Chapter Four A Conservative Canon

Alf Garnett and his American cousin, Archie Bunker, may be caricatures, but working-class cultural conservatism is a real phenomenon in industrial societies. Some of its manifestations can even be quantified. In France, Pierre Bourdieu has plotted taste and class on Cartesian coordinates and found a distinct correlation between conventionality and manual labor.1 In Britain one can detect a similar and remarkably persistent pattern throughout the industrial era. Literary canons may change over time; but at any given point, the reading tastes of the British working classes consistently lagged a generation behind those of the educated middle classes, a cultural conservatism that often coexisted with political radicalism.

This tendency can be traced back to eighteenth-century Scotland, where the first working-class libraries in the British Isles were founded. In this period, a preference for religious books reflected conservative tastes; the avant-garde was represented by the growing acceptance of fiction as a legitimate literary genre. Table 4.1 (p. 117), based on statistics compiled by John Crawford, reveals a striking difference in library collections serving different social classes. The first line is a benchmark drawn from William Bent’s London Catalogue of Books, which listed new titles published in London between 1700 and 1773. The second line analyzes a catalogue from around 1786 for James Sibbald’s circulating library in Edinburgh’s Parliament Square, which served a middle-class clientele. The next set of figures represents averages of the holdings of four other middle-class libraries in smaller Scottish towns (Greenock, Hawick, Forfar, Duns) compiled from catalogues published between 1789 and 1795. The last two lines reflect the stock of two libraries run by and for lead miners, in Wanlockhead (1790) and Leadhills (1800).

These statistics suggest that in the golden afternoon of the Scottish Enlightenment, reading tastes among the affluent were quite up-to-date in the provinces as well as in the heart of the Caledonian metropolis. Leadhills, in contrast, was much slower to shift its collection from religion to fiction; at Wanlockhead, fiction would not overtake theology until the early twentieth century. Some other Scottish working-class libraries banned fiction altogether, at least until the success of Sir Walter Scott forced them to change or die. The Dunfermline Tradesmen’s Library (founded 1808) made the transition when it found that weavers were clubbing together to buy the Waverley novels: by 1823, eighty-five out of 290 volumes in its collection were fiction, and as a result membership and usage increased dramatically. These libraries also avoided controversial politics. In 1837 miners at Leadhills and Wanlockhead refused to accept George Combe’s Constitution of Man because they considered it hostile to revealed religion.2 Combe was in fact a radical, dismissive of classical literature, and a vocal advocate of phrenology, scientific reason, shorter work hours, and female education. His Edinburgh lectures, as Lord Cockburn reported, attracted “hundreds of clerks and shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, nibbling at the teats of science,” but not manual workers, in part because they were disinclined to pay 6d. per lecture.³

Table 4.1: Holdings in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Libraries (in percent)
	Religion	Fiction
Bent’s Catalogue (1700–73)	19	8
Sibbald’s Library (c. 1786)	8	20
Four proprietary libraries (1789–95)	3.1	14.1
Wanlockhead library (1790)	23.6	14.2
Leadhills library (1800)	24.6	8.5

Janet Hamilton grew up among Scottish weavers who read newspapers together and discussed parliamentary politics, but whose reading was otherwise almost entirely theological. Most homes in her village of Langloan had Pilgrim’s Progress and Watts’s hymns. Some religious periodicals circulated, but no secular magazines. When local workingmen, farmers, and schoolteachers set up a subscription library, half the books they voted to acquire were religious: “then biography, travels, voyages, and several sets of the British Essayist, a fair proportion of history and geography; no poetry, nothing of the drama, and but one novel”—Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766), in five volumes. Consequently, Janet had a heavy literary diet as a child—history by Rollin and Plutarch, Ancient Universal History, Pitscottie’s Chronicles of Scotland, as well as the Spectator and Rambler. She could borrow books by Burns, Robert Fergusson, and other poets from neighbors, and at age eight she found, “to my great joy, on the loom of an intellectual weaver,” Paradise Lost and Allan Ramsay’s poems. But during the radical agitation of 1819–20, the common people of the village would have nothing to do with the Black Dwarf:

A small, mean-looking sheet, overflowing with scurrilous epithets and venomous invectives against the Government, and utterly subversive of all lawful authority and social order, and interlarded with scepticism and blasphemy. … [We] felt a strong desire to see what we would at other times have deprecated—parties of soldiers among us, to protect property and insure social order. … Long after the terror had passed away mothers would frighten their wayward children into submission by telling them that the radicals would catch them.⁴

This attachment to religious literature held up the development of inexpensive secular magazines. According to farm laborer Alexander Somerville, George Miller’s 4d. Cheap Magazine (published 1813–14) failed partly because potential readers found it insufficiently pious.5 It took a generation of political activism—as well as the popularity of Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott—to prepare the working classes for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and the Penny Magazine. Before then, they could only glean that kind of “useful knowledge” from old volumes of middle-class magazines. As a boy Thomas Carter was baffled by adult books like Paradise Lost, but his schoolmaster loaned him volumes of the Arminian Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine, whose miscellaneous contents were far more digestible. Later, as an apprentice, he found in his master’s kitchen an odd volume of the Spectator, wherein Addison helpfully explained what Paradise Lost was all about. Carter read so much about London in the Spectator and Rambler that in 1810 he moved to the metropolis, half expecting to join the coffeehouse intelligentsia.⁶

The only books John Clare repeatedly read were Paradise Lost, Thomson’s Seasons, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, and The Vicar of Wakefield: he had no desire to read Scott or any other contemporary novelist.⁷ As the great Romantics were not yet available in cheap editions, worker-poets had to look to the eighteenth century and earlier for their models, even if the styles were antiquated and inappropriate to a new industrial world. “Every poet must at first be an imitator,” admitted the Northumberland shepherd poet Robert Story (b. 1795). With little formal education, he knew that untutored genius could not find expression “unless a medium is found through which it may dart its irradiations. That medium is the language of our country’s approved bards,” and only by studying and borrowing from them could any aspiring poet find his own voice. Pope happened to be first English poet that Story discovered, so he provided the template from which the herd-boy minted pastorals “delightfully free from everything connected with real life or rural manners; and wrote descriptions that were descriptive of nothing.” Story soon hungered for “a freer or less measured style of composition,” but in the wilds of Northumberland he had no way of knowing that the Romantic movement in literature was in full swing:

At the very time when I was lamenting the lack of poets in the nineteenth century, and almost fancying that I should myself be the oasis in the desert—Wordsworth had produced his “Lyrical Ballads,” Rogers his “Pleasures of Memory,” and Campbell his “Pleasures of Hope;” the strains of Scott were still in all their freshness; Byron had just wrapped himself in the mantle of “Childe Harold;” Moore had displayed—or was displaying—the riches of oriental imagery; and Southey, by tale upon tale, each more brilliant than the last, was continuing a climax that was to terminate in “Roderick!”—It might be poetically said, that the gales of Britain were alive with harmony; but the sound was turned aside by the mountains that sheltered my cottage; and it rolled away into distance—unheard and unenjoyed!

When he was finally exposed to Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, he reeled from the shock of the new. Pope may have been too refined, but this, Story insisted, was “uncontrolled barbarism,” poetic anarchy, “harsh, puerile, and fantastic.”8 Robert White, another pastoral poet born just seven years after Story, had somewhat more progressive tastes, which extended to Shelley, Keats, Childe Harold, and The Lady of the Lake. But his reading stopped short at the Romantics. In 1873 he confessed that he could not stomach avant-garde poets like Tennyson. “As for our modern novel-writers—Dickens, Thackeray and others I do not care to read them, since Smollett, Fielding and Scott especially are all I desire.”⁹

Perhaps the most popular proletarian author of the century was Hugh Miller (b. 1802), a Scottish stonemason who achieved great celebrity as a geological writer. His The Old Red Sandstone (1841), First Impressions of England (1847), and Footprints of the Creator (1849), as well as his memoir My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) each sold more than 50,000 copies by 1900.¹⁰ But Miller was still trying to reconcile modern geological science with Genesis, a paradigm already rendered obsolete by the evolutionary theory advanced in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33). Even Miller’s literary style was out of date: in 1834 he alluded to “my having kept company with the older English writers,—the Addisons, Popes, and Robertsons of the last century at a time when I had no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the authors of the present time.”¹¹ Growing up in Cromarty, Miller had access to the substantial personal libraries of a carpenter and a retired clerk, as well as his father (sixty volumes), his uncles (150 volumes), and a cabinetmaker-poet (upwards of 100 volumes). These collections offered a broad selection of English essayists and poets—of the Queen Anne period.¹²

Miller’s continuing popularity may be an indicator of persistent working-class resistance to Darwin. When Jim Bullock (b. 1903) wrote an examination essay on coal formation, his father (a Yorkshire miner and Baptist fundamentalist) tossed the paper in the fire, appalled that his son’s treatment of geology so clearly contradicted Scripture.¹³ Of course, urban working-class militants like T. A. Jackson (b. 1879) had been promoting Darwinism as a weapon against evangelical religion—only to discover that they too were behind intellectual fashion. “The Darwinian battle … had not only been fought and won for middle and upper class culture,” Jackson observed, “the ultra-Left, as in the case of Erewhon Butler were stirring beyond Darwin into neo-Lamarckism. In proletarian circles the fight still had to be won.” As an apprentice, Jackson relied upon secondhand bookshops and cheap out-of-copyright reprints for his reading: “There was thus a perceptible time-lag between the culture of the reading section of the proletariat and that of the middle and upper classes.”¹⁴

