#127 - Jonathan Rose - They Read Shakespeare After A Twelve-Hour Shift: What Happened To The British Working Class Mind?

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. He is the author of several books including The Literary Churchill and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

For the better part of two centuries, the British working class sustained one of the most remarkable intellectual traditions in any civilisation. Miners read Shakespeare. Engine-men debated Darwin. Workmen's institutes built libraries of tens of thousands of volumes. Literacy was not a middle-class gift — it was seized, organically, as a form of human dignity claimed on their own terms. Then we severed it. 

In this conversation, we think out loud about: 

• What the autodidact tradition looked like at its height — what a working-class reader's intellectual life in 1880 or 1910 actually was 
• Why they chose Shakespeare and Milton rather than what their betters told them to read — and what that tells us about the nature of the impulse 
• How the educated classes responded by creating modernism — deliberately obscure, deliberately difficult — to keep the inheritance out of reach 
• The mechanism by which reading formed people with a high internal locus of control — and whether the loss of that mechanism is what literacy decline is really documenting 
• The Hitchens argument: whether the tradition was destroyed from above by curriculum changes, or voluntarily relinquished from within — and whether those two things can be separated 
• The role of Methodism as the engine of working-class self-improvement — and what its near-collapse means for any prospect of recovery 
• Whether the autodidact tradition is still alive, operating now through podcasts and the internet rather than workmen's institutes 
• What recovery would actually require — and Jonathan Rose's own changed mind on whether the impulse is dying

Find Jonathan Rose's work: 

• The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes — Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300098952/the-intellectual-life-of-the-british-working-classes/ 
• The Literary Churchil: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300196535/the-literary-churchill/ 
• Drew University faculty page: https://www.drew.edu

About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with thinkers, historians, and commentators grappling honestly with the condition of our civilisation.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and in this episode I'm speaking with Professor Jonathan Rose. Jonathan is William R. Keenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. Jonathan is the author of several books, including The Literary Churchill and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. For the better part of two centuries, the British working class sustained an autodidact tradition that most people today would find almost unbelievable in any class. And in this episode, we think out loud about what the autodidact tradition looked like at its height, why they chose Shakespeare and Milton rather than what their betters told them to read, how the educated classes responded by creating modernism to keep the civilizational inheritance out of reach, the mechanism by which reading formed people with a high internal locus of control, the Peter Hitchens argument that the tradition was destroyed from above by curriculum changes, whilst also asking whether it was voluntarily relinquished from within, whether either of these can actually be separated, the role of Methodism as the engine of working class self-improvement, and why its near collapse means any prospect of recovery is perhaps dimmed. Whether the autodidact tradition is still alive, and it's now operating through new audiovisual media like podcasts on the internet rather than workmen's institutes, and what recovery would actually require. And we find out what Jonathan has changed his mind on during the course of his life. If you find this conversation valuable, please subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Jonathan Rose. I think we're about to have a conversation that isn't often had, and it's about the intellectual life of the working classes, specifically in the country that I am from and live in, Britain. Because for the better part of two centuries, the British working class did something that most people today would find unbelievable almost. Because without being told to, they weren't guided by any institutions. We found that miners would read Shelley, we'd find engine men debating Darwin, we'd find workmen's institutes building libraries with tens of thousands of volumes. And the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, learned to debate in a reading group. He learned the the connection to the canon in a reading group. A tailor became a published literary critic. A Tyneside Pitt Village would produce more readers per head than most of London. And literacy wasn't a middle class gift bestowed on the poor, and it was actually an organic process. It was like an opportunity was being seized as a route out of drudgery or in the uh hope of expanding consciousness or claiming a form of human dignity on their own terms. And today literacy is hitting record lows. The working classes are no longer conversant in the civilizational inheritance of the English-speaking world, but that is also the same of the cultural elite too. It's not just the working classes. And I think that matters, not necessarily just because of cultural refinement arguments, but because inheritance bestows dignity on people's lives and it gives them the tools to be able to name their condition, to be able to govern themselves and to resist bad governance. So, Jonathan, you you spent 25 years almost documenting the evidence for what was built and what was lost, and you're here to tell us what happened and whether we can recover any of it. So perhaps before we get into the argument, you could simply describe in concrete terms what the autodidact tradition looked like at its height, what was a a working class reader's intellectual life say in 1880 or 1910 like...

