Re: [Marxism] British workers and the classics

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

Not to mention John L. Lewis, who, if I remember right, would scatter 
Shakespearean (and Biblical) references all over the place. And then of course 
there's Debs, who must have read Les Miserables a hundred times (as well as 
other French progressive poets and novelists).
Didn't someone write a book a few years back about Shakespearean traveling 
companies and the US working class?

-- Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The City Journal, Autumn 2004
The Classics in the Slums
Jonathan Rose

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language
Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require
any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to
underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she
asserted, an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not
figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not
perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not
have value for them."

One should not be too hard on Professor Smith. She was merely echoing what
was, at the time, standard academic opinion: that the Western classics
embody a worldview that somehow "marginalizes" the poor, the nonwhite, the
female, the "other," and justifies their subordination to white male
"hegemony." And like so many postmodern critics, Professor Smith could be
naively confident that she was in full possession of the facts, even
without the benefit of research.

But her theory had no visible means of support. Whenever it was tested, the
results were diametrically opposed to what she predicted: in fact "the
canon" enabled "the masses" to become thinking individuals. Until fairly
recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large
minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature,
philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that
Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the "great books" that she
derided would emancipate the workers.

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."

In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare could still attract enthusiastic,
rowdy working-class audiences, who commented loudly about the quality of
the performances. Caravans of barnstorming actors brought the plays to
isolated mining villages. In response to popular demand, Birmingham's
Theatre Royal devoted 30 percent of its repertoire to the Bard and other
classic dramatists. In 1862, a theater manager provoked a near-riot when he
attempted to substitute a modern comedy for an announced production of Othello.

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.

Working-class autodidacts read the classics in part because contemporary
literature was too expensive. A 1940 survey found that while 55 percent of
working-class adults read books, they rarely bought new books. An
autodidact could build up an impressive library by haunting used-book
stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints such
as Everyman's Library, but these offered only yesterday's authors. Thus
Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) was able to immerse himself in
Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Keats,
Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, and Greek philosophy. There was one
common denominator among these authors: all were dead. "Volumes by living
authors were too high-priced for me," Keating explained, but that did not
bother him terribly. "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."

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.

Oral-history interviews reveal that, among British working people born
between 1870 and 1908, two-thirds had unambiguously positive memories of
school. And that fact inevitably raises a disturbing question: whether
children today in America's inner cities would give their schools such high
marks?and if not, why not?

Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at
nonacademic high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample
represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students
had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on
scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read
over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average
group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry:
their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning,
Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of
boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these
students averaged six or seven books per month. Compare that with the
recent NEA study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,
which found that in 2002, 43.4 percent of American adults had not read any
books at all, other than those required for work or school. Only 12.1
percent had read any poetry, and only 3.6 percent any plays.

In the mining towns of South Wales, colliers had pennies deducted from
their wages to support their own libraries, more than 100 of them by 1934.
The miners themselves determined which books to buy. One such library, the
Tredegar Workmen's Institute, devoted 20 percent of its acquisitions budget
to philosophy. Another spent 45 pounds on the Oxford English Dictionary.
(In the best of times, a miner could not earn much more than a pound a
day.) There were sophisticated literary debates down in the pits, where one
collier heard high praise for George Meredith. That evening, he tried to
borrow Meredith's Love in the Valley from the local miners' library, only
to find 12 names on the waiting list for a single copy. "Every miner has a
hobby," explained one Welsh collier. "It may be a reaction from physical
strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light.
It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something. . . . Think
what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for
hours every day!"

full: http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-classics.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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