Before the First World War, elderly Lanarkshire miners were known as “fourpenny professors,” because they had attended village schools at 4d. a week and were solidly grounded in theology. But they rarely read daily newspapers or contemporary authors. Patrick Dollan, who organized an informal library service for them, found that they preferred Byron, Carlyle, Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Hardy, Hall Caine, George Meredith, Ouida, Zola, Dumas, Jules Verne, Hawthorne, Harrison Ainsworth, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, while Shelley was a favorite for quoting at ILP meetings. Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett were completely unknown to them: Dollan himself only discovered them when he visited Manchester and attended Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre.15 And there were still a few ancient mechanics’ institute veterans who had never accepted fiction as “improving literature.” One of them was appalled to find his grandson reading a novel from a public library: “What are you doing with this trash? Read proper books, young man—proper books.” (The novel was Anna Karenina.)¹⁶

A General Theory of Rubbish

The high cost of new books and literary periodicals was an obstacle to the working-class reader, but not an insurmountable one. Every industrial town of any size had at least one secondhand bookstall in the market square. In the mid-nineteenth century, journalist Henry Mayhew found that the prime customers of London bookstalls were workingmen. When he asked what sold particularly well, the answers fell into a clear pattern: Rasselas, The Vicar of Wakefield, Peregrine Pickle, Tom Jones, Goldsmith’s histories, A Sentimental Journey, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Philip Quarll, Telemachus, Gil Blas, the letters of Junius, Shakespeare, Pope, James Thomson, William Cowper, Burns, Byron, and Scott. For the most part, they were the standard classics of the long eighteenth century. Bound volumes of almost any periodical from the same period (e.g., Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, Rambler) sold briskly for 1s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. a volume. Equally revealing was a list of what was not generally available for sale. The supply of old black-letter editions was far less than it once had been, since they were now snapped up by second-hand dealers for resale to affluent collectors. It could be equally difficult to find popular nineteenth-century poets like Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Hood, because they were still in demand. “They haven’t become cheap enough yet for the streets,” said one stall-owner, but “they would come to it in time.”¹⁷

That stall-owner recognized a market phenomenon familiar to any dealer in “collectables.” More than a century later, Michael Thompson would explain it in terms of “Rubbish Theory.” Almost any cultural product—from Melville novels to Elvis Presley lunchboxes to cast-iron storefront facades in lower Manhattan—seems to follow a three-phase life cycle. At first everyone must have one simply because it is novel and confers a certain distinction on the owner. That distinction is lost when ownership becomes so common that the market is saturated. At that point the artifact becomes “banal,” and its value plummets to the level of “rubbish.” Production ceases, and the thing is gradually junked—until it becomes so scarce that it acquires an antique cachet. In this final phase its value rises once again, often quite dramatically.18

The literary marketplace is governed by the same laws. First editions of books in nineteenth-century Britain could be very expensive, but eventually they would pass out of vogue and end up in the 2d. bookstalls. A generation or two later they would become collectors’ items, and bibliophiles would bid up their price. Only in the intervening window of unfashionability would they be affordable for the working-class autodidact, whose reading would therefore always be a certain distance behind the times. By the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Knight observed, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and Tristram Shandy had “utterly gone out of the popular view.”¹⁹ Therefore, they were widely available. In the 1920s Janet Hitchman acquired her literary education among the derelict bookshelves of an orphanage, which included a huge collection of “drunken-father-death-bed-conversion” stories (Christie’s Old Organ, ‘The Little Match Girl’, A Peep Behind the Scenes), as well as everything by Dickens, old volumes of Punch and the Spectator, and The Life of Ruskin. “My undigested reading made me look at the world with mid-Victorian eyes,” she recalled. “Much as present-day [1960] Russians are supposed to do, I thought there were still little boys in London who swept crossings to support their ailing mammas, and that if I ever ran away I could always earn my bread by cleaning doorsteps. I also believed that you had a baby if you allowed a man to kiss you, for this was always the sequence of events in the books.”²⁰

As late as 1940, Mass Observation found that while 55 percent of working-class adults read books, 66 percent never bought books, another 10 percent once bought them but no longer did, 19 percent bought books only occasionally, and only 5 percent had bought a book within the past two to three weeks. Sixty-eight percent never patronized any kind of library and only 16 percent used the public library: the remainder resorted to subscription and 2d. libraries.²¹ In working-class communities books were usually acquired second-hand or as gifts (notably the ubiquitous Sunday school prizes), borrowed, inherited, or scavenged. From rubbish heaps and used-book stalls, labor activist Manny Shinwell (b. 1884) was able to build up a library of 250 volumes, including Dickens, Meredith, Hardy, Keats, Burns, Darwin, Huxley, Kant, and Spinoza.²² Autodidacts could afford reprints such as John Dicks’s English Classics and Everyman’s Library, but they were generally out of copyright.

Thus Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Greek philosophy, as well as the John Dicks edition of Vanity Fair in weekly installments. The common denominator among these authors was that they were all dead. “Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me,” Keating explained. “Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation.” His initiation into modern literature came when his brother introduced him to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat: “I had thought that only Smollett and Dickens could make a reader laugh; and I was surprised to find that a man who was actually living could write in such a genuinely humourous way.”23 In the early 1870s bookbinder Frederick Rogers wanted to read Tennyson and Browning, but a half-crown Tennyson was not available until 1879, and no cheap Browning appeared until the year of his death (1889). Rogers was able to enjoy Browning’s “Paracelsus” in the Guildhall Library, but beyond that its collection was fairly antiquated.²⁴

The People’s Bard

Nineteenth-century popular culture was dominated by one dead author in particular, and Victorian “Bardolatry” was driven largely by working-class demand. In mid-century London newsboys spent their odd 6d. on Hamlet and Macbeth.²⁵ Drama critics reported on Shakespeare productions where the boxes and stalls were half-sold, while the pit and gallery were filled with enthusiastic audiences who loudly commented on the performance and even prompted the actors. Between the 1840s and 1870s, popular demand drove Birmingham’s Theatre Royal to boost the proportion of Shakespeare and other classic drama from about 15 to 30 percent of its repertoire, while melodrama fell from a half to a quarter. In 1862 a theater manager provoked something approaching a riot when he attempted to substitute a modern comedy for an announced production of Othello. A London reporter described the proletarian audience for an 1872 production of The Winter’s Tale : “Without knowing anything of poetry they felt the wondrous power of the poet’s genius, and their flushed faces and brightened eyes betokened the thrill which some of the magnificent passages sent among them.” As a Birmingham reviewer noted in 1885,

The pit has had a dramatic education …, and the pit knows at once what is good, bad or indifferent. The criticism of the pit … if rough and ready, is formed on a sound basis. Listen between the acts to the remarks passed around you on a new exponent of a celebrated part, and you will hear comparisons drawn between the present performance and all the great ones who have trod the boards.²⁶

Before the cinema, caravans of barnstorming actors brought Shakespeare to Durham mining villages, often using local talent for the lesser roles.²⁷ “I knew several men who could recite long passages from Shakespeare’s plays impromptu at any time,” recalled Bradford millworker F. W. Jowett (b. 1864). “One man, a workmate of mine who could neither read nor write, never missed seeing a good play and could appraise the actors with sound judgment.”²⁸

These enthusiasts were not crowding into the theaters out of deference to middle-class tastes. For many of them, Shakespeare was a proletarian hero who spoke directly to working people. One weaver’s son made that point by translating The Merchant of Venice into Lancashire dialect.29 In Leicester Thomas Cooper founded his Shakespearean Chartist Association in 1841, quickly attracting 3,000 members. The Leicester Working Men’s College (founded 1862), the Working Men’s Club (founded 1866), and the local Independent Labour Party (from the early 1900s) sponsored regular Shakespeare readings. The Leicester Domestic Mission men’s class attracted up to a thousand to its annual Shakespeare recitals, among them a worker-poet who opened the 1866 program with these lines:

I have a right, a kindred right I claim,

Though rank nor titles gild my humble name,

’Tis from his class, the class the proud discard,

For Shakespeare was himself the people’s bard.³⁰

One ex-ploughboy proclaimed, “It was Shakespeare who taught me to say, ‘I am a true labourer: I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man’s hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good.’”³¹

The plays also provided a language of radical political mobilization. As E. P. Thompson noticed, radicals and Chartists habitually quoted Shakespeare in their polemics.³² So did the confrontational secularists associated with G. J. Holyoake: for them, the plays became a surrogate “Bible of Humanity.”³³ When John Dougherty attempted to ally all trade unions in a National Association for the Protection of Labour, his 1830 manifesto began with militant words from Julius Caesar.³⁴ Jailed for incitement to riot in 1919, Manny Shinwell kept his spirits up by reading the plays and taking notes on them. On his release, his notebook was taken away and returned only after most of the pages had been removed: “Shakespearean quotations, together with my reflections on man’s inhumanity to man, were doubtless regarded as dangerous material by the prison authorities.”³⁵