SPEAKER_00 5:51

workers got together, they discussed books. It was basically a seminar with no professors. You know, no professors need apply. They were self-directed. Um but uh uh the result was, I think, in the long run, that there was a divorce between um the educated classes and the, shall we say, the working classes.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

What what struck me about all of the evidence you put together, and I briefly referenced it in the opener, is that it it wasn't a top-down programme, as you've said. People were weren't necessarily reading what their betters told them to read. In fact, their betters weren't always happy that they did read. Uh, and and uh we we find that people choose Shelley, they choose Darwin, they choose Milton, Shakespeare, you know, uh uh almost any name you can imagine, people were getting their hands on it. What what do you think that tells us about the nature of this impulse? What is the impulse uh that was driving these people?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Oh, well, I i it was it was certainly uh I was trying to frame a critique of the attitude which had become rather common by the 1970s, that this the so-called literary canon had been created by elites, it had been imposed on on the rest of society, and it represented only their personal tastes and and and their social position and not universal values. Well, um uh the fact is that uh if we had left uh the uh uh the decision uh uh to to which which book should we be reading to the working classes, they would have come up with Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare and Darwin and so on. Um so my conclusion is that no, these books were inherently valuable, liberating, um uh enabled people to live truly free lives, which is the meaning of the term liberal education, and uh therefore were very much valued by working class readers, again, precisely because their betters often didn't want them to read uh uh these books, in part because that it started them think you know the working classes thinking, and secondly because it collapsed the distinction between the educated and self-educated classes. If anybody can buy a thousand volumes every man's library and read it through and acquire an education, then in what sense are the uh the university educated people special or entitled to uh to rule? Uh I think that was uh by the early 20th century, that created a lot of anxiety amongst the, shall we say, formerly educated classes. And in order to maintain these distinctions, they um uh well, among those other things, created modernism, which was deliberately obscure, deliberately uh uh difficult, in order to sort of keep out the riff raff from uh from uh from culture.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Well, uh yes, that's that's a very interesting point about how a class division saw the betters in society trying to pull up the drawbridge in quite obscurantist ways, like through modernism. But but there's there's something I suppose I want to press on here as well, because I I I accept that's what happened, but I also accept that um there's been a change with regards to the agency people apply in their lives, and again I think in across every class, but you you do also see it amongst uh some of the lower classes, at least within Britain. So the the autodidact tradition that you document wasn't merely about acquiring knowledge, and it seems to have been about forming a person. Um it gave those people a high sense of uh control, an internal locus of control, someone who uh believed their life was their own project. That just kept on coming out, and all of your diaries, people saying I just needed to get back and consume all of this information once I finished at the factory, or they were reading on the job because they knew it lifted them up somehow. And I I grew up in Northumberland, and that there were grandmothers of my working class friends who I grew up around who well, they'd left school at 14, but they used language with a greater precision than I find amongst university educated people today, uh, or people with considerably more formal education. So, what was the the mechanism by which reading formed that kind of person? And and is the loss of that mechanism, if mechanism is the right word, the the loss of the belief that an inner life is worth cultivating, um, is what we're really documenting when we think about the decline of literacy that we're seeing in all all of the countries that we review.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Well, let me give you just an example here back home in in New York City, where I grew up, uh right now, uh only about uh a little over 20% of eighth graders, uh yeah, uh i.e. uh about uh uh 13 years old, are reading proficient in the public schools. And this and if if you're not reading proficient by the eighth grade, you'll almost certainly end up in poverty and or in jail. Okay. This is and I have to say, an absolute national disgrace. I am ashamed of my country that we have the we have we are so poorly serving the kids in the inner cities in this way, because that then then the things are gonna be hopeless for them. So the question is, among other things, why have we why can't we teach these kids to read? It's not rocket science. It shouldn't be that difficult. And um uh but we're gonna pay it uh uh they're gonna pay, I should say, a terrible price for that throughout their lives.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah, uh absolutely. We we have uh he's quite a famous cultful commentator and journalist called Peter Hitchens. He's the brother of uh Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens. And and he he argued that uh in a book called The Rev A Revolution Betrayed that curricular changes in the 1960s and 70s that were made in the name of relevance and the liberation of working class people from the dead weight of the canon or traditional modes of learning deprived children of um of the very tools that would have made the inheritance genuinely accessible and meaningful. Um and and he argues that you can't, you know, well actually he doesn't argue this, but you can't actually voluntarily relinquish anything that you've been not been properly introduced to. And so our comprehensive schools of today didn't didn't merely fail to pr transmit the tradition. It just decided that the tradition wasn't for anyone, it was a form of cultural oppression. And uh I mean this is this is uh a great tragedy, and I I I actually wonder often how we come back from that because before we started to record, uh we uh we would mention how all of us are subject to uh d media which allow us to or enable us to, in Neil Postman's words, decades ago, entertain ourselves to death.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

