more advanced level of Sunday school. Most nineteenth-century Sunday schools were indigenous working-class self-help institutions: even the Chartist Northern Star extolled them for creating a literate proletariat. According to radical weaver Samuel Bamford, the surge of political agitation after 1815 owed much to “the Sunday Schools of the preceding thirty years, [which] had produced many working men of sufficient talent to become readers, writers, and speakers in the village meetings for parliamentary reform.”22 As early as 1834, one in every five Sunday schools offered a library. The organizers and teachers were largely drawn from the working class, where the Sunday school experience was nearly universal: 91.8 percent of workers in twelve Manchester cotton mills in 1852 had attended at least for a time. By 1881 no less than 19 percent of the entire population of Great Britain—and more than 70 percent of young people aged five to twenty in Keighley—were currently enrolled.23
Mutual improvement was not necessarily political: the early Scottish working-class libraries generally avoided political books. But as Francis Place described it, the London Corresponding Society—the first laboring class political organization—was organized on the mutual improvement model. It purchased books and loaned them to members, and devoted its weekly meetings to readings and general discussion. One week the chairman (a rotating position) would read a chapter from a book; the following week it would be reread and thrown open to discussion. No one could speak a second time until all who wished had spoken once. Place also organized a French class with four other LCS workmen, reading a French grammar propped up before him at work and reading three hours or more each night from Helvetius, Rousseau, and Voltaire. The “moral effects” of this regimen of study, he concluded,
were considerable. It induced men to read books, instead of wasting their time in public houses, it taught them to respect themselves, and to desire to educate their children. It elevated them in their own opinions. It taught them the great moral lesson “to bear and forbear.” The discussions in the divisions, in the Sunday evening readings, and in the small debating meetings, opened to them views which they had never before taken. They were compelled by these discussions to find reasons for their opinions, and to tolerate others. It gave a new stimulus to an immense number of men who had been but in too many instances incapable of any but the grossest pursuits, and in seeking nothing beyond mere sensual enjoyments. It elevated them in society.
As proof of that last point, Place recalled an 1822 dinner to commemorate the anniversary of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy, who had been arrested for high treason in 1794. There Place met twenty-four LCS veterans from the 1790s, when most of them were journeymen or shopmen: now they were all prosperous businessmen. Place was a fervent apostle of working-class respectability, and he was prone to exaggerate the role of the LCS as “a great moral cause of the improvement which has since taken place among the People.”24 But contemporary social observers agreed that there had been a dramatic “reformation of manners” among the lower classes between the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Great Exhibition of 1851. And this was not simply or even primarily a matter of aping the middle classes: it was a product of a grass-roots working-class struggle for mutual improvement, of which the LCS was certainly a part.
In the early nineteenth century, the middle classes often associated mutual improvement with political radicalism, not without reason. An Uxbridge carpenter recalled that, as the campaign for the First Reform Bill approached its climax,
An agitation was raised by a few of the leading artisans for a mechanics’ institute. A room was taken over the market-place and opened three evenings a week. Books of all kinds were presented, most of them of a religious and disputative kind. The Penny Magazine, the Penny Cyclopaedia, the Mirror, also Dispatch, and Examiner were taken in. Most of the mechanics in the town joined, beside a few shopkeepers and innkeepers. Scientific and literary lectures were occasionally given by itinerant lecturers. The genteel people would not attend lectures at a mechanics’ institute, and they started a literary and scientific institution. It was a bad time for educational work. Bread was dear, trade was bad, and the country was passing through the throes of a political convulsion which was fast ripening into a revolution. The mechanics’ institute gradually degenerated into a violent revolutionary club. The door was locked, the passages watched, the most inflammatory and seditious things were read and discussed, and most of the men took an oath and swore if there was a general rising they were to march at once on the local bank. Collections were frequent to meet the expenses of trials which were taking place all over the country. One of these meetings had been held far into the night. The following morning found all the shops closed and the militia on the pavement.25
Thomas Cooper and other Knowledge Chartists evangelized for the organization of mutual improvement societies.26 William Lovett (b. 1800) conveys a sense of what they were struggling against and what they aimed to accomplish. Lovett served his apprenticeship as a rope-maker in Newlyn, where there was no bookshop, a few hopeless dame schools, and “scarcely a newspaper taken in, unless among the few gentry. … With the exception of Bibles and Prayer Books, spelling-books, and a few religious works, the only books in circulation for the masses were a few story-books and romances, filled with absurdities about giants, spirits, goblins, and supernatural horrors.” These were all he read until he moved to London and joined (around 1825) “The Liberals,” a group of workingmen who paid a small subscription to support a library, and met two evenings a week to discuss literary, political, and philosophical topics. Lovett’s first meeting was a revelation: “It was the first time I had ever heard impromptu speaking out of the pulpit—my notions then being that such speaking was a kind of inspiration from God …. My mind seemed to be awakened to a new mental existence; new feelings, hopes, and aspirations sprang up within me, and every spare moment was devoted to the acquisition of some kind of useful knowledge.” He read William Paley and other theologians in their library, plunged into religious and political controversies, attended coffee-house debating societies, went without food to build up a small personal library, petitioned for the Sunday opening of the British Museum and other cultural institutions. Later, as a Chartist, he would agitate for free access to education up to the universities, including adult schools and public libraries. As he vociferated in an 1837 speech: “Unhappily, though the time has gone by for the selfish and bigoted possessors of wealth to confine the blessings of knowledge wholly within their own narrow circle, and by every despotic artifice to block up each cranny through which intellectual light might break out upon the multitude, yet still, so much of the selfishness of caste is exhibited in their fetters on the Press, in their Colleges of restriction and privilege, and in their dress and badge-proclaiming charity schools, as to convince us that they still consider education as their own prerogative, or a boon to be sparingly conferred upon the multitude, instead of a universal instrument for advancing the dignity of man, and for gladdening his existence.”27
The Northumberland Chartist Robert Lowery (b. 1809) claimed that in his mutual improvement society of twenty men, mostly workers, half went on to become authors or public speakers.28 J. B. Leno (b. 1826), who identified profoundly with Alton Locke, edited a manuscript newspaper for an Uxbridge mutual improvement society, out of which grew the Chartist journal Spirit of Freedom.29 With little formal education, William Farish (b. 1818) acquired basic literacy and political knowledge by reading newspapers to Newtown weavers. (Their favorite was the tri-weekly Evening Mail, a condensation of the Times.) With a self-help philosophy drawn from Thomas Cooper, William Cobbett, and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Farish joined a workingmen’s school in Carlisle around 1840:
Hiring a six-loom weaving shop in the Blue Anchor Lane, we fitted it up ourselves with desks and seats, rude enough, doubtless, but we could not very well complain of our own handiwork, and there was nobody else to please. The [Carlisle] Mechanics’ Institution, although well managed and liberally supported, had failed somewhat in its mission, mainly, as was thought, through the reluctance of the weaver in his clogs and fustian jacket to meet in the same room with the better clad, and possibly better mannered, shop assistants and clerks of the city. So these new places were made purely democratic, having no master, and not permitting even any in the management but such as lived by weekly wages. Those who could read taught those who could not, and those who could cypher did the same for those less advanced.
Farish himself learned much from an uneducated Irishman who had somehow picked up a broad knowledge of English etymology, and a Cockermouth weaver “who was an adept in algebra, and yet could scarcely either read or write.” The school could not break even on its 1d.-a-week subscription, but contributions were accepted. Some gentlemen supplied free subscriptions to respectable journals, while the school itself paid for radical papers, which were usually less expensive.30
Farish’s experience was entirely typical of Carlisle, where at least twenty-four reading rooms were founded between 1836 and 1854, with a combined total of almost 1,400 members and 4,000 volumes. The town (population 25,000) was a center for handloom weavers, who were often the prime movers behind these enterprises. Many reading rooms also offered classes in reading, writing, and math, taught cooperatively by the members themselves or by professional teachers who volunteered their services. These schools undoubtedly boosted literacy before the 1870 Education Act: in one working-class parish the proportion of those who could sign the marriage register jumped from 70.36 percent in 1841 to 92.69 percent in 1871.