Shakespeare provided a political script for J. R. Clynes, the son of an Irish farm laborer, who rose from the textile mills of Oldham to become deputy leader of the House of Commons. In his youth he drew inspiration from the “strange truth” he discovered in Twelfth Night: “Be not afraid of greatness.” (“What a creed! How it would upset the world if men lived up to it, I thought.”) Urged on by a Co-operative society librarian, he worked through the plays and discovered they were about people who “had died for their beliefs. Wat Tyler and Jack Cade seemed heroes.” Reading Julius Caesar, “the realisation came suddenly to me that it was a mighty political drama” about the class struggle, “not just an entertainment.” According to his comrade Will Thorne, Clynes was “the only man who ever settled a trade dispute by citing Shakespeare.” (Evidently, he overawed a stubborn employer by reciting an entire scene from Julius Caesar.) Elected to Parliament in 1906, he read A Midsummer Night’s Dream while awaiting the returns.³⁶

Robert Smillie, president of the Scottish Miners’ Federation, felt that his lack of education hampered his trade union work, until Shakespeare exercised his powers of thought and expression: “It was a new and enchanting world. Those tragedies and comedies, to an ardent young mind which had hitherto been ‘cribbed, cabin’d, and confin’d,’ caught and held in the iron clutch of the industrial machine, were a sheer revelation. … Outside of the boards of the Bible I know of no greater mental stimulus than Shakespeare.”37 Then there was Alice Foley who had to endure home performances by her father, a Bolton millhand:

I can remember the agony of having to be Desdemona. You see, he knew all the tragedies of Shakespeare and he would enact them, you see, half drunk he would enact them. And he used to go stalking round the house … he was a majestic man … giving us Hamlet’s soliloquies and all these long speeches and if he took Othello he would fling me suddenly into either an armchair or on the old horsehair sofa and smother me with a cushion, you know. I can remember to this day the stuffy old cushion that he used to put over my mouth. And then just as suddenly he would fall back in his chair and he would say, “The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it.” And it was his own soliloquy. It was the pity of it, you see, that he could do that kind of thing so magnificently, and yet .…³⁸

If Shakespeare still had a proletarian following in the nineteenth century, it melted away in the twentieth. By the 1880s, popular demand for his plays was already beginning to slacken. In 1910 the Leicester Pioneer noted the trend, and placed the blame squarely on the mass media and public education: working people had been “Daily Mailed” and “School Boarded into preferring Mr. Hall Caine before the late William Shakespeare.”³⁹ Here were the outlines of what would become a common leftist critique of modern culture: while the popular media distracted the masses from serious literature, a bureaucratized system of compulsory education reduced Shakespeare to tedious classroom drill. It was certainly hard for classic drama to compete with popular fiction, the music hall, and the cinema. At the same time, it seems unfair to blame the 1870 Education Act for the decline of the people’s bard. In school memoirs, some of the most rhapsodic passages harken back to Shakespeare recitals in class. The Merchant of Venice was “unforgettable,” something that “brought into our very classroom the human passions of the outside world, its scheming hatred, scorn, avarice and injustice”—this from a Lancashire girl (b. 1912) who “simply did not know what drama was,” since she and her classmates had never seen a play performed.⁴⁰

Another factor may have been involved here. The same workers who read a radical political message into Shakespeare had hopelessly conservative tastes in stagecraft. Even Victorian critics complained about the stodginess of plebeian audiences. They “preferred their Hamlet acted in a mannered, dated way,” observes Jeremy Crump, and reserved their greatest applause for warhorse soliloquies delivered with predictable grandiosity.⁴¹ As a Glasgow power-loom tenter admitted, “I suppose it was the melodramatic element in them that made Julius Caesar and Hamlet such a draw” among the same audiences that were spellbound by East Lynne.42 Frederick Rogers found that no one else in his London bookbinder’s shop would tolerate Henry Irving’s new psychological treatment of Shakespeare in the 1870s. “He was making a revolution in dramatic art,” Rogers recalled, “and the workshop wanted no revolution there. It held certain stereotyped ideas as to Shakespeare’s conceptions of his own characters, and these ideas were represented by the men and women it was used to—or it thought they were—and Irving’s wonderful psychological studies of passion or crime were things it could not understand, and would not accept.” In Hamlet the line “Look here upon this picture, and on this … ” traditionally called for gestures toward two actual paintings, but with Irving the portraits were only suggested: “The workshop rose in furious revolt at this innovation.”⁴³ As melodrama and stage literalism went out of fashion (at least among middle-class sophisticates), working-class audiences would be left far behind. If they found Irving too avant-garde, how would they respond to the still more innovative Edwardian productions staged by Harley Granville Barker, which experimented with nonrepresentational sets?

Perhaps they turned to the pages of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, where they could find a more familiar mix of socialism and literary conservatism. “I sometimes wish our people would give less time to modern and more to ancient English literature,” Blatchford once sighed. Emerson, Ruskin, and George Eliot were fair enough, but Blatchford directed his readers to The Faerie Queene, More’s Utopia, Sir Philip Sidney, and Shakespeare.⁴⁴ Contemporary literature had even less appeal for W. E. Adams, a compositor and editor who began his political career as a Chartist and a republican. By 1903 he was fulminating against “the loathesome suggestiveness of the problem play,” in which “harlots and strumpets have been made the heroines of dramas.” He condemned publishers who brought out translations of Zola, and he vilified modern English novelists who seemed to be suggesting “that the father of a woman’s child was no more anybody’s concern than the cut or fashion of her under-garments.” Adams’s tastes had been formed in the 1850s by a literature course at the London Working Men’s College, taught by the philologist F. J. Furnivall, who concentrated on Chaucer and the Elizabethans. Adams was prepared to concede that, even in the wholesome Victorian era, there was a huge audience for the novels of G. W. M. Reynolds—sensational trash, verging on pornography, modeled after Eugène Sue. But, he protested, back then everyone knew it was trash: “With the taste for sensation and salacious details which the modern novelist and modern dramatist have cultivated, it is not at all unlikely that [Reynolds] would, if he had flourished at the end of the century, have been admitted to the hierarchy of fiction.”⁴⁵

The Hundred Best Books

That comment was a remarkably far-sighted anticipation of today’s postmodern literary standards, and it points to a cultural gap that was opening up between the classes. Artist Frank Steel (b. early 1860s) was not inclined to sentimentalize the Victorian era: at his workhouse school he had been force-fed moralizing tales designed to “induce in the plastic minds of dependent children a habit of cringing humility that, however proper some may deem it to their ‘station in life,’ is the greatest curse of the poor.” Yet when the Stracheyite reaction against Victorianism set in, Steel was disgusted: “I am prone to impatience with … the antics of certain new schools or circles of pseudo-criticism which affect to despise, or at best to patronize condescendingly and ‘damn with faint praise,’ anything bearing the stamp of nineteenth-century British refinement. As if true-to-type Victorian literature (and art) did not fill its place and period, and fulfil its mission as worthily as that of any other epoch!”46

At the dawn of the twentieth century, when literary modernism was emerging, the self-educated had only just mastered the great English classics. By the time the masses caught up with post-Victorian writers, literary elites had moved on to still more advanced authors. It was not until 1929 that Norman Nicholson, a Cumberland tailor’s son, discovered modern literature in Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. These two eminent Edwardians already had all their great works behind them, and were considered obsolete in avant-garde circles: five years earlier, Virginia Woolf had dismissed their entire generation in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” But for a working-class boy from a provincial town in the far north, they represented the last word in subversive literature. Shaw, who was not yet available at the Millom public library, opened Nicholson’s eyes to unemployment, made him an angry socialist, and taught him what he had never appreciated before—“that the Victorian age was over and gone.”

He could not have learned that lesson in the classroom, though he attended a good grammar school. His sixth form English teacher was an exceptionally brilliant woman, who taught him to love Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Sheridan, Lamb, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Scott. Yet even she could not venture beyond the Victorians. “She once drew on the blackboard a graph of the progress of English poetry, as she saw it,” Nicholson recalled, as if she were charting the stock exchange index:

First, Chaucer jutted up, like a cliff, out of sheer nothingness; then, after a gap, came the towering Everest of Shakespeare, the lesser peak of Milton, and a whole century and a half of fen-land flatness, until the Romantics soared up, nearly as high as Shakespeare, followed by the lower rolling ranges of the Victorians. Of Eliot, Pound and Joyce, I doubt if she even knew the names, and if she’d heard of Lawrence, it was only in the pages of the Sunday newspapers. [John] Drinkwater was her idea of a modern poet, Galsworthy, of a modern dramatist, and when I managed to persuade her to include St. Joan in our syllabus, I fancy she saw herself as being quite daringly contemporary.⁴⁷

She was in fact a progressive teacher, and Nicholson a fortunate student. At that time the literary education of most working-class pupils stopped in the mid-nineteenth century or even, in some cases, the eighteenth century.48 Yet for those at the bottom of the social scale, the most old-fashioned literary canons could be terrifically liberating. What was dismally familiar to professional intellectuals was amazingly new to them. For Richard Hillyer (b. c. 1900) the revelation struck when he came across the words “Poet Laureate” in Lloyd’s Weekly News, and asked his teacher what it meant:

So, for ten minutes, he let himself go on it, and education began for me. There was Ben Jonson, the butt of canary wine, birthday odes and all the rest of it. I was fascinated. My mind was being broken out of its shell. Here were wonderful things to know. Things that went beyond the small utilities of our lives, which was all that school had seemed to concern itself with until then. Knowledge of this sort could make all times, and places, your own. You could be anybody, and everybody, and still be yourself all the time.