So um how do you think we get back the love of the inheritance? And well, certainly that that we are now being uh deludes with sensory overload in s in in smartphones, uh iPhones, whatever, and that is eating up time enormously, and it is uh uh teaching a whole generation to absorb quick and superficial ideas or images, um and they are losing the ability, I think, to think in in linear and logical terms, because if you read a book, uh you have to think in those terms, and uh uh they're they're to a large extent losing that ability. So uh it's um uh the the odds against turning this around are very heavy, but I think we have to, you know, make make that effort. Uh I think that the uh schools should uh try to get back to a more classical curriculum. I think that they should confiscate smartphones when the kids are in school and keep keep them away from them. Um and uh uh and and and I think that they should set aside a certain amount of time every day where kids simply go to the library, the school library, and read a book. They can read whatever they want, but it can't be a screen. It has to actually be a book. Uh because they have to learn to exercise those intellectual muscles.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, I the I I think we should uh we should expand a little bit on the human experience that we're we're missing out on in this new world that we we've created, because uh the the book that you wrote, which uh you know I I only I can't remember which book referenced it that I read, but immediately I went through the sources, found your book, and ordered it. And it'd been around for 25 years, and it is honestly w one of the most uh magnificent contributions to the understanding of uh our own culture here in Britain, and I I exhort everyone to go and read it, not least because it might actually generate the inspiration uh for people to go and self-learn, because actually what I was struck by is a lot of these people who came home black-faced and uh callous-handed, uh, a better educator than than uh than than I am, and so many of fellow educated people are. And and your book is is built on 2,000 diary entries that were written by the working class people themselves. And there's there seems to be an emotional register that sits within them, you know, the sense of the lights coming on in some way, or the world being larger, or lots of introspection on self-becoming. Uh could you could you just describe for the listener for a set so that so people can understand that what was lost wasn't just a cultural practice, but perhaps a form of human experience we don't often get to experience. Um, what the experience of reading some of these uh these uh entries in the canon actually felt like to one of the people that you you documented.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Well, I think they they they you have to understand, especially in the 19th century and to a large extent in the 20th century, working people uh had to follow orders. I mean, that was the definite nature of their position in the class system, and uh they were not going to be expected to think for themselves. So uh the reason that they so passionately embrace these books is because, yes, here they can express their individuality. Uh here they can think they can think for themselves. Uh when you read a book, it is up to you to decide how to read it and how you're going to interpret it and what lessons you're going to draw from it. And uh this was a freedom that they enormously valued. Um I I rather reject the Sao Chai Marxist idea that the working classes are inherently more collectivist or more uh communal. Um uh there is that, of course, in every class, but I think there is also a drive for individuality, um a um uh to assert one's own priorities and thoughts and ideas and attitudes. Um and it's very powerful precisely because so much is done to try to stifle that. So uh that's what certainly comes out in the uh accounts I read. Yeah, I did I did consult uh literally hundreds of working class memoirs, and when these people write their own stories, when they write their own history, they frequently mention what they read. Because they're basically saying to be the historian later on, this is what's important about me, this is what I want you to know about me. And that's that was the so you know, I had a lot of very good raw material to work with.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Absolutely. I I I I I I often find find myself when I read books like yours solidifying the view that the the late philosopher Alistair McIntyre um laid out in his book After Virtue, where where he argues that we live among the moral and intellectual ruins of of a tradition that we we've forgotten how how to inhabit. And we we we use the language of ethics and rights, but we don't really understand where those concepts came from or what sustained them. And and with with other guests on the show, uh when we've talked about things like the Western canon, I I've often thought out loud whether it's possible to even add to it because it feels like we've become so severed from that tradition that I'm not sure any new works could really be added to it because it's not speaking to the same source data. Um do you agree with that? Do you actually think that we're we're probably we're living so in the ruins of that tradition that um because that seems to be so widespread across class and across the the globe that was at least that impacted by Western civilization that um to to try and get back to that, to try and make contributions to it, to try and even get people to effectively understand it is a little bit like seeing through a glass darkly.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Well, if you mean have we lost a sense of a common culture, yes, I think that is that that has on almost er on almost every level. Um it makes for a lot of uh uh diversity and so on, but it also means that we are each you know sequestered in our hate. Uh we are all isolated within our our own little identity group and uh and often can't see outside of that. And what you end up with is a society which lacks a common language, lacks a certain uh sense of common reference points rooted in a literary tradition, uh and and and and at each other's throats. Uh because um they're not speaking the same language and they're not drawing upon the same body of you know the same kind of cultural inheritance, yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