Reading rooms and adult schools were organized largely as an alternative to the mechanics’ institutes, founded and governed by paternalistic middle-class reformers, where religious and political controversy was usually barred and the premises could be uncomfortably genteel. In 1843 workingmen petitioned a Croydon institute to form a discussion class and to drop the rule barring controversial political and religious works from the library (a rule not strictly enforced against conservative literature). The gentry and clergy on the governing committee rejected the plea and, on top of that, increased user fees, thus driving out so many working-class members that the institute virtually shut down. A few years later, radical journalist Thomas Frost helped organize a more democratic society, which sponsored lectures, musical performances, and debates on such contentious issues as Owenite cooperation. This forum attracted such a large following that it was eventually able to rent the premises of the now-defunct institute. “The causes of the failure in the one case, and of success in the other, do not lie very deep,” Frost observed. “Working men do not like to be treated like children, to have the books they shall read chosen for them; and they naturally resent any attempt to set up barriers between themselves and other classes, when all are associated on the same footing for a common object.”31
Since mutual improvement schools and reading rooms relied on the support of workingmen, they were liable to be short-lived, vulnerable to economic downturns and internal squabbles over the acquisition of radical literature. Volunteer teachers could be unreliable or incapable. Many students attended simply to acquire basic literacy and once they reached that goal, they abandoned the school and allowed it to collapse. Yet if these institutions had accepted middle-class help, they might have lost their independence and, with it, their working-class followers. The Lord Street Working Men’s Reading Room in Carlisle fell victim to this dilemma. It began when fifty men, anxious to read about the European revolutions of 1848, clubbed together to buy newspapers. A year later, with 300 members and 500 books, it had far outgrown its premises, a borrowed schoolroom. A new Elizabethan-style building was constructed and opened in 1851, with congratulatory messages from Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. Governed by a committee of workingmen, it charged a subscription of only 1d. a week, and even that was waived for the unemployed.
It all looked like a triumph of working-class self-help, yet nothing on that scale (the construction cost £393) could have been accomplished without generous middle-class assistance. There were contributions of books, money, and low-interest loans; the architect donated his services; a solicitor rented the land for a 1s. a year. However well intentioned, it all bore the taint of bourgeois patronage, especially when the rule was adopted “that party politics and controversial religion are shut out from all meetings of the institution.” At first Lord Street attracted crowds to its library and classes, but as it assumed the trappings of a conventional mechanics’ institute, it was deserted by the working classes. By 1863 it was nearly moribund: only the possession of its own physical plant kept it going.32
Though mutual improvement societies tended to be ephemeral, they were fairly easy to set up and answered a need for remedial education. Fustian cutter Joseph Greenwood was one of a dozen men who founded an institute in Hebden Bridge at the end of 1854. Renting an empty cottage with absolutely no furniture, “we met and stood in a circle, one holding the candle while we deliberated, and another wrote out the resolutions on loose paper.” The entrance fee was 1s.6d., plus weekly dues of 2d. By May 1856 they had 131 working- and middle-class members and had outgrown their premises. Interest in the Crimean War attracted newspaper readers to their reading room, which subscribed to the Daily News, the Manchester Examiner, and the Athenaeum. There was also a library of 230 volumes, most of them loaned by a silk-dresser. The institute offered classes, starting with basic arithmetic, grammar, and writing, then adding courses in drawing and higher mathematics, taught by two paid and three voulnteer teachers.33 In 1860 another such institute, Culloden College, was launched on a tiny investment:
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. We did not advertise it in the newspapers or on the streets, for we could not afford to do that, but we invited all our friends and acquaintances to join us, and in a few days we had about twenty members. … We had no men of position or education connected with us, and I believe we were better without them, but several of the students who had made special study of some particular subject were appointed teachers, so that the teacher of one class might be a pupil in another.
Except for a grammar school boy who taught Latin, the teachers were all printers, tailors, shoemakers, and shopmen, who offered classes in English, drawing, Euclid, and arithmetic. The members gave Friday evening lectures, and ventured out together on summer rambles to collect zoological, botanical, and geological specimens. Culloden College was in every respect a learning collective: “The belongings of the students were considered public property. We had no library, but we lent and borrowed the books belonging to each other.” Like most mutual improvement groups, Culloden College depended on the organizing energy of a few enthusiasts, and it collapsed when they migrated elsewhere or lost interest. But four of its students, including two shoemakers and one printer’s apprentice, went on to obtain MA degrees.34 And some of these societies did become permanent. The imposing mechanics’ institutes at Bradford, Keighley, Halifax, and Stalybridge all began as small mutual improvement societies.35 The Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1840 with only one room and one teacher: in less than twenty years it was offering ninety-one classes to 800 students.36
The workingmen who created these schools earned not only an education, but tremendous pride and independence. “Never was more delightful work engaged in than in the earlier struggles of [our] Society,” boasted Ben Brierley (b. 1825), the Lancashire millworker-poet. “Like newly-married people who look forward to important events we made our cradle before the child was born—we shelved a corner to accommodate what we had the presumption to call a library” when they had no books as yet. “It afterwards became a labour of love to cover the bindings, which we did with stout nankeen, so as to make them last for ever. This work accomplished we had a show night for friends, who, while they encouraged us in our undertaking, did not think we could have achieved so much in so short a time.”37 “These institutions in England’s educational barrenness were as oases in the desert,” proclaimed Tunstall potter Charles Shaw. Organized around 1850, his society instilled, if anything, too much self-confidence in its members:
We met to discuss and criticise all things in heaven and earth, and sometimes even a far deeper province of the universe. This habit was not born of our conceit—it was the pure birth of our simplicity. We could expatiate about the universe when an examination in the geography of England would have confounded us. We could discuss astronomy (imaginatively) when a sum in decimals would have plucked us from our soaring heights into an abyss of perplexity. We could discuss the policies of governments and nations, and the creeds and constitutions of churches, while we would have been puzzled to give a bare outline of our country’s history.
By the 1890s, Shaw noted, the Board schools were providing that kind of basic knowledge, making education less of an adventure and more a matter of examinations. “But we had the freedom of the universe, and such lesser matters as nations and churches, policies and creeds, statesmen and preachers, came easily under our purview.” If they lacked a clear sense of direction, they acquired impressive assurance: “No members of the ‘Imperial Parliament’ ever go with a prouder joy to their great ‘House’ than we went on Saturday nights to our meetings. There was a hum, a bustle and an interest when we first met, as if the fate of the nation depended on that night’s debate.” And perhaps it did: several alumni later took up public service at home and throughout the Empire, as far as Canada and Australia. “Without knowing it, our poor little society was preparing to help in empire-building,” Shaw boasted, though he was quick to add that “Our contributions never became the elements of reckless and unscrupulous aggression.”38
The chief ideologist of mutual improvement was Samuel Smiles. His Self-Help (1859) sold a quarter million copies by the end of the century and was translated into all the major European and Asian languages. The volume grew out of lectures delivered to a Leeds mutual improvement society in 1845, and drew inspiration from a whole subgenre of self-improving literature: G. L. Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830–31), Thomas Dick’s Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge (1833), Timothy Claxton’s Hints to Mechanics on Self-Education and Mutual Instruction (1839), and William Robinson’s Self-Education, as well as the endless stream of popular education articles from the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. The secularist whitesmith G. J. Holyoake had published Self-Help by the People, a history of the Rochdale Pioneers, just two years before Smiles. By then the Sunday schools had indoctrinated an entire generation in the self-help ethic.39
The Smiles philosophy was more than a crude success ethic. He was a radical who favored universal suffrage, had some sympathy with Chartism and the ten-hour workday, and strongly supported the Co-operative movement and adult education. He condemned class-bound standards of respectability and denounced pure economic individualism as empty and selfish. In his vision, the working class would raise its educational and economic standards through its own cooperative efforts. Autodidacts like Samuel Bamford, William Lovett, and Thomas Cooper were local heroes in Yorkshire’s West Riding: they were also Smiles’s models. He preferred to write about workingmen whose achievements were intellectual rather than commercial, though he ruefully noted that his business success stories sold much better.40
A labor leader once warned Robert Blatchford away from Self-Help: “It’s a brutal book; it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. Smiles was the arch-Philistine, and his book the apotheosis of respectability, gigmanity, and selfish grab.” It is difficult to imagine who actually spoke those words, because most pre-1914 labor leaders who commented on Self-Help admired it. Certainly Blatchford, once he read it carefully, found it “one of the most delightful and invigorating books it has been my happy fortune to meet with,” and seriously suggested it should be required reading in schools. He conceded that no socialist could feel entirely comfortable with Smiles’s individualism, but Self-Help also denounced the worship of power, wealth, success, and keeping up appearances. And, he noted, Smiles himself had second thoughts about the title: he wished he had done more to encourage altruism as well as self-reliance.41
Smiles’s fans included Labour MPs William Johnson and Thomas Summerbell.42 Ramsay MacDonald enjoyed his biographies of working-class naturalists. Even A. J. Cook, who became a Communist miners’ leader, started out with Self-Help.43 At the turn of the century, Smiles was the most popular author in the 20,000-volume prison library at Wormwood Scrubs.44 (Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which conveyed a similar philosophy, was equally inspirational to autodidacts.)45 Not until the great disillusionment following the First World War would misgivings about Smiles surface in workers’ memoirs.46
George Gregory (b. 1888) offers a case study in the importance of Self-Help. His father was an illiterate Somerset miner, his mother a servant who read nothing but the Bible. “There was a feeling in the home that books were not intended for people like us, and were not actually necessary,” he recalled. Gregory only had a few school prizes—Jack and the Ostrich, a children’s story; The Crucifixion of Philip Strong, a gripping tale of labor unrest; and the verses of Cornish poet John Harries—and the family read a weekly serial, Strongdold the Gladiator. Having left school at twelve to work in the mines, Gregory had no access to serious reading matter until mid-adolescence, when a clerk introduced him to Self-Help. That book, he recalled in old age,
has lived with me, and in me, for more than sixty years. … The reference may raise a smile among some moderns for they have no liking for the industrial context that made the volume so popular in the Victorian Era. Nevertheless, I was impressed by its quality for I had never touched such a book of high quality; and the impression deepened and became vivid as I took it home, read the stories of men who had helped themselves, struggled against enormous difficulties, suffered painful privations, became destitute, and overwhelmed by conditions. Many of them reached the lowest levels of depression, but went on to rise phoenix-like from the ruins of their plans and collapse of their expectations to find a way to success. Such information stirred dormant powers in me. I began to see myself as an individual, and how I may be able to make a break from the general situation of which I had regarded myself as an inseparable part. I realised that my lack of education was not decisive of what I might become, so I commenced to reach out into the future.