For a cowman’s son in a Northamptonshire village it was a revolutionary insight. From a classroom library of perhaps two dozen volumes he borrowed one by Tennyson, simply because it had “Poet Laureate” printed on the title page:

The coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy. They drew pictures in the mind. Words became magical, incantations, abracadabra which called up spirits. My dormant imagination opened like a flower in the sun. Life at home was drab, and colourless, with nothing to light up the dull monotony of the unchanging days. Here in books was a limitless world that I could have for my own. It was like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time.

Later, at a second-hand stall, he bought a four-volume Half Hours with Best Authors. One could dismiss it as a potted Anglocentric collection of arbitrary snippets by dead writers, but as Hillyer explained:

The all important thing was that within the battered covers were bits and pieces from a vast range of literature, people I had always wanted to read, and others I had never heard of, but standing in the full tradition and waiting to be discovered. It is easy to talk of epochs in a life, events which are permanent, and far-reaching, enough to be called that are rare, but this was one. The dilapidated old book opened to me the sweep and grandeur of English literature better than most professional teachers would have done. It was literature itself, not talk about literature. It made its own impact, spread the goods out in front of me, and let me make my choice. Nobody told me what I ought to like, it was just there for me to like, if I wanted to. All the great people were there, from Chaucer to Tennyson, in passages which were supposed to take a half hour to read; and there was one for every day of the year, with a gossipy little introduction to each which gave all that was needed to be in the picture. From them I learned that behind the English writers lay others, belonging to far off times and places, in the old days of Greece and Rome; and that was a fact that I had never heard of before, but something to go into, if ever the chance came along.49

Racing to make up educational deficits, autodidacts often resorted to prepackaged collections of classics. Any number of them testified to the inspiration of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.⁵⁰ “Hot with the hunter’s passion, I began to chase everything labelled ‘standard,’” recalled orphanage boy Thomas Burke (b. 1886), who devoured books until “my mind became a lumber-room.” Inevitably, “Criticism was beyond me; the hungry man has no time for the fastidiousness of the epicure. I was hypnotised by the word Poet. A poem by Keats (some trifle never meant for print) was a poem by Keats. Pope and Cowper and Kirke White and Mrs. Hemans and Samuel Rogers were Poets. That was enough.”⁵¹

C. H. Rolph (b. 1901) recalled that his father, a London policeman, invested the same unquestioning faith in middlebrow reference works. Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary was the last word in lexicography, Pitman’s Shorthand Dictionary the absolute standard for pronunciation, while Meiklejohn’s English Grammar “occupied in our household a position usually accorded at that time to the Bible.” With that kind of deference to intellectual authority, his father read diligently through a list of the “Hundred Best Books” compiled in 1886 by Sir John Lubbock. “It included nearly all of the books that one didn’t want to read, or gave up if one tried,” Rolph recalled: “Aristotle’s Ethics, The Koran, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, The Nibelungenlied, Schiller’s William Tell; and it ended with ‘Dickens’s Pickwick and David Copperfield ’ (only) but ‘Scott’s novels’ (apparently the lot). For the most part they were the books which, it seemed, you should expect to find in every intelligent man’s private library; with, in most such libraries, their leaves uncut.”

Matthew Arnold and Henry James were equally dismissive of the Hundred Best list, and everyone has a right to argue with Lubbock’s choices. But no one who has ever handed students a syllabus of required readings can in good faith object to the principle of a best books list. Though canons can be changed, canonization is inevitable, given that we must choose among the millions of books available to us. And Sir John Lubbock had earned the right to publish his own selection: he was a committed adult educator, president of the Working Men’s College, and a best-selling popular science writer. As an MP, he sponsored a Bank Holidays Act and early closing legislation to allow working people more time for cultural pursuits. If you already know your way around the literary canon, it is easy to sneer at Lubbock’s list; but it was enormously popular among readers like Rolph’s father, who was eager to make up for an education that had been denied him, and was not ashamed to ask for a roadmap.52 Without it, he would never have gone beyond the authors popular in his family circle: Edgar Wallace, Silas and Joseph Hocking, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, W. J. Locke, Jeffery Farnol, Emma Worboise, Mrs. Henry Wood (“I cried in bed over The Channings”), and Mrs. Humphry Ward. “Marie Corelli was more revered in our home than Thomas à Kempis himself. Their books went through our household like a benignly infectious plague,” writes Rolph, but there was “a marked absence of authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Mrs. Gaskell.” For all his limitations, Sir John Lubbock was pointing the way to Pride and Prejudice.⁵³

One would expect Lubbock to be a sitting duck for contemporary critics of the “Great Books” tradition. “No longer the ‘undulating and diverse’ relation to knowledge which Matthew Arnold prescribed, the ‘hundred best books’ has an attainable completeness, a finality of its own, existing precisely as a fetish which may be owned,” wrote academic Marxist N. N. Feltes.⁵⁴ Yet for working-class Marxist T. A. Jackson, Lubbock’s list was exactly the opposite. It was conservative only in the sense that it included no living authors. Its impact on the minds of readers like Jackson was profoundly radical, inspiring them to range far beyond the limits of the “hundred best.”

Compositor, full-time lecturer and educator for the Communist Party, author of sophisticated studies on dialectical materialism and Charles Dickens, T. A. Jackson was the beau idéal of the proletarian philosopher. A fellow street orator hailed him as “the intellectual head of the communist movement in this country; so much so that if he dropped out of the movement the intelligence which remained would not be discernible without the aid of a powerful microscope.”⁵⁵ According to Harold Heslop, the miner-novelist, “his immense intellectual ability” was equalled only by his scruffiness: “He was the spiritual father of all the hippies of this day [1971]. … He strode all the pavements of London with the intentness of George Gissing, often unwashed, always undignified, curiously unaware of his forlorn appearance.” Yet he could successfully debate Trotsky, argue down George Lukács on the virtues of Walter Scott, and do it all in language “almost as magnificent as that of Edmund Burke.”⁵⁶ Jackson himself affirmed that he owed his intellectual gifts largely to Sir John Lubbock. “Expensively educated comrades” laughed at him for saying so, but the act of reading through nearly all of those one hundred books set in motion an intellectual odyssey that eventually brought Jackson to Marxism, though Marx was certainly not on the list:

It rescued me from the notion that the only books properly to be called “good” were prose fiction, and such history and biography as could be read as if it were prose fiction—which, alas, it all too often, is. It drove me into reading translations of the Greek and Roman classic authors I would never have faced otherwise. It started me off upon an intensive study of English poetry and, thereafter upon a similar study of Romance and Saga literature. It taught me there were other branches of literature than prose fiction, and other dramatic writers than Shakespeare. It taught me Shakespeare was something much more than an old bore invented to plague the lives of schoolboys. It drove me back upon a wider grasp of history—since I found in practice that there were other literatures than English—literatures of at least equal merit. I found too that all could be understood only in their historical sequence. In the end it led me to philosophy and Marxism and thereby to the revolutionising of my whole life. … Whether he desired it or not, he gave me the urge which sent me adventuring with courage and confidence until I had found them all for myself.

Jackson’s tastes had been formed by the old books in his parents’ home: “A fine set of Pope, an odd volume or two of the Spectator, a Robinson Crusoe, Pope’s translation of Homer, and a copy of Paradise Lost.” He read them all “for the simple reason that there was nothing else to read.” Hence his talent for preaching Marxism in Burkean prose: “Mentally speaking I date from the early 18th century. And, after all, one could date from worse periods than that.”57

Besides, many of these older authors offered anticipations of Marxism. “Incongruous though it may seem,” Jackson wrote, “it was Macaulay as much as anybody who gave me a push-off on the road from the conventional conception of history as a superficial chronicle-narrative to the wider philosophical conception of history as an all-embracing world-process as understood by Marx.”⁵⁸ Jailed for incitement to mutiny, Communist J. T. Murphy (b. 1888) was amused to find that the prison library barred subversive literature but permitted Macaulay’s essay on Milton—“a most powerful justification of the Cromwellian Revolution,” he noted. “It is only necessary to transpose ‘bourgeois revolution’ to ‘proletarian revolution’ and you can soon think you are reading an essay by Trotsky, whose style of writing is not unlike Macaulay’s, on the Russian Revolution.”⁵⁹ Working-class readers continued to enjoy Macaulay’s drama and accessibility long after professional historians had declared him obsolete. Kathleen Woodward (b. 1896) read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Macaulay’s History of England twice through over factory work, with such absorption that she once injured a finger, leaving an “honourable scar.” “I derived great pleasure from these histories, which, as I grew up, I heard slighted, maligned. The colour and movement of Macaulay, the onward swing from Parliament to Parliament and from King to King daily transported me; nor was my pleasure spoiled by any awareness of his prejudices or inaccuracies.”⁶⁰ Even when social and economic history came into vogue in the late 1930s, miner’s son Alan Gibson was bored by it, preferring Macaulay and Carlyle to J. H. Clapham. “When Macaulay published his History of England he received a letter from a working-men’s club thanking him for writing a history which working men could read,” he noted. “It remains true that if working men cannot read a history book it is not history at all (it might be antiquarianism or archaeology or something like that, but it is not history).”⁶¹ Note that the reading preferences of the first Labour MPs listed in Table 1.1 (p. 42) included Macaulay but no living authors other than Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