I I I I know we we spoke about this before we started to record, but actually I think it's it's worthwhile uh uh re reproducing the conversation in in some way because um because I think so people so many people are so unfamiliar with the canon and its fruits, and also that it was always simply an elite project that n the Hoy Poloi couldn't access. I think it would be interesting for people to hear actually why it was that you decided to dedicate some of your professional life to um chronicling the intellectual life of the British working classes. What what was it that drew your interest into it and uh why specifically that that subject? And I suppose one addendum question to that, Jonathan, is some of the the the thrusts of your arguments so far, they have a coherent worldview. Did you always hold that worldview? Is that something that changed over time as you threw yourself into this work?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

I oh I always felt that there was a a great value in in uh you know canonical classic literature. Uh that uh I was driven to its defense, precisely because it was challenged, precisely because that when I was starting began to write, uh this was uh in some to some extent under attack. And I felt that one had to uh uh frame a defense of it. A defense, however, not simply founded on the idea that uh these books represent absolute truth and we should hold to them in that respect. No. Obviously, when you read a book, you engage in a dialogue with it, you question it. Uh great books are not necessarily books that contain eternal truths, they obviously don't, uh, but they do address eternal questions and uh and challenge you in that respect, and that is why they are they are they are important. So um uh I felt that by illustrating how people in the past, ordinary people really, had Engaged with this with these books, uh, how they had been a liberating force, how they had been interpreted in many ways differently from what the way we might interpret them in the classroom today, uh, how they were used to um uh they were read in ways that serves these readers' own interests and priorities. Uh Roger Chartier, who's a French historian, calls this appropriation. Okay. Um that would um uh be a much more effective defense of this kind of literature. It's not a sense of a bunch of dogmas that we have to absorb, but it is some it is a quest a series of questions and ideas that we have to engage with.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

And uh that was my fault because I finished a question with a question. So the first question was, what was it that drove you towards chronicling the the intellectual life of the British working classes? Uh uh why did that feel so important to you?