In his isolated rural community, Gregory never imagined that he might aspire to a higher profession. Now he returned to his old school for evening classes in chemistry, arithmetic, and mining engineering, where he won a prize book of world history and was introduced to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. These two volumes taught him to think in evolutionary terms, and he began to read widely on the historicity of religion and the development of capitalism. “My mind underwent an expansion,” as did his personal library, “and ambition began to stir.” Gregory won a diploma in Mining Engineering and Surveying but, fearful that he might rise out of his class and become a Tory, he returned to work as an ordinary miner. He became a socialist, a trade union organizer, a Co-operative society manager, an antiwar activist, a branch secretary for the Workers’ Educational Association and for the League of Nations Union, a Congregational minister, and the owner of more than a thousand books.47 That is what Self-Help set in motion.
Proletarian Science
Samuel Smiles’s favorite working-class heroes were amateur scientists, who did real research with no money or training. They were remarkable for their ability to work in isolation. Thomas Edward, the shoemaker-naturalist (b. 1814), had an income of 9s. 6d. a week, little formal education, no books on natural history, and no community of autodidacts with whom he could discuss his research. Learning from the Penny Magazine and from observation, he eventually discovered twenty-six new species of crustacea in the Moray Firth; contributed to the Naturalist, the Zoologist, Ibis, and the Linnaean Journal; was elected an associate of the Linnaean Society in 1866; and won a Civil List pension of £50 a year.48 There was also railway porter John Robertson, who made drawings of sunspots and published notices in scientific journals; and John Jones, who loaded slate at the Bangor docks and constructed a telescope powerful enough to observe the icecaps of Mars.49
Yet in one important respect these success stories are unrepresentative: proletarian science was a predominantly collective endeavor. Well before Lord Brougham and George Birkbeck established the “first” mechanics’ institute in 1824, the working classes were organizing their own. Arguably, the first mutual improvement group was the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, founded in 1717. It met weekly on Saturday evenings to explore the natural sciences, at first at local taverns, later at its own premises. In the mid-1740s about half its members were weavers, the rest a variety of other tradesmen, including braziers, bakers, and bricklayers. By 1784 it had sixty-four members, an impressive library, globes, air pumps, and microscopes.50 In 1817 whitesmith Timothy Claxton founded a “Mechanical Institution” in London, which sponsored weekly lectures and discussions on the arts and on science. Lacking affluent supporters, it could not acquire its own library, and folded after three years.51 At about the same time, institutes at Hulme and Salford were set up by fustian cutter Rowland Detrosier, one of several artisan radicals who used scientific lectures as propaganda for Tom Paine’s materialism. As Gwyn Williams observed, their faith in education and respectability was so thorough “that they, no less than the evangelicals, can claim the title of prototype Victorians,” precursors of Samuel Smiles.
That impulse gave rise to a network of plebeian circles devoted to natural history, predominantly in northern England. In 1829 some botanical workingmen, discontent with the middle-class tone of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, founded the Banksian Society (after Sir Joseph Banks) and elected Rowland Detrosier its first president.52 With not more than fifty members, the society had a well-used library of fifty-four books, acquired a microscope and some cabinets of plants and insects, and met monthly to examine specimens. Within a few years, deaths and retirements had broken the group’s momentum, and in 1836 it was absorbed back into the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution.53 One of the organizers of the Banksian Society was handloom weaver John Horsefield, who headed two other similar groups, the Prestwich Botanical Society and the General Botanical Meetings.
The plebeian botanists built on a long tradition of popular herbalism and floriculture. Nicholas Culpeper’s classic Herbal (1652) and John Wesley’s Primitive Physic (1747) continued to be reprinted well into the nineteenth century and were widely distributed in working-class communities. Artisan botanists of the north country not only exchanged information among themselves: they were also important sources for gentleman naturalists, with whom they traded specimens and discoveries. William Withering’s A Systematic Arrangement of British Plants owed much to contributions from artisan correspondents. Before science was professionalized at the end of the nineteenth century, working-class naturalist societies were active participants in scientific research.
Following the Methodist model, they organized themselves into local groups of eight to forty members, and came together for larger area meetings (70 to 250 participants) on Sundays. The local societies were commonly based in pubs, which offered meeting rooms and housed specimens and libraries in return for a certain minimum purchase of refreshment. The pub setting, combined with high rates of female illiteracy, insured that these meetings were, with some exceptions, exclusively male. There was commonly a membership fee of 6d. a month, which was spent on drink and books. The Prestwich Botanical Society, for example, purchased 131 volumes between 1820 and 1850.54
Chartist Robert Lowery found among the miners of Northumberland and Durham
many superior mathematicians, and the booksellers of Newcastle were known to sell, chiefly among the workmen of the north, a larger number of works on that science than were sold in any other similar district of the country. Some of these men were excellent horticulturalists and florists …. I was acquainted with one: … as he walked among his flower beds he would sound their scientific names in his provincial tones, intermingling his conversation with remarks on the philosophy of Locke, or quoting passages from Milton, Byron, Shelley, or Burns.55
Followers of Robert Owen saw revolutionary potential in those worker-scientists. In the mid-1840s Allen Davenport—shoemaker, poet, and former president of the Tower Street Mutual Instruction Society—estimated that there were nearly fifty groups in and around London where working men and women were studying
chemistry, geology, mathematics, and astronomy, with all the gravity, deliberation, and confidence, of old and experienced professors. And will the government and legislature of this country still look on and remain stationary, while every thing is changing around them? Will they stand still and see the intellectual struggle that is being made by the working classes, to acquire a thorough knowledge of every branch of useful science—such as the agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial systems—the principles and powers of the production and distribution of wealth—the science of government—and the best means of establishing and extending through every grade of the community, a free, and untrammelled education! Will they be the last in the race of improvement, and cling to the old worn-out laws and institutions? while inventive genius, with steam and mechanical powers, is revolutionizing every nation, and changing the political, the commercial, and the manufacturing systems of the world! Are they so blind, or so infatuated, that they neither see, nor will be persuaded of the approaching storm—the moral earthquake, which will shake the world, and convulse Europe from its centre to its circumference—from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and from the Bay of Biscay to the Bosphorus; unless an universal change in the political and social system of nations takes place, and a more equal distribution of human subsistence shall be conceded.56
Perhaps more typical, however, were eight apolitical Kettering velvet-weavers, who in the 1830s hung a map of the world in their workroom, placed entomological specimens in the window-sills, and pooled money to buy books. Five of those eight would rise out of the artisan class. A sixth (who became a poet) explained that weaving was
very favourable to self-culture—almost infinitely more so than the business of the trading classes; and if there is one study to which mechanical employment is particularly favourable, it is that of metaphysics .… No costly laboratory or apparatus is required; but the topic can at all times be followed up, without anything to interfere with the thinker, and without extraneous aid.
