Reading by Candlelight and Coal Dust

Before the Spreadsheets: An Intellectual Life Worth Reclaiming

I am not a fan of separating classes of society. In fact, I cringe at the very mention of classes and caste systems, however real (or imagined) they may be. Nevertheless, I greatly admire the work of Jonathan Rose detailing the British working class, the bottom of the economic pyramid, in his masterwork The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, now in its third publication.

The period of analysis in Rose’s book spans roughly from the late 18th century through the mid-20th century, with a strong concentration on the 19th century and early 20th century, particularly the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He uses memoirs, oral histories, library records, and educational archives to reconstruct the reading and intellectual practices of British workers during this transformative period in industrial and political life.

This is not a story of hardship ennobled by culture. It is a record of an insurgency fought in secondhand bookshops, between shifts at the mill, and by candlelight in rented rooms. Jonathan Rose demolishes the pretensions of both the genteel historian and the radical theorist, not by rhetorical flourish, but by forensic resurrection. He shows that the working poor of Britain were once the most serious readers in the empire, consumers and critics of canonical literature who saw in Shakespeare not a curriculum but a comrade. To read this book is to be shamed by history, and perhaps to be redeemed by it too.

Rose does not begin with a thesis. He begins with the lives that historians had neither the time nor the imagination to record: a miner who reads Plato underground, a servant girl found with a volume of Shelley in her apron pocket, a baker’s son quoting Ruskin to an indifferent magistrate. These were not exceptions. They were, for a time, the rule. In their diaries, in oral testimonies, in battered memoirs, the question is not “why would they read this?” but how could they not?

Reading was a lifeline, a solace, and an assertion.

“I read,” said one ironworker, “because I wanted to say what I thought, not what I was told.”

The paradox Rose exposes is uncomfortable for modern sensibilities: that the working class once read more seriously, more adventurously, and more democratically than today’s university-credentialed elite. The autodidacts of the Victorian and Edwardian years were not guided by syllabi or triggered by texts. They read for transformation. They read to join a conversation they had been told was not theirs. And in doing so, they threatened to become something horrifying to both patricians and party bosses alike: intellectually independent.

One of the people documented was George Norris, who embraced self-studies in industrial psychology, which Rose says “enabled him to argue down postal supervisors who were eager to experiment with time-and-motion studies. Norris himself is quoted as saying:

“I can now hold my own with the finest products of Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge whether it be in understanding problems of trade and commerce or in the realms of literature, art or music. ... I’ve learned how to analyse Government blue books and white papers, and to digest statistics; workshop practice, managerial problems, wage rates, currency problems, social planning, local and national government developments have all become understandable as a result of my studies. ...

…Training in the art of thinking has equipped me to see through the shams and humbug that lurk behind the sensational headlines of the modern newspapers, the oratorical outpourings of insincere party politicians and dictators, and the doctrinaire ideologies that stalk the world sowing hatred.”

Lifelong Learning

Rose's polemic is not just scholarly; it is epic. A teenage weaver, hungry for more than bread, pores over Darwin’s Descent of Man by the glow of a gas lamp. A Black Country nailmaker teaches himself Latin to read Virgil in the original. In an Irish tenement, a bricklayer’s daughter annotates Middlemarch in the margins of a borrowed Everyman's edition.

A Welsh miner debates the merits of Paradise Lost with his comrades underground. A Lancashire housemaid tucks a tattered volume of The Pilgrim’s Progress under her mattress, reading in secret between shifts. These are not eccentric tales; they are part of a sustained, often secret rebellion against the limits of circumstance. Each book cracked open was a door forced ajar.

This diversity is central. As Rose demonstrates, the intellectual life of the British working class was not monolithic. Its texture varied by trade and by town: Scottish foundry workers favored science and theology; Welsh colliers devoured poetry; Yorkshire textile workers wrote memoirs in margins and margins of factory calendars.

Gender mattered, too. Women readers were initially scarce among memoirists, just 5% of those born before 1870, but they grew increasingly present across generations, bringing new forms of engagement and ambition. One mother, denied education herself, bequeathed to her daughter not jewels, but Shakespeare, and the insistence that she, too, could read.

Crucially, the canon these readers pursued was often conservative. “Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Best Books”, was embraced as a radical act of self-cultivation. Why? Because these texts, however traditional, represented access. To read Milton or Johnson or Carlyle was not to bow before aristocratic tastes but to claim parity.

“What they read,” Rose notes, “were books that conferred dignity and demanded discipline.”