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Well, it was um uh first of all, I I it was a sub subject British history, that's what I worked in. I and I've always been I've always had to say I've always thought very much at home in Britain, in some ways more at home than in my home country. Uh somehow everything seemed to make sense to me. It's the one country other than America that I ever seriously considered living in, you know, per permanently. Um so it was in that sense very very congenial. Um but the other reason is that there was a uh uh the uh the British working classes gave me a lot of material to work with, uh, and I can make this uh this claim. Uh I have asked historians in other about you know other countries whether there is the same huge body of yes, literally 2,000 autobiographies of working people that we know about in Britain. Um and well, there are some, but not not nearly as much as not nearly as much raw material as we have in the in in in the in the UK. So um uh it was a logical thing to work with. And um uh two very good historians, uh uh John Burnett and David Vincent, uh compiled a bibliography of all these uh uh working class autobiographies. So I I simply worked through them uh one by one, and uh they were you know they were wonderful historians, and uh in a sense what I did was simply to build upon the foundation that they established.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Well, well, uh and uh and what a foundation it was. You you've built a superstructure sitting on top of it. Um uh because funnily enough, is uh uh an organization, it's a a cultural center in in London, recently gave um a speech there, ran an event, and as I arrived there, uh they they they get a selection of books that they find particularly interesting, and um one of them was yours, and I said, Oh, I'm I'm interviewing Professor Rose in the next fortnight or so. And they said, Really, we're just about to run a course centered on this book, and I think uh 20 people or so signed up to it. So I'll I'll I'll f I'll fish out the details and send it to you because you're you're you're you're still making ripples after all of this time. Um ladder to no end, yeah. Yeah, I mean it's uh yeah, honestly magnificent. And um uh just digging a little deeper in the rubble that we've talked about of this this not just an int not an intellect, just an intellectual tradition, but rather a civilization, I suppose. So um specifically the civilizational inheritance. We we've spoken a little bit about how the the the top-down influence of um I don't know, uh severing severing a connection to this tradition. I would also like to explore the other sides to it as well, which is about the tradition uh being given up. And I know we've spoken a little bit about some of those influences like entertainment, but there's a uh an influential writer who's a clinical psychologist by trade, used to write under a pseudonym Theodore Dolrymple, which he still does, but his real name is Dr. Anthony Daniels.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I've read a lot of his uh articles here in this sense, yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yes, yeah. Well, I've I've I've interviewed him a couple of times, and and one of his his books, Life at the Bottom, the 25-year anniversary version, is out now with a introduction by Rob Henderson, which is important because they both come at the same question from different angles. Where Dol Rymple worked in Birmingham hospitals and he saw that working class communities in in Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s, where the autodidact tradition would have once been so prevalent, had entirely vanished amongst the people he was he was dealing with that something seemed to have happened inside those communities before the institutions might have even destroyed them in some way. And he he argues it's not all down to bad curriculum policy, it's that people can be prone to adopting a certain set of attitudes toward their own lives about agency and effort and whether it's worth improving oneself, and um that would make the autodidact impulse pretty inconceivable. And and Rob Henderson, he's you know the a modern-day version in some ways, but without the clinical background, and he's he's famous for the luxury beliefs framework, suggesting that those kind of attitudes began as elite ideological exports and then they're internalized. And I suppose my question is is um do you think the autodidact tradition and all that contained within it was destroyed from above, either through policy or through the television becoming so widespread, or the welfare state, or the comprehensive school, so bad institutions, bad ideology, or was it abandoned from within? And um I suppose whatever the answer is, what does that say about how robust it all actually was?

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Well, I th I think they they the uh ideology was driven to a large extent, in fact to an enormous extent, by Methodism, uh which they influenced that you can't uh that you can't overestimate. Uh it was um uh I mean next to the Church of England, it was by far the largest denomination in the 19th century. In terms of actual active churchgoers, they probably were in first place, and they certainly always emphasized self-improvement, uh reading, um uh reading the Bible is true, but uh it's a very short step to saying that uh you don't only have to read the good book, you've got to read the great books as well. And for many uh working class people who had taken a step away from conventional Methodism, who had been to some extent secularized, still retained that reverence for the printed word and that uh that uh reverence for uh self-education. And that carried on until at least I'd say halfway through the 20th century. But eventually that uh that movement um uh ran out of steam. I understand the Methodist Church in Britain is now nearly defunct. Um and uh and and with it that whole uh uh Wesleyan ethos which survived for a long time, but uh that that uh that that that basically they we've spent through that catch that cultural capital, and to a large step it's gone now. Um uh and you know this is the uh uh uh so we don't have the same impulse toward self-improvement, shall we say. Yeah. So yes, in some extent you're right, the causes were internal to the working class, both the uh the the drive towards self-education and the eventual decline of that uh of that effect.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