He could ponder philosophical questions while at work, jotting his conclusions in a notebook kept by the loom, sometimes discussing Locke and Reid with a philosophical woolcomber.57 As late as 1900 such societies were still quite common in Lancashire.58 But the tradition of proletarian naturalists did not last long into the twentieth century, when scientific research became the preserve of university-trained specialists.
Mutual improvement, then, was an evolving movement that changed in several directions over two centuries. Workingmen developed their own libraries until the late nineteenth-century expansion of public libraries made their efforts redundant. In areas where public library services were slow to penetrate, notably the coal valleys of South Wales, miners made exceptional efforts to support their own libraries up to the mid-twentieth century. Political controversy found a home in mutual improvement societies until around 1850, faded out in the mid-Victorian years, then revived in the 1880s. Women were mostly excluded from mutual improvement activities before the late nineteenth century. And mutual improvement societies were important providers of adult remedial schooling until the 1870 Education Act and the achievement of near universal literacy, when they could turn to exploring politics and literature on a more sophisticated plane.
One can trace some of these trends in the Gallatown Mutual Improvement Association (founded 1863), one of the very few that has left any historical record. The members came from a range of social ranks—miners, handloom weavers, and potters as well as teachers and manufacturers—but they had in common a lack of basic education. In its early years, therefore, the society concentrated on teaching grammar and history. The first essays presented focused on elementary topics: Art, The Sheep, Coal, Good Habits, Paper, Water, The Power of Steam, The Eagle, The Seasons, Countries, Domestic Animals, The Late Flood at Sheffield, War, Gravitation, Strong Drink, The Bible, Safe Company, Indolence and Industry. Equally light subjects were selected for debate, such as The Eye and the Ear—Which Affords the Most Pleasure? Within a decade, however, more controversial papers appeared on the agenda: Stability of Society, Primeval Man, Strikes, The Drinking Traffic, The Relation between Science and Scripture, Equality. The first generation of members had held to the theology of their fathers; now biblical criticism and Darwin were having an impact. In 1875 there was a debate on republicanism vs. monarchism, with the royalists winning by a single vote. The first paper on socialism appeared on the roster for 1887, and within a few years the members were discussing Home Rule for Ireland and women’s suffrage. By 1891 there were presentations on the French Revolution and the Oppression of the Masses. In 1895, the all-male club voted twenty-six to fifteen to support a resolution for women’s equality. At the turn of the century they were discussing the Dreyfus Affair and anarchism, and they voted down (eleven to twenty-two) a motion to support the war in South Africa.59 (One historian has observed a similar shift to controversial issues in a Unitarian mutual improvement society in Keighley).60
The autobiography of miner Chester Armstrong (b. 1868) densely chronicles the role of mutual improvement in transforming working-class intellectual life. He grew up in a Cumberland village where there were few books other than the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, and some devotional volumes. All the same, mid-Victorian rural Nonconformity provided a real foundation for cultural growth. His family often had preachers and elders over for tea: the discussions focused on detailed critiques of sermons and ministers, and close readings of Scripture and spiritual experiences. “I always listened intently, and in doing so was unconsciously cultivating the habit of analysis which has become all the more intense as I have advanced in years,” he recalled. Simultaneously, his political consciousness was awakened when his father, a self-help Radical, read aloud the weekly paper, which brought home the horrors of the Afghan and Zulu wars.
Armstrong relocated to Ashington, another mining town, where the mechanics’ institute was the only cultural resource. But in its library he discovered “a new world” and “a larger environment” in Defoe, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens, and Jules Verne. As the population of Ashington grew, other cultural institutions blossomed: a Co-operative society hall that featured political speakers, a Harmonic Society concert hall and orchestra, a Miners’ Association hall, a new library, several new churches, and Gilchrist Lectures on the sciences that attracted large and rapt audiences. In 1898 Armstrong organized the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin, and T. H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll’s British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association, and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola, Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World. Meanwhile, his conception of the function of literature changed as well. Great books were “the common property of mankind,” transcending time and provinciality, but they were not scriptures containing absolute truths. In his immaturity he had worshipped particular authors,
each on his separate pedestal, to whom I bowed in grave humility. We talked of our household gods in authors. In heated dispute we quoted our respective gods by way of clinching the argument, just as in religion Biblical authority is used. … It now seems to me obvious that to lean on authority is to acknowledge the philosophy of crutches, which is fatal to culture and to companionship in literature. … I have good reasons to know the spell which canonized writers and others yet cast over the minds of mankind—a spell yet fatal to free initiative and self-reliance in culture.
It was not until I made the discovery that all writers who ever penned a document, whether they were included among the saints or not, belonged to one common humanity and were therefore capable of error, that a free avenue was opened for my approach to them. And now [1938] when I know how widely the great ones differ—even among the saints—in their own special departments, I think there is no need to fear if I should have to differ from all of them. I now feel assured that to make an idol of an author or a fetish of a book is tantamount to slavery in one of its many forms. I still retain, however, my household gods; only that halo round their heads has vanished, and my worship has given place to a more matured respect born of the knowledge of their fallibility and therefore of the success of their achievements. I now feel that I can, so to speak, walk arm in arm with them and so converse on familiar terms.
This, I think, suggests the right relationship between author and reader … .
In other words, “Book culture is distinctly a matter of mutuality,” just as it had always been in the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society.61 For people accustomed to accepting dogmas handed down by churches, chapels, teachers, politicians, and employers, mutual improvement provided invaluable training in forming and expressing opinions. Exercising that atrophied muscle was painful for David Willox (b. 1845), a Parkhead handloom weaver and iron-puddler. “I was a silent member for a long time,” he admitted, “but latterly began to offer a few trembling remarks, principally of an enquiring kind. It was long before I ventured into the ocean of controversy. I was like a child learning to skate or slide upon ice. I kept pottering away about the margin of the lake to see how the ice was bearing before I would trust myself on the open sheet.”62 These miniature parliaments did much to build the confidence of future Labour politicians. In 1910, on the floor of the Malton Mutual Improvement Society, chemist’s apprentice Philip Inman called for the abolition of the House of Lords. Thirty-six years later he was sitting in it.63
For F. H. Spencer (b. 1872), a Swindon factory worker’s son, mutual improvement provided all the intellectual stimulation he did not receive in teacher training. “The education of a pupil teacher in the eighteen eighties … was designed to enable a mediocre head master to prepare an unintelligent pupil teacher for a very easy examination. Any lad or girl of energy and intelligence could have passed the fourth-year examination before the end of the first year,” he protested. “In history we just learned facts out of a date-book. And I got some background out of Scott. Geography was a thing of names, meaningless, wearisome names, and our instructor was dull, stupid and conscientious beyond words.” It was a Young Men’s Friendly Society that “liberalised and awakened such mind as I had.” Members debated capitalism and socialism, performed scenes from The Merchant of Venice and The Pickwick Papers. A mix of students, workers, and lower professionals encouraged Spencer to read broadly and trained him in public speaking. (There were some women in the group, but they were not yet bold enough to contribute to the debates.) He could also use the celebrated GWR Mechanics’ Institute Library, which, with more than 20,000 volumes, was “as good as that of any London club”: “The son of a duke could have been little better off in the matter of access to English books.” Spencer went through a phase of regretting the lack of a university education, but he came to realize that mutual improvement had brought him into contact with a much broader section of humanity, and had prepared him to rise to the rank of Chief School Inspector for the London Education Committee.64
Mutual improvement drives home the lesson that no autodidact is entirely self-educated. He or she must rely on a network of friends and workmates for guidance, discussion, and reading material. Exclusion from those networks (together with lower rates of literacy) largely accounts for the scarcity of female proletarian intellectuals and autobiographers in the nineteenth century. Only as working women became more active in corporate bodies such as the Labour Party, the Co-operative movement, trade unions, and mutual improvement societies did they begin to produce memoirs in large numbers.
