You know what I saw: two buildings on fire. One morning in September, as I walked as usual onto campus on a tree-lined path, one of the department staff called out something to me about a dramatic news story, and I stopped into the student center to look at a television. In 2001 I was a graduate student in philosophy, writing a dissertation on ancient views of self-knowledge, luxuriating in the physical and intellectual riches of Princeton University. The revelations from his research are fascinating, and his subtle tilts against fashionable post-modernist readings of reading are funny and well placed.- Miles Taylor.This essay appears in the symposium “ Assault on Higher Education: Reports from the Front,” in the Summer 2017 issue of Modern Age. It is not always easy to follow Rose in his journey through the working-class canon-he is determined to take us into every corner of his library-but it is worth sticking with him. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Roe argues that this self-taught culture produced a working class wary of Marxism (because it was badly written), but also bored by imperialist adventure tales (because they gestured to a world of which workers knew nothing).
Using workers' autobiographies, social surveys and opinion polls, Rose has produced a rich compilation of evidence, depicting an elite within the working class suffused with Macaulay, Milton and Shakespeare, and contemptuous of romance fiction, the tabloids and sensationalist melodrama. His book is a mammoth survey of the autodidact, self-improving culture that emerged in Britain in the late 18th century and flourished for nearly 200 years through religious tract societies, mechanics institutes, trade union libraries and the Workers' Educational Association, until the end of the Second World War. Nearly a century later, Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes goes a long way to explaining why.
In 1906 a famous survey of the reading habits of Labour MPs revealed that their preferences were the Bible, Walter Scott and John Ruskin, with hardly a hint of Karl Marx.
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