It's interesting you mentioned the influence of the Methodist Church and how it's largely defunct, because any walk a walk around almost any small town or decent-sized town in in England, which had so many Methodist churches, you you will see that they still stand, or at least the buildings do, and you can see the name Methodist Church tapped into stone, or maybe even some of the old service boards, but they've either been converted into apartments or that the line derelict, or uh what a couple of examples. So I just went on a road trip around the country as part of a travel log that I was doing, following in the footsteps of a writer, H. V. Morton, who wrote 100 years ago. Largely did it because I thought it'd be quite interesting to see what he saw now, follow his tracks and see what I see today. And um, as I was going through Whitby, for example, um on the northeastern coast of England, um, I came across a Methodist church which at least still had the sign of a Methodist church, um, but it was now uh a brewery and beer room, um which, you know, has a totally grim irony. The Methodists were known for effectively leading to uh a dry and sober culture amongst the working class in the in the mining villages. Um I suppose that that's a that's a question actually, because you know, whilst we're talking about Britain, it's it's surely there are similarities over in the States, is both both of our countries have been driven by a Protestant inheritance about the value of the word and obligation of self-improvement and dignity of individual before God. Um do you think I don't know what your religious proclivities are, but it probably doesn't really matter for the sake of argument. Um, is do you do you think that with the loss of the Christian inheritance, the kind of radical secularizing of society, that this has also been the thing that has severed the link between how we approach great works of literature, self-improvement?