In the early Scottish workingmen’s libraries studied by John Crawford, between zero and 10 percent of members were women, and they had no role in governance. Wanlockhead barred women until 1812, Leadhills until 1881, though they might have read books borrowed by male family members.65 Later, some mechanics’ institutes were open to women in a limited way, and a few institutions specifically for women were founded at Bradford, Huddersfield, and Keighley. The 1851 census reported that only 9.4 percent of all mechanics’ institute students were female, many of them middle-class. In 1857 one hundred associated mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies in Lancashire and Cheshire had a total of 19,880 male members and only 2,150 female members, with 8,050 men and 500 women attending evening classes.66
Where workingmen had access to education and women did not, communication between the two was likely to break down. One wife complained that when her husband brought home fellow students from the Working Men’s College,
These people would come, bow to us, say “How do you do?” when they came, and “Good night” when they went; all the rest of the time would be spent talking about things we did not understand. If we asked questions, we heard about Algebra, Shakespeare, or Red Sandstone. What these things were we had no idea; nor did our lords and masters seem to know enough about them to be able to explain them in simple words that we could understand … . All that we learned from the conversation of the learned Collegians on Sundays was, that all the teachers of some sort of classes (I think they called them Mathematical) wore double-breasted waistcoats and Albert watchguards of the same pattern. We women felt, naturally, not quite satisfied with this.
When she had the chance to attend college classes, even for a few months, she learned just enough to establish an intellectual rapport with her husband.67 But there was no united female front on this issue: another student’s wife affirmed that women belonged in the domestic sphere, and doubted that further education would be helpful there.68 And workingmen of the early nineteenth century rarely acknowledged women as intellectual equals or companions. Like Felix Holt, they were liable to regard females as a distraction for men in pursuit of the truth.69 In early Victorian Carlisle, women had very limited access to workingmen’s reading rooms. In 1852 some men seceded from their reading room in protest against the admission of too many women. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, there was at least serious discussion of extending adult education to women in Carlisle.70 As late as 1893 women were admitted to only one of Keighley’s numerous mutual improvement societies, which was connected with the Unitarian Church.71 In fact, workingmen in northern England were more hostile to female education than their brothers in the south: by the late 1870s, twenty out of twenty-seven Methodist mutual improvement associations in the London area admitted both sexes.72 At this time women were generally more literate than men south of the Wash–Severn line but less literate north of it.73 And in the Co-operative movement, between 1897 and 1915, women were far more likely to be elected to educational committees in southern England than in Lancashire and the West Riding.74
Autobiographical evidence suggests that provincial groups were finally opening up by the turn of the century,75 but the women who joined them could still encounter some suspicion. Alice Foley recalled that her older sister Cissy—a suffragette, Labour Church member, and textile workers’ union officer—found a circle of girlfriends in Bolton who met to discuss “politics, men, votes for women and culture.” Together they took an Oxford extension course on Robert Browning, and talked of William Morris and Karl Marx. Their mother dismissed them as “fuss-pots” indulging in “long-curtain” talk. “To replace short by long curtains was a sign of moving up in the social scale,” Alice explained, and in fact Cissy’s intellectual friends were mostly shopclerks and office workers rather than factory girls.76
The Women’s Co-operative Guild (founded 1883) was a female mutual improvement association with a feminist agenda, peaking at 88,000 members in 1938. But it too faced opposition among northern miners,77 as D. H. Lawrence observed in Sons and Lovers. Though Mrs. Morel finds stimulation reading papers before her local chapter, and wins “the deepest respect” of her children, many men treated such activities as a threat: “From off the basis of the guild, the women could look at their homes, at the conditions of their own lives, and find fault. So, the colliers found their women had a new standard of their own, rather disconcerting.”78
The Guild certainly had revolutionary consequences for Deborah Smith (b. 1858), a Nelson weaver. She was raised by parents who were poor, illiterate, and not inclined to encourage education. Having had only a brief interval of half-time schooling she was, as Secretary of the Nelson Women’s Co-operative Guild, initially embarrassed by her inability to write and spell. Nevertheless the Guild, with its meetings and lectures, “opened up a new life to me .… I got new ideas, a wider view of life. It taught me to think for myself on all questions.” She began reading poetry and, at age fifty-one, discovered her own spiritual longings in Tennyson:
Break, break on thy cold grey stones, oh sea,
Oh would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!
She had always hesitated to write about her own life, because she did not know “if anyone had an experience like mine.” The revelation that classic authors shared her thoughts liberated her latent powers of self-expression. “I began to realise the experience of the poets who had written such poetry, and I felt like getting in touch with them,” she explained. “We find that Art and Literature and Beauty are stored in our own souls once that creative power gives them life.” Though raised as an Independent Methodist, she now found that class meetings did not welcome her questioning spirit: “Sometimes I gave them poetry, but one of our women said, we must have nothing but the Bible.” It was in reading circles that she found “The questions, the friendly discussions, the exchange of opinions about many things [that] all teach us to be tolerant.”79
Working-class women had less opportunity to practice public speaking than their men, and here again mutual improvement proved invaluable. When Elizabeth Andrews (b. 1882), a Welsh miner’s daughter, prepared a paper for the Wesley Guild, the prospect of reading it made her physically ill, and the minister had to present it for her. Though she eventually became a suffragist and Labour Party organizer, the experience taught her “to be very patient and understanding when training women to take part in public work for the first time.”80
Since most mutual improvement societies are beyond the reach of historical detection, estimating their total membership is next to impossible. Nevertheless, studies focusing on small geographical areas have found impressively high levels of participation. The 1851 census reported that something less than 1 percent of the total population belonged to mechanics’ institutes, but as Ian Inkster notes, the census-takers probably missed most of the smaller informal societies. Adult education appealed mainly to workingmen aged twenty to thirty-nine, and may have reached as much as 15 percent of that target population in the Huddersfield area.81 In rural districts, where there were few other distractions, institutes could attract an even larger proportion. In 1850 the village of Ripley had only 300 inhabitants, of which fifty-seven belonged to its own little institute, based in a hayloft.82 By 1881 nearly every church and chapel in Keighley sponsored mutual improvement societies, with an estimated total membership of nearly 1,000, or about 6 percent of the male population.83 Impressionistic evidence offered by autobiographers suggests the same level of saturation in Newcastle84 and North Wales.85
Although the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union was primarily a social organization, it also made a contribution to mutual education. In 1874 it comprised 312 clubs: of those that filed reports, 21 percent held classes in the arts and sciences, 33 percent sponsored lectures, 64 percent held “musical and elocutionary entertainments,” and nearly all had lending libraries.86 By 1903 there were about 900 clubs with 321,000 members. Five hundred of those clubs had libraries with a total of 187,000 volumes, though mostly fiction was in demand. Some clubs staged theatrical productions, usually melodramas but occasionally Shakespeare.87
Similarly, the Co-operative societies were authorized to spend up to 2.5 percent of their profits on education. Most spent nothing at all, but some developed impressive programs. In the 1870 and 1880s there were actually more Co-operative libraries than public libraries nationwide.88 The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society in Woolwich was devoting nearly £1,000 to education in 1901, up to £18,792 in 1937 for its 362,000 members or about 1s. per member. It opened a library in 1879, twenty-two years before any municipal library service began. By the 1930s it had 10,000 volumes, mostly light fiction, but also economics, social science, and philosophy. In 1928 the society fielded 280 dramatic and musical groups, staging Shakespeare, Ibsen, Galsworthy, and Shaw. The London area Co-operative societies together could mobilize armies of performers for mass musical events. Eight hundred choristers plus orchestras offered a concert version of Carmen at the Albert Hall in 1927. John Allen of the Unity Theatre massed 400 singers from fifteen Co-operative society choirs for Handel’s Belshazzar in May 1938, when the fall of Babylon and the liberation of the Jews had a clear anti-Nazi message.89
Chekhov in Canning Town
By their very nature, amateur theatricals were an exercise in mutual education, the Board of Education noted in a 1926 report. As one participant put it, drama at once encouraged community and individuality: it demanded not the regimentation of the shop floor, but a more creative kind of collective action. The actor “takes his place in the team, and passes on to self-expression, self-discipline and conscious co-operation with others. He finds perhaps for the first time, that he is doing something, is giving out rather than merely receiving impressions from others.” Townspeople bitterly opposed to each other in religion and politics could work together on a common project, and producing foreign plays broke through the provincialism of industrial towns. Those who were intimidated by a university-level extra-mural course might be more receptive to practical drama. Onstage, working people could enjoy an opportunity that they rarely had in life—to assume another role and express themselves to an audience. If they were not ready for that, they could always make costumes and build sets.