Everyman’s Library

In addition to reading from lists like Lubbock’s, autodidacts could resort to inexpensive editions of the world’s great books. J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library, begun in 1906, would be the largest, most handsome, and most coherently edited series of cheap classics, though it was certainly not the first. When the House of Lords issued its landmark decision in Donaldson v. Beckett (1774), ending perpetual copyright, it opened the way for publishing uniform editions of works in the public domain. In 1776 John Bell began his Poets of Great Britain, 109 volumes for 18d. each. John Cooke followed with 6d. numbers of British poets and dramatists, much admired by John Clare and Thomas Carter.⁶² Richard Altick counted upwards of a hundred such series commenced between 1830 and 1906. By 1863 there was Charles Knight’s Library of Classics, Bentley’s Standard Novels, Bohn’s Standard Library and British Classics, W. and R. Chambers’s People’s Editions, Chapman and Hall’s Standard Editions of Popular Authors, Murray’s British Classics, Routledge’s British Poets and Standard Novels. Most of these editions were not so cheap, selling for between 3s. 6d. and 5s., but eventually a growing demand for school editions made possible economies of scale, and fierce competition among publishers drove down prices. John Dicks offered the Waverley novels for 3d. each, a huge illustrated Byron for 7d., and Shakespeare at 1d. for two plays or 1s. for the complete works. Henry Morley edited two rival series: Routledge’s Universal Library (from 1883) selling at 1s. a volume and Cassell’s National Library (from 1885) at 3d. paper, 6d. cloth.⁶³ Prices hit rock bottom in May 1895, with the inauguration of W. T. Stead’s Penny Poets. In January 1896 there followed the Penny Novels which, anticipating the Reader’s Digest, were condensations of 30,000 to 40,000 words. Stead proved that the demand for cheap classic reprints was enormous: by October 1897 there were sixty volumes of Penny Poets with 5,276,000 copies in print, and about 9 million copies of ninety Penny Novels.⁶⁴

An important immediate precursor of Dent was Walter Scott—not the Waverley novelist, but an unrelated Newcastle publisher. He was an uneducated self-made entrepreneur in the construction trade who acquired a near-bankrupt publishing firm in 1882 and appointed David Gordon, a bookbinder, to manage it. Gordon put the business in the black with several series of inexpensive classics, reprinting Dickens, Smollett, and the other Walter Scott. In 1884 he launched the 1s. Canterbury Poets, edited by the collier-poet Joseph Skipsey. There followed a profitable and popular Contemporary Science Series, overseen by Havelock Ellis. The Scott firm was instrumental in introducing English readers to the works of Tolstoy and Ibsen, publishing some of their first English translations. There was also the Camelot Classics, prose reprints edited by Ernest Rhys, who would later apply that experience to Everyman’s Library.65

J. M. Dent was yet another product of the working-class autodidact tradition. Born in 1849 to a Darlington housepainter with musical interests, he was raised along strict Nonconformist lines and attended a good Wesleyan school. At age fifteen he joined a chapel-based mutual improvement society and agreed to present a paper on Samuel Johnson. He knew nothing about the man except the dictionary on his father’s bookshelves. Boswell’s biography and Macaulay’s essay were at first hard to decipher, unfamiliar as he was with the larger constellation of eighteenth-century literary men, but he was absolutely

amazed that these greater men, as they seemed to me, should bow down before this old Juggernaut and allow him to walk over them, insult them, blaze out at them and treat them as if they were his inferiors—men like Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith, with a host of others. At last it dawned upon me that it was not the ponderous, clumsy, dirty old man that they worshipped, but the scholarship for which he stood. … I quickly learnt to worship at the same altar, and I bless the day that brought me in touch with Boswell’s Life. I got up from the book feeling there was nothing worth living for so much as literature, otherwise how could this uncouth man rule over such a company? To write a book seemed to me to be the only way to gain Olympus, and I am very much of the same opinion to-day, but it must be literature.⁶⁶

(He always pronounced it “litterchah”, according to employee Frank Swinnerton.)⁶⁷ Dent’s literary tastes were naive, old-fashioned, petit bourgeois, and blindly worshipful; but he recognized early on that the great books were an engine for equality, a body of knowledge that anyone could acquire, given basic literacy and cheap editions. Naturally, his reading was marked by the autodidact’s characteristic enthusiasm and spottiness. He knew Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton, Cowper, Thomson’s Seasons, and Young’s Night Thoughts ; but even Dickens was not widely available in a provincial mid-Victorian town, and he did not read Shakespeare seriously until he was nearly thirty.⁶⁸

His cultural contacts broadened when he became an apprentice bookbinder in London, discovering the work of William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Increasingly unhappy with dogmatic Nonconformity, he found a more liberal community of minds in Toynbee Hall’s Shakespeare Society, where he also discovered a potential mass market for inexpensive quality books. “It was amusing to see the texts brought to our readings” in the Toynbee Shakespeare Society, he recalled, “second-hand editions, quartos, Bowdlerized school editions—no two being the same and all without proper machinery for elucidating difficulties. Neither types nor pages gave proper help to reading aloud.” He filled that gap with the forty volumes of the Temple Shakespeare (1894–96), edited by Israel Gollancz. Printed on fine paper, with act and scene headings on each page, lines numbered for ready reference, and title pages designed by Walter Crane, it was priced at 1s. For a time the series sold a quarter of a million copies annually—“the largest sale made in Shakespeare since the plays were written,” Dent boasted. It was followed by the Temple Classics, of which 300 were published by 1918, including Chapman’s Homer, The Romance of the Rose, Plutarch in ten volumes, Boswell’s Johnson in six, William Caxton’s The Golden Legend, all four Brontës, The Mahabharata, and an annotated Dante in English and Italian on facing pages.69

In 1904 Dent began to think seriously about a still grander venture in cheap classics. He was familiar with the earlier series issued by Bohn, Morley, and Stead, as well as the French “Bibliothèque nationale” and the “Réclam” series of Leipzig. But they represented fairly random selections of titles, unattractively produced and poorly edited. Dent envisioned nothing less than a uniform edition of standard English and world literature in 1,000 volumes. Priced at 1s., the break-even point would be at least 10,000 copies, for some volumes 20,000 or 30,000. But the moment seemed right: the copyrights of the great Victorians were expiring, and he had £10,000 in liquid capital.⁷⁰

The same general idea had occurred independently to Ernest Rhys, who would edit Everyman’s Library from its inception until his death in 1946. Like Dent, Rhys had some experience in bringing literature to the masses. As an apprentice mining engineer in a Durham coal town, he had set up a small library (which included works by Plato and Shelley) and a book discussion group for the colliers. As editor for Walter Scott’s Camelot Classics, Rhys coined the phrase “the suffrages of the democratic shilling,” later appropriated by Dent.⁷¹ And it was Rhys who hit upon the name Everyman’s Library, borrowed from the medieval mystery play. Launched in February 1906 with (of course) The Life of Samuel Johnson, Everyman’s Library sold so well that Dent soon had to begin construction of a costly new plant at Letchworth Garden City.

Modern and postmodern critics would be less enchanted with Everyman’s Library specifically and, more generally, the entire species of “Five-Foot Shelf ” packaged classics. Their creators stand accused of neglecting authors who were female, non-Western, subversive, avant-garde, or otherwise “marginalized” (Zora Neale Hurston is often cited as an example here).

The truth is the House of Dent was innocent on every count. This is not to defend all of Rhys’s choices. Hugh Kenner, for one, laughed heartily over the inclusion of Adelaide A. Procter (1906), an early Victorian poet remembered today only for “The Lost Chord.”⁷² The backbone of Everyman’s Library was the standard roster of English literature, from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to sixteen volumes of John Ruskin, along with the predictable Greek, Latin, American, and Western European authors.⁷³ In a way, it was impressive that Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George Grote’s History of Greece in twelve volumes, Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages (introduced by John Masefield) in eight, J. A. Froude’s History of England in ten, fifteen volumes of Balzac, and six of Ibsen. But even as Rhys pressed ahead with the project, the canon was shifting under his feet. When Everyman’s Library finally reached Volume 1,000 (Aristotle’s Metaphysics) in 1956, Dent’s editorial director was forced to concede that many of their Victorian novelists, historians, and materialist philosophers were obsolete: “Already during the fifty years of the Library’s existence it has been perfectly clear that the standards of ‘immortality’ have been changing.”74

Still, it is unfair to criticize Rhys for failing to anticipate the literary fashions of the late twentieth century. Compared with all the earlier series of cheap classics, his represented the most deliberate and inclusive effort to assemble a library of world literature. It was very much an open canon, frequently venturing beyond the safe and familiar. Rhys was willing to take chances on what he judged to be forgotten masterpieces, such as Richard Ford’s Gatherings from Spain and Robert Paltock’s fantasy Peter Wilkins and the Flying Indians. (Both ended up on Dent’s “worst-sellers” list.) He included not only Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, and Pushkin, but also other Russians who were scarcely known in Britain: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1932) and Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family (1934) were each issued just three years after their first complete English translations. When few English readers had heard of Herman Melville, and he had yet to be revived in the United States, Everyman’s Library issued Moby Dick (1907), Typee (1907), and Omoo (1908). And these decisions were not necessarily market-driven: Dent complained that he could not make Russian or American literature sell in Britain.⁷⁵

As a radical liberal, Dent was happy to publish Tom Paine, William Cobbett, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Henry George. He even toyed with the idea of a Lenin anthology,⁷⁶ though neither Robert Owen nor Capital would appear in Everyman’s Library until after his death in 1926. Dent was a puritan who personally vetoed the inclusion of Smollett and Moll Flanders: “There is no reason why we should try to perpetuate the uncleanness of a very unpleasant age.”⁷⁷ Only after control of the firm had passed to his sons would they publish Roderick Random, Madame Bovary, Rabelais, The Decameron, and Rousseau’s Confessions.

