Introduction to the Second Edition

A few years ago some labor historians at an English university confided to me that, when this book was first published in 2001, they posted the newspaper reviews on their departmental bulletin board. As they explained it, the fact that an academic study of labor history could still attract the attention of the popular press did wonders for their morale, which sorely needed boosting. True, their field had enjoyed a vogue for about twenty years, starting with E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). But it was gradually eclipsed by the historiography of gender and race, and in 1983 Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 sent younger scholars off in yet another direction, exploring linguistics and culture.

To be congratulated for revalidating working-class history was, for me, as ironic as it was flattering, for I could hardly call myself a labor historian. Certainly, as an American undergraduate and graduate student in the 1970s, I had been assigned The Making of the English Working Class: whether I read it all the way to the end is another question. But my chosen specialty was intellectual history: while others of my generation were studying the workplace, trade unions, family structure, diet, housing, and wages, I much preferred the world of ideas. Naturally, I had to defend that peculiar taste in the classroom. Wasn’t intellectual history elitist? Did the conversations of great minds have any real influence outside their own select circle? Shouldn’t history be about everyday life, material culture, and the “inarticulate masses”? These were tough but fair questions, and ultimately I, along with other intellectual historians, realized that they could only be answered by inventing three new academic fields.

The first and (for me) the most fascinating was the history of reading. My model was not E. P. Thompson, but a shopworn copy of Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader which I found in a campus bookstore early in my first year of graduate study. Historians of reading have never been solely concerned with the lower classes, but they have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the great books had plebeian readers, that reading has long been a necessity of everyday life for ordinary people, and that books were an important part of the material culture of most working-class homes. This was the method deployed not only in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes but also in several other works all published within a few years of each other: Christine Pawley’s Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (2001), Martyn Lyons’s Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (2001), Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002), Stephanie Newell’s Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life” (2002), and Thomas Augst’s The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003). We knew each other, we presented papers at the same conferences, we shared the thrill of working on a new and rapidly advancing scholarly frontier. We used similar kinds of sources (memoirs, library registers, the records of mutual improvement societies) and we all discovered the same kind of self-improving common readers in various parts of the world. More recently our work has been assisted by the development of electronic resources: the Reading Experience Database (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/) for Britain, and the What Middletown Read Project (www.bsu.edu/middletown/wmr/) for the United States, both of them searchable by class and occupation.

A second route for connecting intellectual history with labor history is the history of authorship, as pursued by the Labouring-Class Writers Project at Nottingham Trent University. In this field I drew some inspiration from Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse (1974), but I discovered that not all working-class writers were obscure impoverished milltown versifiers. Quite a few of them, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, were successful well-known prose writers. They have since fallen into a historiographical black hole, largely because they worked in a genre that academia despises and ignores. I don’t mean lowbrow literature: there is no shortage of monographs on penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and pornography. No, what has been shamefully neglected is middlebrow literature, which was by no means exclusively middle-class. While highbrow culture was controlled by the guild of Bloomsbury, the middlebrow remained an open marketplace for working-class writers such as Howard Spring, Ethel Mannin and Alexander Baron. I sensed their importance, but I was not able to say much about them in my book, simply because they had not yet generated a corpus of scholarly biographies and critical studies. Today the MLA International Bibliography lists just two hits for Spring, six for Mannin, and none for Baron, compared with 4,547 for Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Woolf and F. R. Leavis pronounced that middlebrow authors were not worth reading, and generations of academics obeyed. Not until the 1990s was that barrier finally broken, by Rosa Maria Bracco’s “Betwixt and Between”: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties and Thirties (1990) and Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 1920–1950 (1992). Rather than produce yet more books about Bloomsbury, we really need studies of the writers that the Bloomsberries defined themselves against, such as Christopher Hilliard’s To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006). We need to discover how these plebeian writers scrambled out of poverty up the ladder of popular journalism, how they transformed their life experiences into literature, how they appealed to working-class audiences.

That kind of scholarship inevitably involves a third new field, the history of taste. I grew up in an America where, it seemed, everyone was middle-class, everyone read the same middlebrow books and magazines, everyone ate the same kind of food at the same restaurants, wore the same kind of clothes, and watched the same indistinguishable programs on three undistinguished television networks. Of course, in reality American society was never quite that homogeneous, but it certainly grew less so over the ensuing decades. Income distribution became more unequal, cultural tastes became more stratified. One could not help but wonder whether there was some connection between the two trends. Were we witnessing the formation of a new class, variously called yuppies or trendies or bobos, and was the avant-garde a business that supplied this class with distinguishing (and expensive) cultural markers? In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Richard Florida saw a clear link between artistic innovation and dynamic postindustrial capitalism. So did a host of academic studies on “marketing modernism,” notably James Nelson’s Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (1989), Joyce Piell Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (1997), Peter D. McDonald’s British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (1997), Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998), Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (2000), Paul Delany’s Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (2002), and Catherine Turner’s Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (2003). These issues informed my own discussion of modernism and the working class, which proved to be gratifyingly controversial. (For a rebuttal, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere [2003]). I should stress that I never intended to devalue the aesthetic achievement of modernism. My point was that, as in the case of the Baroque, we can admire the art while recognizing that it buttressed social hierarchies.

I am sometimes asked if I have any roots in the working class. I can claim no such pedigree. A great uncle (whom I never knew) was a Bronx garment worker who spent much of the Great Depression reading through a kind of Yiddish Everyman’s Library, classics in translation from The Merchant of Venice to Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Otherwise my people were all professionals, managers, and shop owners. Speaking of cultural markers and the avant-garde, I attended a highly progressive private day school in Greenwich Village, very like A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, poles apart from the Victorian board schools. My old school was so unstructured that every pupil had to become an autodidact—and, yes, in that sense it may well have germinated this book.

In this second edition I have corrected some factual and spelling errors, with thanks to the readers who pointed them out. A version of this essay previously appeared in the journal Key Words, and something like it is published here, with the kind permission of the editors.