Recognizing this, settlement houses sponsored fringe theaters for local amateurs. The Mary Ward Settlement in London was home to the St. Pancras People’s Theatre, with seats priced from 6d. to 2s. 6d., as well as the Working Class Dramatic Club, which staged prize-winning productions of Arms and the Man and Gilbert Murray’s Andromache. The first season of the Mansfield House Players in Canning Town featured Galsworthy’s Strife, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pygmalion, Tolstoy’s Michael, Chekhov’s The Proposal, and Anatole France’s The Dumb Wife, attracting audiences of up to 800. Between 1919 and 1945, the Little Theatre at the Sheffield Educational Settlement produced Aeschylus (The Oresteia), Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone), Euripides (The Trojan Women), Aristophanes (The Frogs), Marlowe (Dr. Faustus), Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet), Milton (Comus, Samson Agonistes), Goethe (both parts of Faust), Schiller (The Maid of Orleans), Pushkin (Boris Godunov, Mozart and Salieri), Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Emperor and Galilean), Tolstoy (Where God Is, Love Is), Wilde (A Woman of No Importance), Shaw (The Devil’s Disciple, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Major Barbara), Yeats (Cathleen-ni-Houlihan), Synge (The Playboy of the Western World), and Ernst Toller (Masses and Men).
Strictly speaking, settlement houses were not mutual improvement societies, they were university-sponsored institutions staffed by educated men and women. But the literary, musical, and dramatic groups they hosted offered the same kind of collaborative working-class education. In 1938 Alexander Hartog, an apprentice tailor, found in Toynbee Hall the creative community that affluent intellectuals might hope to find in a university or bohemian quarter:
I fitted in there like a very happy bug in a well-known and well-loved rug .… Brilliantly gifted people of the many shades of Art were there—ballet dancers, actors, musicians, singers, painters, sculptors …. It was a common meeting-ground of people who had some artistic bent. One person gave forth to another, and the other received it and gave out something of his own to others. The atmosphere was truly magical. It hit me then and, even now as I look back, I still think, “That was the first time in my life I felt I was really where I belonged.” I was surrounded by people who were like myself. They were searching, they were participating. In an atmosphere almost of gaiety people were talking about their art and their pleasure and their activities.90
With the same goal in mind, the YMCA, London County Council Evening Institutes, and the WEA sponsored dramatic activities. Beginning in 1912, the Oxford and Bermondsey Shakespeare Society staged annual productions performed entirely by boys from one of London’s roughest districts. The producer admitted that “About 5 per cent or less of our boy actors learn to appreciate the language of Shakespeare, but very few of them read, and hardly one writes decent English.” Their passion for drama, he concluded,
lies in their keen enjoyment of the acting as a form of expression and legitimate self-display, and the intensely valuable training of the team spirit necessitated by everyone merging his own wishes and convenience in the requirements of the whole cast—punctuality for rehearsals, thoroughness at dull spade work, striving for corporate effect rather than individual brilliance, etc. In fact, the value of our yearly production (which I am certain is very great) is much the same as the value of a good football team—only it appeals to a rather different type of boy who would probably not be interested much in football.
Even prison educators found that Shakespearean tragedy could reduce convicts to tears and provoke profound moral self-examination. The Board of Education reported “it was a common experience of one of the teachers to meet members of his class at Shakespeare performances after their release.” One instructor found that Shakespeare dissolved the teacher-student hierarchy, even when the audience was literally captive:
If I took a class in economics, I should always be in the position of a teacher, by whatever title I chose to call myself. I would have the advantage of a trained mind, and an accumulation of facts far greater than that of anyone in my class. But in the study of the drama my education has left me little, if at all, in advance of any of my class, because the points which come up for discussion are questions of life and character where their knowledge and experience are as great, and probably greater, than my own. It seems to me that we find in the plays, and particularly in the Shakespeare plays, a basis of common experience and common humanity which destroys any barrier erected by social conventions and differences in educational opportunities.
To break down the barriers separating different levels of employees, drama societies were sponsored by a number of progressive corporations, such as Lyons Teashops and the cocoa manufacturers Rowntree and Cadbury. One large London office found that company athletic clubs rarely appealed to more than a single grade of workers, but a drama society attracted more than 400 employees of every rank. Shakespeare was selected for the first production, and an outside director brought in to ensure impartiality. Two executives were cast as artisans, two messengers played courtiers, and the society’s chairman gave orders to players who far outranked him in the office.
Shakespeare dominated the repertory of amateur dramatic groups partly because his plays were labor intensive. Where most modern plays had small casts, Elizabethan drama offered roles to battalions of actors, musicians, dancers, dressmakers, and set builders. That was a vital consideration when 400 people, with much enthusiasm but very mixed talents, showed up at an organizational meeting. Greek tragedy was also remarkably popular, thanks largely to the translations of Gilbert Murray, which put a premium on accessibility and stageworthiness. At a competition for amateur groups sponsored by the British Drama League, an educational official was stunned by two of the finalists:
The Merchant of Venice had been produced by a boys’ club in one of the worst parts of the East End, and the Shylock who had so thrilled me was a boy of 16. The Andromache had been given by a working girls’ club in a very poor neighbourhood. And I thought of these boys and girls taking into their poor homes the beauty and splendour of two of the world’s greatest masterpieces, and of all that it must mean in the enrichment of their lives. If I had any doubt as to the power of the drama as an instrument of education in its highest sense, it was resolved that evening.
Though the drama was always a disciplined group activity, it offered the kind of intellectual freedom that had always been the prime objective of autodidacts. J. R. Gregson, a cotton mill worker turned factory clerk, wrote, produced, and performed in plays for the Stockport Garrick Society, the Huddersfield Thespians, the Leeds Art Theatre, the Leeds Industrial Theatre, and the York Everyman Theatre. For him, the theater was a repudiation of the “insane ideal of standardisation” imposed by his old Board school, where “variety in boyhood was a vice, apparently, to be exorcised at whatever cost (to the boy!).” He found “a freer, more human, discursive and conversational method of tuition” in adult drama classes. “No digression was too long, no bypath too tortuous to be explored in company with, not ahead of, us. We were encouraged to think for ourselves and to follow our individual bent.” That experience convinced him that knowledge is only valuable when
acquired as a bye-product of one’s own originality and special turn of mind .… Only in the drama did I find the fullest scope for this vital activity and in the service of the drama I have acquired, as a bye-product, what real knowledge I possess and what real mental ability I exercise .… I know what modern industry means in terms of monotonous routine tasks. I know what a working-class home-life means, with few outlets for emotional “release” save the “pub” and the “chapel.” I know the mental apathy and the crippled spirit they engender. I have spent my life fighting against this state of mind and temper, both in myself and in my fellows. The working-man’s first instinct is to distrust beauty when he is made to see it. Talk to him of what life means to you, and he will confide to his neighbour—behind your back—that you are a bit funny sometimes!
The drama, he was convinced, offered working people a true “release” for the individual spirit:
This is not theory or hearsay. … I have proved it myself and seen and helped others to prove it. I believe that the most valuable result of the work at the Industrial Theatre was that it allowed, nay demanded, that the workpeople-players should break their shells and “come out of themselves.” This, to me, is the first and all-sufficient justification of the drama. Before a player can be anything but a stick he must try, at the cost of violence to his timid reserve, to become someone else. He must conquer his inbred repression, rouse his dormant spirit, practise insight and a sympathetic understanding of the “other fellow,” and the pleasure of this, the freedom and relief it brings in train, will result in the practice of the imaginative faculty off the stage as well as on. As one workman put it, “It’s no use trying to be somebody else unless you try to feel what he feels.” Another description of this sensation of release is most pithy. Said one of my actors in The Merchant of Venice, “Eh, I’ve been miles away from myself tonight, and I feel pounds lighter for it.”91
A Common Culture?
Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the achievement of mass literacy but before radio and television, working-class culture was saturated by the spirit of mutual education. Every day, information and ideas were exchanged in literally millions of commonplace settings—parlors and kitchens, workplaces and shops. One has to multiply thousands of times over the self-educated Leeds shoe repairer whose customers (including the local vicar and policeman) would congregate at his shop to debate religion, politics, and economics. Though his young son (b. 1887) could not entirely follow the discussions, he went on to become secretary of a Methodist Young Men’s Class.92
Everywhere informal groups of militant workingmen, even from the London police force, came together for intellectual discourse. C. H. Rolph remembered the “Turneymen,” a circle of radical intellectual constables led by Bob Turney, that flourished between the world wars. They clubbed together to buy used BBC classical records from a Shaftesbury Avenue shop. They circulated among themselves copies of the New Statesman and a collective season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall.
