City Journal is running a fascinating piece by Jonathan Rose on the role the classics have historically played in the lives of working people. Rose's largest and least interesting quarry is the academic literary establishment, which he argues is woefully and narcissistically out of touch with the people. But along the way, Rose assembles some fascinating anecdotes about the reading habits of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English miners, maids, millers, and more:

Will Crooks (b. 1852), a cooper living in extreme poverty in East London, once spent tuppence on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled: "What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece." Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until her last illness, at age 54. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and "mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read." Margaret Perry (b. 1922) wrote of her mother, a Nottingham dressmaker: "The public library was her salvation. She read four or five books a week all her life but had no one to discuss them with. She had read all the classics several times over in her youth and again in later years, and the library had a job to keep her supplied with current publications. Married to a different man, she could have been an intelligent and interesting woman."

[...]

Shakespeare provided a political script for labor leaders like J. R. Clynes (b. 1869), 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!" he marveled. "How it would upset the world if men lived up to it." Later, reading Julius Caesar, "the realisation came suddenly to me that it was a mighty political drama" about the class struggle, "not just an entertainment." Once he overawed a stubborn employer by reciting an entire scene from the play: Clynes, as a friend put it, was "the only man who ever settled a trade dispute by citing Shakespeare." Elected to Parliament in 1906, he read A Midsummer Night's Dream while awaiting the returns.

[...]

Of course, a century ago elementary schools for the British working classes were in many ways grossly inadequate. Classrooms were crowded and under-equipped, discipline was enforced by the cane, and lessons emphasized rote memorization. But the schools taught at least one subject remarkably well. "Thinking back, I am amazed at the amount of English literature we absorbed in those four years," recalled Ethel Clark (b. 1909), a Gloucestershire railway worker's daughter, "and I pay tribute to the man [her teacher] who made it possible. . . . Scott, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rudyard Kipling were but a few authors we had at our finger-tips. How he made the people live again for us!"

Lancashire weaver Elizabeth Blackburn (b. 1902) conceded that "our horizons were very limited and our education, linked up as it was to our economic conditions, provided little room for the cultivation of leisure pursuits. But I left school at thirteen with a sound grounding in the basic arts of communication, reading and writing. . . . I had gained some knowledge of the Bible, a lively interest in literature and, most important, some impetus to learn." If the objective of public education is to create citizens who never stop learning, then Elizabeth Blackburn's school succeeded brilliantly. When she went to work in the mills she memorized, by the rhythm of the looms, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," Milton's "Lycidas," and Gray's Elegy.

Fascinating, indeed...it would be interesting for someone to trace in depth the decline of this phenomenon, and the reasons for it.

Reminds me of something...during WWII, George MacDonald Fraser (best known as the author of the Flashman novels) was serving in Burma. He loaned his copy of one of Shakespeare's plays (Henry V, I think) to a poorly-educated friend. The man read it avidly, and afterwards remarked that he was sure Shakespeare himself must have been a soldier...that no one else could have written so vividly and realistically.

!!!Classic!!!

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
- Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)

You know Bernard, I sometimes think our Minister doesn't believe that he exists unless he is reading about himself in the paper.
- Sir Humphrey, A Question of Loyalty

Readers who like this essay should look for Rose's book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP, 2001).

My mother grew up on a little farm in Mississippi. There were seven children and they were very poor, but they had books. Because of having to work in the fields they could only read for pleasure on rainy days. (They did their school work, of course.) My mom vividly remembers reading Fall of the House of Usher one day when she was very young and being so frightened that she had to put the book down and go and find her mother.

Comparions of the system described here and the current one at many secondary and university systems where such classes can be seen as a "chore" to non-literature majors would be interesting.

What made this program work should be an object of serious study.

My mother obtained about a 6th-grade education, in Ireland. She learned a lot of Shakespeare, and would recite the "dagger scene" from Julius Caesar in her later years(also the quarrel scene between Brutus & Cassius). When her father took her out of school(after her mom died, around 1920) the schoolmaster followed them home, pleading with him to let her continue. Most people in rural Ireland then got little education(unless they were rich, or were becoming a priest or religious); but there were many intelligent people who continued to read, think, and delight in language and poetry.

I am amazed that people are amazed by this. In the early days of the Labor movement in this country the unions had societies and classes of great literature. The unions used to have lending libraries at their headquarters in the early years of the last century.