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Well, it it it shouldn't have, because even again, the people who were the biggest self-improvers were probably lapsed Methodists. I mean, that is to say, they they were their their their parents were, they came out of those communities, they to some extent distanced themselves from uh the the church uh you know z uh per se, but they still retained to a large extent Methodist values. They still retained these the self-improving values, they still retained the reverence for the for the for the printed word. And um uh I don't see any reason why that couldn't have continued, but for one reason or another, it hasn't. Uh and um uh it may be that um uh uh one one one difficulty may be, again, the kind of media overload. We have so many distractions, so many uh uh uh uh appeals to immediate gratification, um which uh a book can't deliver. A book means you have to sit down and read it, you know, at that at some length. And I certainly notice this among my own students. I teach in a small college in New Jersey, but every year we're under pressure to reduce the actual amount of reading that we give our students because uh they said we don't have the attention spans any longer. And um uh yeah, that that makes the whole business of education increasingly difficult. But certainly uh there were um uh you know uh uh in many other religious groups which had the same uh, shall we say, puritanical uh impulse. Uh I I sort of uh I joke uh uh every every Thanksgiving I say that you know the English really should celebrate Thanksgiving too. They should give thanks to Puritans left. Um and uh but they of course they ended up over over on this side of the pond. But it was not just, you know, most Americans, of course, are not descended from New England Puritans. They are come from various immigrant groups, as do uh my and my forebears were all Eastern European Jews. Uh there's not one drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in me. But nevertheless, there was a fascination growing up with with uh uh with literary cultures of all kinds, including, of course, English literary culture. Uh there was the feeling that this was a uh uh it may have been part of the whole immigrant experience that if you're adopting uh adapting to a new culture, you have to remake yourself and engage in a radical rather radical learning experience in which you assimilate other, you know, the the the the more, shall we say, dominant culture and um and make it your own, which which you know my family certainly did. Um I I grew up in in a uh in a home where um uh my dad loved Anthony Burgess, my my my mom loved Vladimir Nabokov. If I bought if I bought my mom a um uh the Darbies of Union Wolf as a as a as a birthday present, she couldn't have been happier with that. Uh so that uh uh that cultural capital was still in that sense preserved, even though our family was not really in any way religious. Um but the uh uh that the the the the intellectual impulses were still there. Now it uh uh I I think that we see this self-improvement, you know, uh self-improvement uh uh uh is manifest. And for example, Asian immigrants to to America. Uh we have uh uh young Chinese uh uh students who are mastering Latin, they're very interested in that. They are uh playing Mozart on the piano brilliantly. Um and um uh so as as long as that you know self-improving immigrant culture is still there, there will there will be it it will it will the this this cultural inheritance can continue.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it, that often the way the great um Western civilizational inheritance is carried on is by non-Westerners. Uh there are so many that yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Uh I I would say that you it looks it seems to me that half of the major novelists today writing in English are of South Asian heritage.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Yes. Yeah that's a yeah, very good point. Very good point. Uh on the question of self-governance, which we've touched on a few times, so very famously, uh Alexis De Toky, he uh travelled around America, wrote Democracy in America, and and and spoke uh about how um the uh the way these small communities formed and governed themselves um was due to very specific traditions. Those traditions had something to do with literacy, but it was also cultural inheritance and folk ways that have been passed on from various source countries and all the rest of it. But he certainly did put a lot on that that democratic people could only be good democratic citizens if they learned how to self-govern. And I I wonder if part of the reason why we have low turnout rates in elections, but also why we're talking about lots of people having lost agency in their lives in some way and they're choosing other things, is that we have effectively given up one of the things that civilize us, that make us good democratic citizens in some way. Um one one question is do you agree with that? And two is given that we've left that inheritance behind, is there anything that you can see in the modern world post that period in which it would as effectively for help people form themselves into self-governing citizens? Or do you think that it is the it is our our literary nature as Homo sapiens that allow us to fully grasp those concepts and it can't just be learned without the written word.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Okay, okay. I think that many questions. It's um uh I I I I I do think that people throughout the Western world are feeling that they are not in control of their lives. Uh this may be a function of the growth of bureaucracy, it may be a function of the growth of multinational organizations, it may be a function of the growth of of of the behemoth corporations and so on. Um but they there is a sense that they are sort uh losing control of um uh that they're they're where they are not self-governing. And this often fuels populism, which can un can can take on ugly manifestations, there's no question about that. Uh but I think it also often reflects a desire to uh uh uh get you know to t to take control of one's own community and to to organize it on our own basis. And I think if if we can look at it that way, we can channel it perhaps into more positive uh uh channels. Uh I certainly don't want to take a position on on British politics, but I think you see that operating here as and in in Britain and in the United States as well. Um so it's um uh the difficulty is that unless we have a kind of a common language and a common literary culture that we're referring back to, and a common set of ideals, then uh that that uh that grassroots revolt uh becomes very divisive indeed and um uh and and does threaten to tear tear the country apart, uh precisely because we we you know we don't have that that common literary inheritance that we can refer back to and um uh and that common culture, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Well, I I'd agree. I'd I'd also add, I mean, we we see it, as we've said a couple of times, in the political cultural elites too, uh what the lessons from that inheritance aren't transmitted there either because people don't don't choose to inherit it. So I'll give an example. Our current Prime Minister Sakya Starmer has been asked before what's his favourite book, doesn't have one, favourite poem, doesn't have one, favourite piece of music, doesn't have one. Um and uh he he his style of prose, his rhetoric uh is is totally divorced, actually, if you look at it compared to previous prime ministers, even from 30 years ago, 40 years ago. There's a proceduralism there, it's been denuded of any kind of meaning. But also I would argue, whilst we've talked about the issues with grassroots populism without the common inheritance and all of the lessons that the inheritance gives you, is without that at the top, there's also a distinct lack of empathy and um a a lack of dignity even being bestowed on others because people are just spoken about as though they are um they are misguided, that they're they're imagining things when sometimes people are just responding uh as human nature does, like humans being groupish, and um also in Britain, for example, um that there's the age-old argument that that Kipling puts forward in some of his poems that you know Normans are never to lie to Saxons. Any time that a Saxon thinks the Norman's lying, he's he's gonna he's gonna come at you. Um so I think I think there are I think we're basically across society we are absolutely missing out on all of these huge lessons, and instead we keep on rushing headlong into thinking that what seems like a simple solution is going to fix everything at every level, and it's not, uh, because that that they're kind of missing what sits beneath it. Um a question I'll put to you uh let's try and think about green shoots, recovery, potential recovery. So, Michael Lind, I was interviewing recently, and he made an argument on this program that perhaps the lowering cost of audio visual technology might actually produce, after a period of chaos, something analogous to um what happened after the Gutenberg printing press. Perhaps a popular culture of serious engagement. I I I do really want to believe it. Do you believe it? What do you think the chances are of that?