They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building sites on their beats.93
The tailoring factories of the Jewish East End offered the same kind of radical ferment. In the sweatshop Hymie Fagan was pleased to call “my university,” the shop steward introduced him to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and The Iron Heel, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. There were passionate and sophisticated shopfloor debates about Tolstoy, Gorky, Pushkin, Zola, Anatole France, Zangwill, Sholem Aleichem, religion, Zionism, and the recent (and much welcomed) Russian Revolution. Workers would reenact Morris Moscovitch performing a Yiddish Hamlet in the style of Henry Irving, or Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov.94
Meanwhile, the second generation was making good use of the Whitechapel Public Library. It has acquired legendary status as a haven where Jewish slum kids could escape overcrowded flats and plunge into books, but there also study was a social activity. “It was not only a place where one could just about get an hour’s homework done in four hours, but a meeting place for boys and girls,” recalled one habitué. “It was something like a drugstore without the coloured drinks. The girls of many different schools sat there and the boys of other schools helped them with their homework.” There was much conversation and some rowdiness, in spite of a stern librarian.95
By far the most pervasive form of mutual education was, quite simply, reading aloud. In pubs and on street corners, at Chartist meetings and in Methodist circles, the communal reading of newspapers multiplied their audience far beyond their circulation figures. In workshops, one laborer commonly read aloud while the others divided his share of the work. In an oral history investigation of social life between 1870 and 1918, half of all working-class interviewees indicated that reading aloud (including Bible reading and parents reading to children) was practiced in the homes where they were raised.96 Even the illiterate, the sight-impaired, and eternally busy housewives could share to some extent the world of print.
Oral reading was institutionalized in the form of the penny reading. Its inventor, Samuel Taylor, was a clayworker who became secretary of the Hanley Mechanics’ Institute and part-proprietor of the Staffordshire Sentinel. A passionate Liberal apostle of a “free, cheap, enlightened press,” Taylor began in 1854 to read Russell’s Crimean War dispatches for the Times from a terrace in Hanley’s market square. The first “war readings” attracted 8,000 to 10,000 people. The authorities welcomed them as a means of keeping the lower orders out of pubs and music halls, so they offered Taylor the free use of the town hall for other readings. In September 1856 he began his “Literary and Musical Entertainments for the People,” consisting of readings of selections from popular writers along with some vocal and instrumental music, topped off by the national anthem. At first the events were free, but soon attendance was so great that 1d. admission had to be charged. Within months other towns in the Potteries had adopted them, and a report in the Times broadcast the movement over the entire country.97 Between October 1857 and April 1858 nine Staffordshire towns were staging penny readings for overflow crowds, with a total admission of 60,000 to 70,000—this in a district with a population of 100,000.98
All these influences combined to produce a shared literary culture in which books were practically treated as public property, before public libraries reached most of the country. It was a culture that extended even to Flora Thompson’s rural Oxfordshire. “Modern writers who speak of the booklessness of the poor at that time must mean books as possessions,” she wrote; “there were always books to borrow.” At home, besides the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, there were volumes that some neighbors had discarded when they left town: Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s fairy tales, The Daisy Chain, and Mrs. Molesworth’s Cuckoo Clock and Carrots. The women exchanged penny novelettes, the men weekly newspapers. One could borrow Pamela and the Waverley novels from a neighbor, Christie’s Old Organ from the Sunday school library. Her uncle, a shoemaker, had once carted home from a country-house auction a large collection of old books that no one would buy: novels, poetry, sermons, histories, dictionaries. She read him Cranford while he worked in his shop, where he would discuss politics, science, and religion with the locals. Later, she could borrow from her employer (the village postmistress) Shakespeare and Byron’s Don Juan; as well as Jane Austen, Dickens, and Trollope from the Mechanics’ Institute library. The women held parties where they sewed clothing for the poor while one of them read aloud. The penny reading, dying out in most parts of the country by the 1890s, was still popular in these rural villages, though the material was fairly standard. Poetic selections were usually on the level of “Excelsior,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” An attempt to read episodes from The Heart of Midlothian and Vanity Fair brought no visible response from the audience. Of course, Dickens made them laugh, cry, and demand encores, but they rarely borrowed his works from the parish library. Urban readers were more active, but as Flora Thompson noted, these country people “were waiting, a public ready-made, for the wireless and the cinema.” In fact, a conspicuously precocious reader was likely to arouse resentment among the neighbors:
None of their children had learned to read before they went to school, and then only under compulsion, and they thought that Laura, by doing so, had stolen a march on them. So they attacked her mother about it, her father conveniently being away. “He’d no business to teach the child himself,” they said. “Schools be the places for teaching, and you’ll likely get wrong for him doing it when governess finds out”. …
There was a good deal of jealousy and unkindness among the parents over the … one annual prize for Scripture. Those whose children had not done well in examinations would never believe that the success of others was due to merit. The successful ones were spoken of as “favourites” and disliked. “You ain’t a-goin’ to tell me that young So-and-So did any better n’r our Jim,” some disappointed mother would say. “Stands to reason that what he could do our Jimmy could do, and better, too.” The parents of those who had passed were almost apologetic. “’Tis all luck,” they would say. “Our Tize happened to hit it this time; next year it’ll be your Alice’s turn.” They showed no pleasure in any small success their own children might have. Indeed, it is doubtful if they felt any, except in the case of a boy who, having passed the fourth standard, could leave school and start work. Their ideal for themselves and their children was to keep to the level of the normal. To them outstanding ability was no better than outstanding stupidity.99
The great virtue of mutual improvement was a general sharing of knowledge; its great drawback was a corollary distrust of private study, which was regarded as selfish and unneighborly. The mother of Ruth Johnson (b. 1912) made it clear that reading was not only a distraction from housework, but unsociable as well. As a Lancashire millhand she “had become so habituated to the continuous clamour of the machines that, for her, silence had become almost an unnatural and unfriendly state .… Silence should be devoted to speech, and not frittered away in a still deeper and uncommunicating void of book-reading.”100 The mineworker and novelist J. G. Glenwright (b. early 1900s) aroused resentment among his workmates because he devoted mealtimes to reading rather than conversation.101 Communing with nature in search of poetic inspiration could generate even greater hostility. As one sympathetic observer recalled, Alfred Williams, the poet of the Swindon railway works,
was considered mad by those villagers to whom animals were just animals, either of value or pests according to their type. Said one “I see’d Alfie Williams t’other night walkin’ down ‘Poor Meadow’ wi’ ’is ’ands behind ’n an’ gawkin’ up at the sky for all the world like a b——- lunatic.” By most of his workmates in the forge he was not appreciated. His omission to join them in small talk while waiting between “heats”—preferring to spend the time in studious meditation—was construed by them as snobbishness.102
Any kind of serious writing involved prolonged solitude and rumination, and that ran against the grain of working-class culture, as Margaret Thomson Davis (b. 1926) discovered when she began her career as a novelist:
Writers were a different breed from us. They lived in a different world. Indeed it was hard to imagine that such creatures existed in flesh and blood at all. They were so far removed from the tenement flat in the middle of Glasgow in which we lived. For anyone in such an environment to have writing pretensions was treated with the utmost suspicion. More than that, it aroused in one’s friends, neighbours and relations acute embarrassment, shame, discomfort and downright hostility.