By its very nature, the Everyman canon had to be conservative. While America’s Modern Library emphasized modern literature, Everyman usually drew its texts from the public domain. The Copyright Act of 1911, which extended protection to fifty years after the author’s death, held up the publication of Middlemarch until 1930 and some of Robert Browning until 1940. The series included nothing from the twentieth century until a translation of Henri Barbusse’s First World War novel Le Feu (1916) was published as Under Fire in 1926. Yet Dent clearly wanted more contemporary literature: specifically Lord Jim, The Old Wives’ Tale, Wells, Galsworthy, and Henry James,⁷⁸ all of which were admitted to Everyman’s Library in 1935. They were soon followed by the great modernists: Aldous Huxley (1937), Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1938), Thomas Mann (1940), J. M. Synge (1941), and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1942). In 1936 the company was eager to issue a Sigmund Freud anthology, only to be blocked by Leonard Woolf, who controlled the rights for the Hogarth Press.79 Outside of Everyman’s Library, the Dent list would feature a number of avant-garde authors, among them Luigi Pirandello, Henry Green, and Dylan Thomas. Before the nineteen-year-old artist had made his reputation, Dent recognized in Aubrey Beardsley “a new breath of life in English black-and-white drawing,” and commissioned him to illustrate Morte d’Arthur.

Everyman’s Library made at least some effort to include Eastern literature: The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, Shakuntala, Hindu Scriptures introduced by Rabin-dranath Tagore, as well as the Koran. Apparently Dent consulted a Japanese scholar about adding East Asian literature, but the First World War put an end to those plans.⁸⁰ As for women writers, Dent published all the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and personally introduced Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, one of his favorite novels. Here again he went beyond the great names: several of the forgotten female authors that feminist scholars have lately tried to resuscitate (and some they have yet to rediscover) were in Everyman’s canon, among them Dorothy Osborne, Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, Mary Russell Mitford, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant, and Mrs. Henry Wood. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was included, as was the autobiography of Elizabeth Blackwell, the trailblazing female physician.

With that record, it was only natural that the House of Dent became Zora Neale Hurston’s English publisher.⁸¹ The company built up a strong list of proletarian writers, including basketweaver Thomas Okey, collier-novelists F. C. Boden and Roger Dataller, farm laborer Fred Kitchen, journalist Rowland Kenney, and Labour Party politicians James Griffiths and Harry Snell. For the Dent firm, publishing new books by disenfranchised authors and publishing old books for disenfranchised readers were all part of the same egalitarian project. A later generation of literary theorists might argue that there is an irrepressible conflict between “canonical” and “nontraditional” literature, that the great books somehow “marginalize” or “silence” oppressed peoples; but to Dent and Rhys that would have been absurd, contrary to everything they knew about working-class readers. “Canon wars” are purely a campus phenomenon, the result of an academic economy of scarcity. If an English faculty is allowed only one new hire, they may have to decide between a Miltonist and a Caribbeanist; and they can only add Zora Neale Hurston to a survey course by bumping someone else, in which case Dr. Johnson may seem a tempting target. But this is an internal professional controversy, irrelevant (if not slightly comic) to general readers, who have time for both Johnson and Hurston.

By 1975 more than 60 million copies of 1,239 Everyman volumes had been sold worldwide, but we only guess how many of them were bought by British working people. Their memoirs are not much help here: while they are quite forthcoming about books and authors read, they only occasionally mention specific editions. Everyman books did become a standby of Workers’ Educational Association syllabuses82: as one student said, you could easily afford them if you went without smokes.⁸³ Some indirect evidence of readership comes from Everyman, a cheap literary weekly launched by Dent in 1912.⁸⁴ Everyman sponsored literary competitions, and it is revealing that in 1913 it received 360 essays on the topic “The Life of a Teacher,” compared with more than a hundred from miners on colliery life.⁸⁵ An occupational breakdown of entrants to a January 1932 Everyman competition produced comparable results: only 13 percent were operatives, the rest mainly clerical workers (20 percent), teachers (10 percent), tradesmen (10 percent), journalists and artists (7 percent), civil servants, professionals, students, and performers of “home duties” (5 percent each).⁸⁶ A file of surviving letters to the editor from 1912–14 shows they were written mainly by middle-class readers, though there were also some appreciative notes from workingmen.⁸⁷ The working-class readership was probably somewhat larger than these proportions suggest, assuming that the average laborer was more reticent about putting pen to paper than a schoolmaster or businessman. The safest surmise is that the working classes bought a substantial fraction of Everyman’s print run, amounting to several million volumes.

James Murray (b. c. 1894), a Glasgow woodcarver, represented the kind of reader Dent and Rhys were trying to reach. He credited Everyman magazine with “opening up an entirely new set of ideas to which I had previously been a stranger. I became familiar with the names and works of all the truly great authors and poets, and was now thoroughly convinced I had been misplaced in my life’s work.” His reading ranged from Rasselas to Looking Backward. He began writing poems, stories, and essays; and tried (without success) to get his work published in Everyman and other periodicals. Murray was handicapped as a writer because he could not afford to have his work typed, but he did take classes in French and German, enough for a reading knowledge of both. In the First World War he was one of those soldiers, noted by Paul Fussell, who marched to the front with a volume of poetry in his kit. Remarkably, considering the men he was fighting, it was Goethe in the original.⁸⁸ Both publishers and readers had invested an enormous liberal faith in the cheap classics, which might somehow abolish classes and establish universal peace. One world war was not enough to destroy that vision. In 1940 Ernest Rhys was still convinced that if the Nazis had only read Plato’s Republic, Carlyle’s French Revolution, John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, War and Peace, and The Federalist Papers, there would have been no war, and Germany would be a democracy in a united Europe.⁸⁹

Catching Up

Proletarian cultural conservatism was also transmitted and reinforced by the first generation of schoolteachers called into existence by the Education Act of 1870. They themselves were often from working-class backgrounds, and what training they received was seriously obsolete. Philip Ballard, the son of a Welsh tinplate worker, was taught geology entirely out of a book—no one thought to visit the coal mines or the quarry in the area. The one geography textbook in use at his training college, James Cornwell’s School Geography (1847), was about forty years old. Lectures on Old Testament history were plagiarized from Dean Milman’s History of the Jews (1830). The school library was a bookcase kept locked except one evening a week, so Ballard could only pick up some knowledge of literature from fellow students and from visits to the Guildhall Library. Even then he had no exposure to contemporary writers until the 1890s: “I gained a nodding acquaintance with the life and letters of Ancient Greece and Rome, and … I had read most of Dickens, much of Thackeray, and some of Scott; but I had never read a line of Henry James, of Meredith, or of Hardy. And Browning I only knew as the man who had written ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.’”

But Ballard was able to catch up very quickly, thanks in part to the popular press. By the end of the nineteenth century mass circulation newspapers were offering an outlet to innovative authors, thus making the literary avant-garde more accessible to general readers. In the Star Ballard read the music criticism of Bernard Shaw, and Richard Le Gallienne on books: the latter kindly sent him a lengthy letter when he asked for advice about modern literature. He pressed on to Meredith and Walter Pater. In 1910 he attended that revolutionary event in English culture, the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition. Two artist friends who accompanied him were stunned: they considered Sargent avant-garde, and were in no way prepared for Gauguin, Van Gogh, or Matisse. By then Ballard, who had attended an “Independents” show in Paris, was actually more familiar with and receptive to modern art.90

An overdose of modernism, however, was likely to alienate the worker-intellectual from his own class. Welsh collier D. R. Davies (b. 1889) had been raised to regard the stage as sinful, and it was with some guilt that he attended his first play, at Miss Horniman’s theater in Manchester. Immediately he was hooked on Shaw, Galsworthy, Masefield, and Ibsen. But when he had to return to the mines of South Wales, his exposure to new cultural opportunities only served “to intensify my egotism and inflate my pride. Its net effect was to isolate me from my fellows. … I now disliked and despised the people among whom necessity had placed me. A better education had made me less sociable.” His resentments turned him toward revolutionary socialism, and he escaped the mines to become, in 1917, a Congregationalist minister in Ravensthorpe. But the modernist social gospel he preached was only a means (generally successful) of keeping his own congregants at arm’s length:

Inevitably, I was inwardly isolated from my people, and except for one or two, drifted away from them all. I lived in a world of my own—an abstract, intellectual world. My gospel was nothing but a system of ideas to which the rank-and-file of my church did not respond. Beyond these ideas, I had nothing to say. I became more and more a misfit. What was once said of a celebrated Anglican could probably have been said of me, that during the week I was invisible and on Sundays I was incomprehensible.