I have a black friend who was before retiring a professor of nursing at a college here. She told me about how her father and his friends had a reading club back during the Depression where they would read the classics and do reports to each other on the books they had read. They expanded this to include history and political science as well. They used their minister as a guide to how to improve their education. She and her brothers and sisters were raised in this milieu of striving for an education and she tried to pass it on to her own children. Unfortunately the spouses of her children refused to allow this to be passed onto them claiming that the kids would not be able to get along with the other kids in the neighborhood.

Somewhat related is a story told by Davy Crockett. Crockett had just voted on a $20,000 charity support for victims of a fire in Georgetown, and was travelling in rural somewhere when he came upon a lone farmer ploughing. Crockett doggedly tried to the engage the guy, who only apparently did not recognize Crockett. Davy nearly failed. But, then, finally the guy faced him full and gave Crockett a long extremely coherent dissertation on the Constitution, proving Crockett had just violated it by his vote, also promising to never vote for Crockett again.

Of course the story was related by Crockett, but still might be instructive, because it was possible back then.

Maybe postmodernism with all its enlightened management rewrites human nature, falsely, of course. Oh, hell, let's just read comic books, or "study" Michael Moore's movies.

And in the times of Davy Crockett, politics was very much the national passion here in The United States. Rich, poor, or somewhere in the middle, most Americans viewed politics as very much a "hands-on" activity, with parades, demonstrations, clubs, and other activities for the masses.

Now-a-days, most Americans limit their participation in the political sphere to showing up at the polls in order to re-elect the incumbent.

As for the 19th and early 20th century love of learning, that was before the rise of "spectator" sports were broadcast live by the mass media.

Alas, many of the citizenry do not know who their state assembly representative is, yet they can describe the roster of their favorite National Football League franchise in exhaustive detail.

I think EdWonk hit it on the head- a version of Gresham's Law has been at work here. Passive entertainment drives out all recreations, including the reading of genuine books, that demand real involvement, just as junk food drives out good food from people's diets. Unfortunately that's a counsel of despair, since I see no way back.

Does the fact that most of the citizenry is more knowledgeable of sports than politics serve a goal? Is it a demand that's only being met or a demand that was engineered?

For years Noam Chomsky's been talking about how the media fill American minds up with pseudo-facts (i.e., sports stats). But he's an Islamofascist, so don't take it from him.

As far as the original issue goes -- popular cultures of literacy -- I think we need to make important national distinctions. Compare British airport bookstores, for instance, with their American counterparts. What's considered "a good read" is far more "literary" in Britain than in the US. Americans would rather read Ann Coulter or Michael Moore or Sean Hannity than, say, Monica Ali or Peter Ackroyd or Orhan Pamuk or many of the other smart novelists I recently saw on display at WH Smiths in Heathrow.

On the other hand the classics have been directed toward a populist/popular audience for a long time now. Why do you suppose major American orchestras perform the same chestnuts over and over again? Why do you suppose that Impressionist paintings go on world tours rivalled only by, say, The Rolling Stones? What once were challenging, even provocative, works of art are now myths, signs of "high culture" to be conspicuously consumed. The media and pundits scare us with Mappelthorpe and piss-Christ, and we go running to the Cezanne exhibit. In 100 years, piss-Christ will be on Hallmark calendars, and we'll be running from some new young lion. And just to clarify my position here, I'm glad when great works of art find popular audiences. I just wish that art didn't have to be declawed by familiarity and given a pedigree by "high art" institutions before it gets to strut its stuff on the popular runway.

All you really need to do to see the state we're in is to look at the transcripts of the Lincoln/Douglas debates. It's not just that we don't have politicians capable of talking like that any more; it's that we don't have citizens capable of following anyone who would.

I have made some personal comments on this here:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2005_01_09_dissectleft_archive.html#110556233000605953

I note that some who blame contemporary violence on television, movies, and music do not realize that many classical works are full of violence, rape, incest, and other deplorable behavior. I suggest that our works of art are violent because we are a violent species. The Iliad is violent. Some of the works of Shakespeare are violent. Some of us believe that if written well that violence is acceptable. I am an eclectic in taste. I enjoy the work of Miles Davis, David Amram, Public Enemy, MJQ, Pablo Casals, Anastacia, Jimmy Rogers, Bach, Tartini, Rolling Stones, The Meters, etc; you get my point. I do not have a prescription for the art that the masses should or should not read. Let folk read what they read; that they read is important. Homer taught me that the ancient Greeks were violent; Public Enemy teaches me that we are violent. Homo Sap is probably the most violent species in creation. When a human is reading, something, it is not doing a violent act.