Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Intellectual Working Class, 22 Feb 2004
This is a marvellous book! The Author displays a remarkable insight into many aspects of working class culture. I was born and bred in Penrhiwceiber, a bustling village (mentioned on page 241), near Mountain Ash in the South Wales mining valleys. My parents and Grand Parents had also lived their lives there, and had taken active parts in the choral societies and local politics etc. As a child, I was brought up amidst the books they had collected to make private libraries, in fact, I now own them all as part of my own valued collection. I know from personal experience just how accurate this book is, and I can 'feel' the reality of the personal accounts of people trying to educate themselves, against the pressures of having to make a living in difficult circumstances. Many of those people lived up to the ideal that 'school simply gave you the foundation to enable life-long learning on your own account'. Also, apart from radical politics and communism, there were many people, who, by their private learning, were able to separate the 'SOCIAL' from the 'ism' in that word-label. They therefore interpreted SOCIALism as an outlook, a way of life and living, that embraced all that was good, noble and true. It is very easy to forget this today, when so much emphasis is put upon the 'ism' part of the word, that the word itself is regarded as a failed system and an irrelevance to modern life.
I am also immpressed by the author's willingness to include in various places, the attitudes of the 'not-so-bookish' and 'anti-learning' factions of the working classes who ridiculed and scorned the efforts of the autodidacts and their efforts. Such people were (and still are) as much of an obstacle to the private students who tried to put their learning into practice in their everyday lives, as the hated Capitalist class who were regarded as keeping the poor man 'at his gate' so to speak. So, in fact, the pressures against you came from both above and below. I know this too from personal experience.
I heartily recommend this book to all who are interested in the old concept of 'learning for learning's sake' and the intellectual development of the individual. The book presupposes a wide knowledge of literature, poitics, religion and history in the reader, but it is easy to read and I am very glad I have added it to my own - 'working class private library'. Howell Thomas.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Working Class Heroes, 23 Mar 2006
If I could give this book six stars out of five I would, it is an absolutely brilliant book, as illuminating as it is enjoyable. In essence it is the story of the 'Autodidact' (or 'self-taught') tradition of the British working classes which seemed to surface in the eighteenth century, become prominent in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth.
A story of 'mutual improvement societies,' 'miners institutes,' 'self-help,' 'everyman libraries,' of men and woman at work at the loom or down the mineshaft with no formal guidance or tutoring making their own way through Dickens and Ruskin and Pilgrims Progress and Robinson Crusoe and whatever else they could lay their hands on.
A story that includes the story of the intellectual milleau that gave birth to the formation of the Labour Party and which had a profound influence on its subsequent development in the first half of the twentieth century, an answer as to why British Socialism owed more to Methodism than to Marxism.
The story of the effect of mass literacy, of Victorian educational reform, of the class-ridden, snobbish differentiation between 'highbrow,' 'middlebrow,' and 'lowbrow,' of the decline of the Autodidact tradition brought by increasing affluence, greater opportunities for higher education, new forms of media and rapid cultural obsolescence as 'cultural styles supercede one another with dizzying speed.'
The story of what it means to live in a country where Pop music employs more people than coal and steel and what kind of cultural shift that entails. The story of how the working class have been increasingly cut off from 'high' culture and what that entails.
In short, a history book of the highest order, one that cannot be reccomended enough, one that will truly provoke thought.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling view of British Society, 24 Mar 2002
By A Customer
An erudite, yet entertaining, study of the way the British working class sought to improve themselves and how the middle classes sought (seek?) to contain these activities, by a combination of social and economic control or by simply redefining what counted as valuable knowledge.
What particularly impressed me was the way it revealed the hidden prejudice from a refreshingly "normal" perspective.
The book covers a wider range of subjects including the rise of friendly societies and the labour movement in the context of bettering the lot of the less well off.
The approach is measured, not drawing on any jargon from sociology, Marxism or the like and, (as a non-historian, actually being a bit of a techie) compelling even though not an easy book to read. I particularly enjoyed the "trashing" of cultural studies in the introduction to the book.
Starting from before the industrial revolution the book covers material up to about 1975 and it has relevance today in a way the polemical and patronising tripe of the radical left fails to do.
When I got to the last page (464) having enjoyed reading every page I was surprised and pleased to see the reference to the on-line search. The results validated the anger and frustration I felt after a day's "diversity" training in the work place.
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