Through a Bradford art dealer he met prominent modern artists: Jacob Kraemer and Jacob Epstein. Once he posted a photo of Epstein’s Christ in the vestibule of his church and praised it in a sermon, “to the great disgust of some members of my congregation, but to the indifference of the majority.” These contacts clearly broadened his enjoyment of art and architecture: he devoted holiday time to exploring the Tate and the Louvre, and became friends with Walter Gropius and Erwin Gutkind of the Bauhaus. Yet as he described it, his pursuit of the modern was in part a deliberate effort to alienate himself from the masses, which soon led him to quit the ministry:

I acquired the silly delusion of possessing the “artistic temperament.” What that meant I never discovered, but it seemed to carry with it licence to disown responsibilities. In practice it put a premium on subjectivism. You did a thing only if you felt like it, and if you felt it: that was its justification. The effect upon me was altogether bad. It gave me the excuse I needed for alienation from my church and people. Moreover, it fostered my pride. It made me feel superior to kindly, decent people who, whatever their narrowness and provincialism, fulfilled their obligations in life, which was more than I was doing, and more than most of the artists I met were doing.91

Modernism did not have much of an audience in northern England, even among the worker-intellectuals of the WEA. In 1932 a Yorkshire instructor, Roger Dataller, noticed that the feminist message of The Man of Property was not getting through to his female students:

While the figure of Irene may have been all the “concretion of disturbing beauty” that the author intended, it is a conception not quite concrete enough for the working women of south Yorkshire. I find them totally unmoved by Irene. They cannot conceive an abstract beauty apart from the companionable, living presence. They conceive it impossible that this woman should have no capacity for mirth, for even a little graciousness towards her husband, for affability, or for general exuberance. Frankly, Galsworthy’s conception does not come off, and the general compassion of these women is for Soames, poor fellow, linked with so insufferable a creature.⁹²

Likewise, “The women in one of my classes were not in the least impressed by Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. That she should allow her mind to wander while trying on the stocking that she was knitting for her little son, seemed inept, and their sympathy was for the little boy with so introspective a mother!”⁹³ Another WEA class on “The Modern Novel” totally baffled N. B. Dolan, a Scarborough trade unionist:

After two hours of hearing a lecturer who took for granted that each member of the class was well versed in Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence I left the room dazed. Vague references to Freud and Behaviourism ran riot in my brain in bewildering confusion. The revelation of my colossal ignorance so stunned me that I did not even know how or where to begin. Moreover, the discussion afterwards gave me such a feeling of humiliation that I daren’t even ask the lecturer for advice.

He could not in good conscience invite others to join the WEA, because “I do not want to choke them by bringing them into an environment of the middle class.” In fact Dolan’s experience was not typical: WEA courses usually avoided avant-garde authors. Yet it is revealing that, in his eyes, Freud, Woolf, Huxley, and Lawrence constituted bourgeois culture.94 One Nottinghamshire collier (b. 1906?), a devotee of Gray, Goldsmith, Tennyson, and Keats, found in Lawrence’s poetry only meaninglessness punctuated by obscenity. He rather enjoyed earthiness in a “classic” like Rabelais, but the “smut” that modern writers turned out was quite another matter.⁹⁵ A secondhand bookdealer noted that Huxley and even Bennett could not sell in Camberwell in 1931, while Marie Corelli and Mrs. Henry Wood were among his strongest sellers as late as 1948.⁹⁶

In 1932 Q. D. Leavis asserted that the books considered avant-garde before the War, such as Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica, were only now beginning to reach the masses.⁹⁷ Four years later WEA tutorial class students in the London area were asked to “Name one or more fiction writers whose novels you read frequently and enjoy”: the results are listed in Table 4.2 below.

Table 4.2: Favorite Novelists of London WEA Students, 1936 (in percent)
	All	Men	Women
John Galsworthy	20.2	9.5	29.2
H. G. Wells	13.8	16.5	11.4
D. H. Lawrence	10.6	10.0	11.0
Hugh Walpole	9.2	3.0	14.4
Aldous Huxley	8.9	12.5	5.9
Charles Dickens	8.9	8.0	9.7
Sinclair Lewis	8.7	8.5	8.9
Upton Sinclair	6.9	9.5	4.7
Thomas Hardy	6.7	6.0	7.2
J. B. Priestley	6.0	6.5	5.5
A. J. Cronin	5.7	6.6	5.1
Philip Gibbs	5.5	2.5	8.1

Compared to the northern WEA students cited above, these Londoners had relatively advanced tastes. Eight of their twelve favorite novelists were actually living, and their favorite nonfiction authors were Bernard Shaw, Wells (again), A. S. Neill, and Freud. Still, such high modernists as Virginia Woolf (1.4 percent), E. M. Forster (0.7 percent), and Marcel Proust (0.2 percent) ranked at the very bottom of the poll. These readers preferred the more accessible and (frankly) sexier modernists, Lawrence and Huxley. And they were unrepresentative of the working-class average: nearly half of them were clerks, and all were metropolitans, more aware of modern literature than provincial readers. (In 1944 hardly anyone borrowed Forster, Huxley, Woolf, Lawrence, Robert Graves, or Hemingway from the Bristol public libraries, where Hugh Walpole, Dickens, Hardy, Jane Austen, and Wells were the most popular novelists.)98

More significantly, the London students read book reviews. Fully a third of all the magazines they mentioned were literary and political reviews such as the New Statesman, John o’ London’s, and the Highway (the WEA organ). When asked which parts of the newspapers they read, book reviews were identified as a prime interest by 36.0 percent of the men (compared with 15.5 percent for sports) and 47.9 percent of the women (compared with 23.7 percent for the women’s page).⁹⁹ That habit was strikingly uncharacteristic of the working class as a whole. During the Second World War, Mass Observation asked readers how they selected books, and some marked class differences emerged:

Table 4.3: Guides to Book Selection, 1944 (in percent)
	Middle Class	Upper Working Class	Lower Working Class
Author	20	31	37
Subject, title	22	21	27
Recommendation	23	18	19
Library	11	22	7
Reviews	28	11	7
Haphazard	8	8	5
Bibliography, catalogues	14	0	2
Bookseller	6	3	3
Other	19	17	27
Don’t know	0	3	0

The middle classes were more likely to rely on reviews, reading lists, and catalogues: that is, guides to new or unfamiliar books. The working classes most often selected books by author: that is, authors they had already read.¹⁰⁰ In 1945, a lack of book reviews (not to mention bookshops) was still an obstacle to publicizing new books in rural counties like Norfolk.¹⁰¹ A half-century earlier, closed-stack public libraries had been a serious barrier to adventurous reading, as Jack Common noted: “The system tended to canalize our curiosity about books into a safe and time-saving pursuit of a few popular authors: the whole of Henty was ever before us.”¹⁰² Even where librarians encouraged broader reading, they often met resistance. One who worked in the Lever company town of Port Sunlight between the wars remembered a girl who invariably requested “a book about a Duchess or a Countess.” Then there was the elderly lady who would only read Annie Swan. When she had ploughed through her oeuvre a dozen times over, the librarian suggested she might try David Lyall, pointing out that David Lyall was a pen name used by Annie Swan. The woman reluctantly accepted a volume, only to return it the following day: “This one can’t write; give me one by Annie Swan.”103

Scholars on the left have again and again tried to recover lost plebeian writers, only to find them disappointingly old-fashioned. Brian Maidment notes that, in spite of its occasional political radicalism, Victorian working-class poetry was stylistically antiquated and generally expressed “conservative ideologies of temperance, stoicism, domesticity, religious devotion, and quietism.”¹⁰⁴ If the Great Proletarian Author was never found, it was not because there were no candidates for the role. The difficulty was that leftist intellectuals were looking for a modernist in overalls, and that combination was almost impossible to find. A more typical working-class writer was Alexander Baron (b. 1917), whose From the City, From the Plough (1948) was a best-seller. “My masters are Balzac, Dickens and Hardy,” he affirmed, “and I find it hard to admit that any fiction of importance has been written in the English language since 1914.”¹⁰⁵

While working in the great railway factory at Swindon, Alfred Williams taught himself enough Greek and Latin to translate Ovid, Pindar, Sappho, Plato, Menander, and Horace. He mastered the Greek alphabet by chalking it up on machinery, and faced down a resentful supervisor who tried to make him erase it. In 1900 he began a Ruskin College correspondence course in English literature, beginning with Bede and ending with Wordsworth. It was an astonishing feat of self-education—and it left out the whole Victorian era. Even a reviewer for the WEA magazine, trying hard to be positive, advised him to write less anachronistic verses: “Poems where shepherds and shepherdesses are of Arcadia and not of Wiltshire, and rhymed translations of the classics, are part of a literary output which is necessarily and frankly imitative.”¹⁰⁶ But Williams stubbornly resisted the new. As he put it, W. B. Yeats, Robert Bridges, Thomas Hardy, Richard Le Gallienne all “produced in me a veritable disgust of modern ‘tack.’ FORTY LINES OF DRYDEN CONTAIN MORE POETRY THAN TWELVE LARGE VOLUMES OF THE MODERN MUDDLE. I cannot help it one bit, but I can get more pleasure out of a page of Ovid than out of a bundle of our moderns.”¹⁰⁷