“There’s a lot more important things you could be doing than sitting there scribbling,” her mother scolded. “Give that floor a good scrub, for instance.” Her father complained of the cost of keeping the light burning at night, and was outraged when he found her using the typewriter he had on loan from his union for his work as branch secretary. When she announced her first acceptance from a publisher, her family responded with embarrassed silence, then resumed talking about the weather. “I felt terribly ashamed,” she recalled. “The unspoken belief had been confirmed, that there always had been something odd about me.” It was worse for one of her friends, an uneducated Irish laborer. When he shut himself in a bedroom to write, his anxious family held a conference and did everything to dissuade him. “There’s something far wrong with a man who writes letters to himself!” his brother exploded. “If you’d just been a pouf the priest could have talked to you or one of us could have battered it out of you. But what the hell can anybody do about a writer?” When he received his first check for a short story, his mother was convinced that he had committed some kind of fraud and insisted that he return it. And when a television play of his was reviewed “his mother was shocked and said that theirs had been a respectable family until then; never once had any of their names been in the paper.”103
Reading was acceptable provided it was a collective activity, as it commonly was in working-class homes. In turn-of-the-century Bolton, Alice Foley was delegated to borrow books from the public library for her entire family. (After a long trek in clattering clogs, she had to confront enormous catalogues and equally intimidating librarians.) At home the books were doled out to her several brothers and sisters. To her mother, however, a roomful of children reading quietly was practically an insult: “Well, I met as weel goo eaut, for this place is nowt but a deaf an dumb schoo’.” Her attitude was understandable: she was illiterate, and silent reading cut her off from literature. It was entirely different when her husband read aloud from Dickens and George Eliot, or when Alice offered to read Alice in Wonderland: “To my surprise, mother entered quite briskly into the activities of the rabbit hole. From that time onwards I became mother’s official reader and almost every day when I returned from school she would say coaxingly ‘Let’s have a chapthur.’”104
This tradition of collective reading pervasively reinforced the importance of literature and education, even in the many working-class families that were indifferent or even hostile to culture. “It would be easy to summarize my memories of home in one word—quarrels,” wrote Harry M. Burton, in his memoir of a bleak London street before the First World War. “When I remember the childhood of other autobiographers—the Boston and Quincy of Henry Adams, the border-country of John Buchan, the Cornwall of Mr. Rowse, even the mining valleys of those teeming literary children of South Wales—I am depressed at the complete absence of any inspiring quality in our little suburban lives. … We never bought a book, never went to an art-gallery, a concert or a theatre (except to the pantomime).” His father, an irregularly employed housepainter, liked a “stirring novel” but nothing more challenging than Conan Doyle: “He had no use whatever for anything remotely approaching the spiritual in art, literature or music, and he seldom took the trouble to conceal his contempt.” And yet the whole family read and, on some level, took pleasure in sharing and discussing their reading. His mother recited serials from the Family Reader and analyzed them at length with grandma over a cup of tea. Every few minutes his father would offer up a snippet from the Daily Chronicle or Lloyd’s Weekly News. The children were not discouraged from reading aloud, perhaps from Jules Verne: “I can smell to this day the Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” Burton recalled. The whole family made use of the public library and enjoyed together children’s magazines like Chips and the Butterfly. It was this atmosphere, perhaps, that propelled Burton up the scholarship ladder to the faculty of Cambridge University.105
When mutual improvement alumni graduated to the ancient universities, they were likely to be disillusioned. “I had been used to the informal learning situations provided by the Mutual Improvement Society and the WEA class, with the ample opportunities they provided for questions and discussion,” explained ex-fitter and Oxford adult student John Allaway (b. 1902), “and I was amazed at the formality of the university lecture system, the aloofness of the university teacher from his students, the perfunctoriness of much of the teaching and the evident reluctance of many university teachers to answer questions or to allow themselves to be drawn into discussion.”106 When Derek Davies attended Oxford after the Second World War, the “elderly dons … and their Edwardian attitudes consorted ill with the Brave New World I was looking for.” He achieved “emancipation” later, in the living rooms of his fellow schoolteachers. “There I found, often without being able to analyse consciously the components, a style of living which rapidly became my ideal. There was talk and argument, and books and music, and pictures on the wall that clearly did something more than merely fill up a space.”107
The universities did provide the privacy necessary for intensive study, which was in short supply in working-class homes. “Homework was a bit of a problem because our house was hardly ever quiet, and no one sat still for long,” recalled scholarship girl Elizabeth Flint (b. c. 1905), whose father worked a vegetable barrow in the East End. “Certainly no one would alter their ways for the sake of homework. If they thought about it at all, which is doubtful, they would have regarded it as a mild lunacy on my part.” She usually had to study in a stifling bedroom or at a neighbor’s house. As for the kitchen table, that
was always crammed with such a miscellany of things that I would be lucky if I could find space enough for one book alone. On our table there would be cups and mugs, a bag of sugar, like as not Dad’s cap would be there, and perhaps a clothes peg or a pile of roughly dried clothes, waiting for whoever would bother to iron them. At home, if you tried to tidy things up a bit, everyone would grumble. “If your old school wants this house to be put upside down for your old books,” Mum had said more than once, “then you’d better leave the place.”108
As late as 1949, Jack Lawson could write: “A library for a workman means a corner in the kitchen or the sitting-room. It is a triumph when he gets a real bookcase or presentable bookshelves in a room apart from workaday affairs. … Every student workman knows the stages and the progress from no books to books, from books in the kitchen to books in a separate room. These stages are the milestones of his life.”109
Even when parents cleared the kitchen table and gave their children every encouragement, cramming for examinations could be an alienating experience. Dennis Marsden (b. 1933) came from a solidly respectable, library-using family. His father owned an Esperanto dictionary, lectured on Malthus before a mutual improvement society, enjoyed Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Galsworthy, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. He had been an exceptional essay-writer in school before leaving at thirteen to work in the mills for 5s. a week, and he found a bittersweet satisfaction in the successes of the next generation. Of his fifteen children, nieces, and nephews, all but one passed scholarship examinations, most attended grammar school, five took university degrees, three others attended teacher training colleges, one became a doctor, another a senior civil servant, and yet another a regional child care officer. Dennis went all the way to Cambridge University, but at a price: “More than sheer loneliness, I knew what a mountaineer feels on an exposed climb.” His three best friends went to inferior schools, fell back into the ranks of manual workers, and lost contact with him. There was no caning at Marsden’s grammar school, but there was relentless cramming. The fact that his parents sacrificed enormously for his education added to the psychological pressures, for they aimed at nothing less than Oxford or Cambridge (“You show ’em, Dennis lad”). “This was a family effort, yet the divide between us was growing,” Marsden recalled. “My father began to make jokes about taking me for a walk to get to know me better.” When his brother only won a scholarship to Leeds University (“an occasion for tears, recriminations and bad temper”) his parents complained that he had spent too much time with his youth club, “a very powerful object lesson for me had any been needed.” Marsden shut down his social activities and lived almost in
suspended animation, a kind of monastic novitiate. Only one of my close friends had any sort of relationship with girls. For the rest of us sex was confined to fantasy or lone visits to American musicals, which involved me very painfully at times. … I was emotionally frozen, and sex came to have two aspects for me. It was a danger to academic work. And more than that it was lower-class. [A] friend who knew girls lived in a notorious council estate, and central-school boys whom I met at the town swimming-club also had girl friends. They seemed more confident and complete; yet all the time I felt I was Grammar-School and my day would come.110
For anyone who had spoken before a mutual improvement society, attended a WEA class, or read aloud bits from the evening paper in the kitchen, education was a social activity, not essentially different from the fellowship of the pub, chapel, or trade union. Knowledge was something to be shared around. The scholarship student, in contrast, had to withdraw into a shell and hoard as much information as possible:
This immediately produced difficulties. Should the wireless be on or off? Could the younger children play noisily? Could the father stretch his legs and tell the day’s tales? To ask for silence here was to offend the life of the family, was to go against it in its natural moments of coming together, of relaxation. So many learned the early habit of working with the wireless on and the family talking, of building a cone of silence around themselves. To a certain extent this worked well, but … the family was not always untroubled at this, for the private concentration could produce an abstraction, a forgetfulness, an off-handedness that also gave offence …. These long homework hours, even more than “accent”, cut into the vital centres of family life, dislocated the whole household’s living. It could generate hostility, misunderstanding, irritation, jealousy; and many mothers had to make a special effort to take it under their protection, to create a new rhythm around it.111
Ironically, the conflicts worsened as educational opportunities opened up for working-class children. Mutual improvement societies enabled some of their alumni to rise out of their class, but they could at least feel that they had all helped each other in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. By the mid-twentieth century, the proliferation of scholarships pressured bright students to abandon the ideal of cooperative liberal education for intense academic competition. Jeremy Seabrook (b. 1939) was painfully sensitive to the change. His mother, who had worked in a boot and shoe factory, cherished her old editions of Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Keats, Shelley, and Browning:
My mother’s school prizes were her most sacred possessions, and, in the hope that I would follow her example, she gave them to me when I was far too young, with the result that I scribbled in them or tore open the binding to see how they were held together; and the works of Tennyson and the Gems of George Eliot and the improving fiction with embossed covers and pages edged with gold fell apart in a disorder of dried gum and loose thread. She attributed to education a magical power that was far removed from the pedestrian and dispiriting experience I was subjected to. For her, education represented the chance for working-class people to think for themselves and take control of their own destiny; by the time I came to be educated it had become a process elaborated specifically to avoid this.
We went to the school she had attended thirty years earlier, but it was no longer a place where being clever was consoled with gold-embossed books. Cleverness had become something to be isolated and fostered, like a culture of bacteria, in a vessel free from contamination.
Exceptional students were now set apart in a classroom where “we underwent a programme of social rather than academic training. We were treated like postulants to a closed order.” Seabrook won his scholarship, but by then the glittering prizes were meaningless. When his teacher rewarded him with Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, “I told her that I really didn’t like Shakespeare, but we needed a teapot stand.”112