BOOKS FOR THR MASSES

This piece by Elinore Standard first appeared as one in an ongoing series in The Record Review titled "My Reading Life."

Works mentioned in this piece: "City Journal," Love in the Valley, Literary Taste And How To Form It,


BOOKS FOR THE MASSES



In a recent article in the urban policy magazine,“City Journal”, titled “The Classics in the Slums” by Jonathan Rose, the author states that the classics in “the canon” – that is, the received list of “great” books acknowledged as necessary to an education – enabled “the masses” to become thinking individuals. “Until fairly recently,” Rose says, “Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy and music.

In the last part of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, self-taught working class people read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A home library could be built up, Rose says, “by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints,” all offering only yesterday’s authors.

Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) said, “Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me. 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.”

Rose continues: “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. 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!’”

The English playwright, novelist and essayist, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) understood the potential of a vast new reading public and believed in getting this public to read by whatever means. Born in the heart of Staffordshire in what is known as “the potteries”, --six towns that later formed the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Bennett wrote fiction about the drab lives and ugly surroundings of working class and middle class people he grew up with.

He also wrote “Literary Taste: How To Form It” first published by A.P. Watt in 1909. “Literary Taste” is an exhortation, a sermon, a plea for self-improvement through reading. The Education Act of 1870 produced what Bennett called “a new, eager reading public with no tradition of self-culture by means of books.” In a pre-public free library era, he set out to show people how they could develop literary taste by scrimping to buy books, by diligent and regular reading of certain works, and by thinking about this reading.

“Literary Taste” contains three of the most delicious reading lists you’ll ever find and I am happy to announce you can read it all on-line for absolutely nothing if you go to
www.readbookonline.net, a site containing 200 of the best novels of the 20th Century. Arnold Bennett would be astounded and pleased to think that many works on his own list can come to your virtual personal library completely free of charge.

In 1909, the total cost of Bennett’s 335-volume library was about £26, or, as Bennett points out, sixpence a day for three years. Figure a pound was worth about $5.00 back then and understand a worker made perhaps that much in a week, it isn’t as inexpensive as it sounds, but still…

“When you have read, wholly or in part,” Bennett says, “a majority of these 335 volumes with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, through to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.”

He divides the literary holdings into three periods: The first is from the beginning of literature to John Dryden or roughly to the end of the 17th Century. He eliminates The Bible from his list because he assumes everybody already has one. This list includes Bede, More, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare, of course.

Period Two goes from William Congreve to Jane Austen or roughly the entire 18th Century into the 19th. Here we find Locke, Newton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Malthus, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Blake and Robert Burns.

Bennett’s Period Three extends from Scott through the 19th Century. As Rose points out in his “City Journal” piece, material under copyright – all the new stuff – then as now, costs more. So Bennett’s third list is the most expensive because it contains a larger proportion of copyright works. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Browning. Lamb, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Stevenson are on the fiction list, and Darwin, Newman, Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Carlyle, among others, are on the non-fiction list.

There is a lot about Arnold Bennett on the website of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council Libraries. www.stoke.gov.uk/council/libraries. This excellent site has many links and you can find information, for example, about the well-known local potteries. You can read a lively and slightly nasty exchange between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf (she says he has a most peculiar accent), you can get maps and find out what is happening locally, and you can print out a recipe for “Omelette Arnold Bennett” created just for him by a famous chef during Bennett’s day.

I like the encouraging tone of “Literary Taste” and for having been compiled 100 years ago, Bennett’s approach and his list hold up today. Often he explains why he has rejected a work one might expect to find included. He is always mindful of the pocketbook. As you’ll notice with us contemporary stone readers and compilers of lists, there is a passion, an obsession. And there is joy: Bennett says, “the spirit of literature is unifying, it joins the candle and the star.”


Elinore Standard elstd@aol.com
There is an excerpt about Arnold Bennett in
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading”
Laura Furman and Elinore Standard, Eds. (Carroll& Graf, 1997)