The tramp-poet W. H. Davies (b. 1871) did not read contemporary authors, though several of them (Bernard Shaw, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Hudson, Edward Garnett, Arnold Bennett) befriended and promoted him. That made for some awkwardness when they met, “for the simple reason that they knew my work and I did not know theirs,” but he could only afford to buy classics at secondhand stalls.¹⁰⁸ As a result, Shaw noted, “His work was not in the least strenuous or modern: there was in it no sign that he had ever read anything later than Cowper or Crabbe, not even Byron, Shelley or Keats, much less Morris, Swinburne, Tennyson, or Henley and Kipling. There was indeed no sign of his ever having read anything otherwise than as a child reads.”109

Peter Donnelly (b. 1914), the Barrow steelworker-poet, tried to find inspiration in contemporary sensibilities:

In extracts from the notebooks of some modern writer I read that he had had no success, that he had not sold a story until he cast away all the books and memories of books which made his mind a lumber room. Since I was a writer steadily collecting rejection slips and unable to discuss my work with anyone or to seek advice, I decided to emulate him. I wanted to make poems, and this writer advised me to forget all the poetry with which I was acquainted, and study the moderns. I wanted to write prose, and he said to turn my back upon any prose writer who had been dubbed classical.

So I began to read modern poetry in magazines and anthologies in order to acquire a modern outlook, to find some clue that would make my verses tingle with the life of my own time. But … all the modern poetry was barren stuff with never an echo from the thunder, the sound and sweet airs which I had always associated with poetry and could not forget; never the little shock that raises the mind and heart like a prayer.

Donnelly found himself “insensibly leaving the moderns, proceeding back and back as though I had missed the road somewhere and must retrace my steps to pick it up again. I discovered that my affinities were with those who had started writing before the 1914 war, and from them it was natural to go farther back, for it seemed that they derived from those who had gone before them.”¹¹⁰ Whoever it was who recommended reading only the moderns (Donnelly never names him) the advice was senseless. What work of modernist literature was not constructed largely from the lumber of classical literature? This strategy would have failed any writer, but especially for someone like Donnelly—with little education and no literary connections—casting aside the old meant throwing away his only store of literary capital.

Conversely, as scholarship children assimilated a more modern outlook, they found themselves alienated from the conservative working-class culture that had nurtured them. Kathleen Betterton, the daughter of a lift operator for the London Underground, was born (1913) into a family that placed a high value on a thoroughly outdated style of education. In the parlor was that monument to working-class respectability, a glass-fronted bookcase, which contained an odd collection of literary hand-me-downs. There were morality tales that her father had won as school prizes, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Bulwer Lytton, Little Women, Christie’s Old Organ, and The Wide Wide World. Her school library consisted of another small cupboard stocked with “dehydrated versions of the classics for the most part—Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Westward Ho! ” Because this literary diet was as digestible as it was banal, it could be quite inspiring to a nine-year-old girl: when her mother read Longfellow to her, Kathleen recited his verses at length and then composed her own, to general applause. But as she later recognized, “We were gathering up the fag-ends of middle-class Victorian culture.”

As a scholarship girl she flourished at Christ’s Hospital in Hertford, because the curriculum there was equally anachronistic. She studied Latin and Greek, memorized Shakespeare, and took classes in English history that stopped cold in 1715. There were no courses in biology (“that would have brought us up against the dangerous subject of sex”) so when she saw a production of The Beggar’s Opera, she was far too innocent to understand it. In the school library, books touching even remotely on love—including the works of Thomas Hardy—were jacketed in red calico, and she was not permitted to borrow these until she reached the Sixth Form.

Consequently, when she entered Somerville College Oxford on another scholarship, she found herself academically prepared but culturally backward. One of her classmates was the intimidatingly brilliant Mary Fisher, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, whose work Kathleen could not even discuss. Befriended by a daughter of Fabians, she discovered that even her socialism was outmoded: she was still a follower of William Morris when Marx was becoming fashionable at Oxford. Eventually she learned to appreciate W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, but as she caught up with her university friends, she grew ever more remote from her parents. Her father always had a taste for sentimental Victorian paintings, with titles like “To the Rescue,” and he could not have been happy when she replaced them with reproductions of Turner and Vermeer. On her visits home she was shocked to discover that

I hated more than ever the ugly working-class district to which I belonged, and I even began to hate the people in it—the women with hair in curlers and bulging string bags, the stall-holders shouting raucously in the street-market, the grubby babies left to howl in their prams outside the pub. After Oxford, everything was so ugly. I was incapable of fusing my disparate existences; the gap between them left me bewildered and resentful. …

Every time I returned home I experienced the same confusion of feeling. It was good to see my parents again, good to be back in a homely atmosphere, good to be kindly welcomed in the street by neighbours who had known me from babyhood … but before a week was out I would feel depressed with Fulham and out of touch with almost everyone with whom I came in contact.

With every term I seemed to grow yet further away from the class to which I belonged. I had always been frank among my friends about my home and circumstances, but in the setting of Oxford they seemed unreal even while I spoke of them. Unconsciously I had assumed the outlook, the manners, the speech of those among whom I spent half the year, and I should probably have been taken anywhere as one of them, if I had been able to imitate their easy assurance. An American friend who thought he understood the English had assumed that I was the daughter of a country parson. At home, my tastes, my interests, even my voice, cut me off from the people about me. It was saddening and filled me with a vague sense of guilt, as though in some undefined way I had rejected my own class.

That guilt propelled her into leftist politics, but the ambivalence remained. She joined the Oxford Labour Club, ostensibly to reaffirm her loyalty to the working class, but on a less conscious level she was doing exactly the reverse: distancing herself from the Fulham Labour Party, where her parents joined in whist drives. That represented the plebeian culture she now found so backward. Even Ruskin College students now struck her as too serious and too proletarian. She preferred “the fluency, the superficial glitter” of Oxford undergraduates. When she chanted the “Internationale” with them, it was not simply a gesture of solidarity with the workers, “it was also a reaction against the correctness of my upbringing.”111

A generation later, Jane Mitchell (b. 1934) would experience the same dissonance. Her father (a Glasgow lorry-driver) and mother encouraged education, turned down the radio when it was time to do homework, and filled their home with old books: Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist, The Wide Wide World, John Halifax, Gentleman, Greek and Roman legends. The last of these were particularly inspiring: she eventually became a university lecturer in classics. But as she moved from one scholastic triumph to another, her classmates seemed increasingly resentful and distant. When she entered Oxford on a scholarship she felt no sense of social, economic, or academic inferiority: “However, I began to feel myself at a considerable disadvantage because of the narrowness of my interests and experience.” She fell in with leftist students, where she “was at first completely at sea, and felt abysmally ignorant. … [I] followed up references to unfamiliar authors and pondered on unfamiliar value-judgments.” Her formal education had done nothing to prepare her for Suez, Hungary, jazz, or the New Left Review. She quickly made up for lost time (“an intellectual explosion was taking place in me”) but joining the left wing of the Labour Party created friction with her Tory parents. For her mother in particular, political discussion consisted in repeating what she had read in Conservative newspapers. “At the same time,” her daughter recalled, “she found in my Socialism a source of pride, since it was for her a symbol of my having entered a society of intellectuals.”¹¹²

If one did not come from a home environment where education was valued, the climb up the scholarship ladder could be even more disorienting. Ronald Goldman (b. 1922) was the son of a Manchester hatmaker and a narrowly religious woman who hardly ever engaged in conversation. “I never recall anyone reading a book, nor there being a book in the house apart from a dusty Bible and a medical dictionary of almost equal ancient vintage.” He acquired an insatiable appetite for reading from his senior school, the public library, evening classes, and WEA courses, and found his intellectual home matriculating at Manchester University. But

[i]t soon became evident to me that I was growing away from my home, despite the fact that I was militantly working-class and politically active in left-wing politics. My time at home made me increasingly irritable since no one seemed to perceive why I wanted to read. When I attempted discussion my open questioning of every convention was simply not understood as an exploration of ideas, but was received by my mother with shocked outrage. The small talk, the three times weekly visits to the local Odeon …, the evenings spent card playing were a crushing bore to me and there was no quiet place to read in the house, other than going to my unheated bedroom. … Being at home was like a slow death to me and leaving home felt like moving into a free world of light and rationality.113

These generational skirmishes were part of a broad transformation of the left, which began early in the twentieth century and is only now reaching completion. Within the Labour Party, the shift from a working-class self-educated leadership to a middle-class university-educated leadership brought with it a shift from economic protest to cultural protest. By now the right has won the battle for privatization, lower taxation, and a hospitable climate for business; while multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights, and government support for the “creative industries” have become potent issues for the left. This change began with these scholarship children, whose anger was directed primarily against a hopelessly bourgeois working-class culture. No doubt they sincerely desired an end to poverty and fair shares for all, but Kathleen Betterton admitted that she had other priorities. What she really wanted was a socialism that would abolish “lace curtains and aspidistras.”