The authority of the canon was, in this context, a ladder up, not a leash tying them down.

Capacious

Nor did intellectual life stop at the canon’s edge. Rose’s readers debated penny dreadfuls and school stories, practiced shorthand, dissected sermons, and joined mutual improvement societies where scripture, socialism, and Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and sociologist who was enormously influential during the Victorian era. He is best known for applying evolutionary theory to social and moral philosophy, a system popularly known as “social Darwinism,” although Spencer himself coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” before Darwin did.

Spencer’s works were widely read among the British working class, particularly those interested in science, secularism, and philosophical individualism. Jonathan Rose documents in his book that Spencer was often read in mutual improvement societies and by autodidacts who were drawn to his rationalist and systemic critiques of religious orthodoxy and government paternalism. His inclusion in the intellectual diet of working-class readers highlights their eclecticism and their appetite not just for canonical literature but for scientific and philosophical speculation.

One could learn as much from a misremembered lecture as from a faithfully copied sonnet. The intellectual life was capacious: it unfolded in chapels, in classrooms, in the awkward hush of the public library. It was not a curriculum; it was a way of asking questions.

An Elegy

But for all its celebration of working-class literary hunger, Rose is also writing an elegy. The third edition of the book opens with a prelude of quiet fury: the gains of two centuries are in retreat. We are, Rose suggests, witnessing a cultural counter-revolution. The liberal arts, once a ladder to dignity and dissent, are being replaced by credentialism, surveillance pedagogy, and a marketplace that appraises curiosity as wasteful unless it turns a profit.

Autodidacts are vanishing not because their ambitions have withered, but because their world has. Libraries close. Reading groups atrophy. Public education is reduced to a cattle chute for standardized tests. The university, rather than expanding the canon, now preaches a curriculum of managed suspicion. And all the while education and environment holds us back.

The stakes, Rose argues, are not merely cultural. They are democratic. When literature is fenced off by gatekeepers, when the idea of truth becomes a matter of credential rather than contestation, we don’t just lose readers. We lose citizens.

“The classics,” he writes, “equipped the governing classes to rule. Then the politics of equality must begin by redistributing this knowledge to the governed classes.”

This is not a quaint appeal to read more. It is a demand to reclaim the intellectual commons.

Rose does not so much praise the past as issue a warning: the future belongs to those who control the interpretation of the present. In that light, his book becomes more than history. It becomes strategy. And here, perhaps, is where Rose is most subversive. He insists that the high culture sneered at as elitist by modern theorists was, in practice, seized by the working class as an instrument of emancipation.

The Iliad, Bunyan, Carlyle, these were not instruments of domination, but of liberation. The autodidacts understood that to read widely was to see differently, and to see differently was to question everything, especially power.

Reclaiming the Future

We live in a moment when the humanities must justify themselves in spreadsheets. It is hard not to suspect that this is precisely because they remain one of the last arenas where dangerous questions might still be asked. In that sense, Rose's book is both requiem and recruitment. It mourns the disappearance of a reading culture forged in hardship, but it also calls upon us, with rare moral clarity, to rebuild it.

Toward the end, Rose entertains a possibility equal parts hopeful and defiant: that the autodidact may return, not in cap and gown but in Wi-Fi and headphones, armed with open-access PDFs and annotated classics downloaded at midnight. This figure, no longer hunched over a coal-stained copy of Bunyan, may now be scrolling Auden on a cracked smartphone or debating Zola in a subreddit no professor has ever heard of.

In online forums, in book clubs, in the quiet tenacity of those who resist algorithmic herding, the spirit of the self-taught reader flickers. But if it is to survive, let alone thrive, it must be remembered. And that is the service Rose performs with this magnificent work. He reminds us that the life of the mind has never belonged to a class. It belongs to those who claim it.

And we must claim it.

Not politely. Not deferentially. But with the fierce joy of a miner reciting Wordsworth to his fellow men in the tunnels of the earth, saying without shame: let us all be Happy Warriors: “More skilful in self-knowledge” and “Keep faithful with a singleness of aim.”

The book is highly recommended, it is littered with positive stories of people who had no formal education and through “mutual improvement provided invaluable training in forming and expressing opinions.” But overall it shows us that Robert Darnton was right to treat print and reading, rather than economics, as the prime cause of the French Revolution.

Could a societal return to wide reading spark the critical thinking necessary to build a better future, just as it fueled the aspirations of those emerging from the mines, workshops, and factories of the early twentieth century?

Stay curious

Colin