SPEAKER_00 43:14

Well, it is it in fact it is. And uh the idea that uh uh there was a famous uh critic of the American press, A.J. Liebling, who said that uh freedom of the press is only meaningful to people who own a printing press. Uh and when he would said that, that was in the 1950s when the media was, you know, there were other several, you know, a few big television networks, a few big uh newspaper combines, and that that was it. And if anything, the media has become more concentrated ever since then. However, we now have, yes, an alternative electronic media where anyone can be a publisher and anyone can reach a very broad audience. Now, it is certainly true, and this is the big drawback of it, that it also means that um yeah uh hate mongers of all kinds uh suddenly are able to reach a much Much, much larger audience. And that's certainly a danger. But it's also made it possible for ordinary citizens to communicate with each other without going through a corporate or or or governmental filtering sort of thing. So it's um uh and I think we now see a real divide in the media between what we might call the legacy media, which is traditional, which are the few newspapers and broadcasters left, and of course the electronic media, which anyone uh can uh can can participate in, and a real sense of distrust of each other. These are two different groups of media who are really antagonistic uh and uh uh seeking to discredit the other because they're competing for credibility, uh which is the uh invaluable possession of any any any medium. Um that's so that's working itself through, and I'm not quite sure how it's going to ultimately work out. Uh but in that sense you could say that um uh uh uh the autodidacticism is still very much alive, but it's it's operating through the uh through the internet, really. Which when you think of it is a is a magnificent tool for self-education if you use it for that purpose.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Absolutely. Well, I th there have been arguments from both sides saying that podcasts like mine might be cannibalizing, or mine's probably not big enough, but cannibalizing non-fiction book sales because people can just listen to it instead. But then there seems to be data that suggests actually it drives quite a lot of non-fiction book sales because the people like need to listen to these kind of conversations, then have their curiosity peaked and they they want to follow it up themselves. Um, so perhaps we're adding to the green shoots, Jonathan. Um let's talk about um institutional matters here. So we've talked a little bit about how uh an ideology, a worldview, uh uh captured institutions perhaps over the last 50, 60 years. Um in the name of a liberatory ideology. That what was what was being proposed was apparently going to be to the betterment of those on the receiving end of the institutional activities, whether it's education or whatever. What we've been putting forward is actually what it's done is sever the inheritance and made people less educated, even if grades might be going up. I think we could probably argue that people are less educated than they were before. In fact, you just got to look at the reading lists for courses 100 years ago for bachelors uh compared to today, and you'll realize that those people were just so so well read before they stepped in the building. Um I speak to friends who are educators, uh, indeed, my my wife is an educator as well, and I asked if, for example, a government decided to and I'll use a British example. We have a very famous headmistress called Catherine Burbel Singh, she has a school in Wembley. Yeah, she she she teaches in the classical tradition and she makes sure everyone understands uh British inheritance and all the rest of it. Um and I asked what what would be the chances of schools if they were instructed to take this uh approach to curricular setting and all the rest of it, and an approach to teaching and discipline, what would be the chances that it would be taken up? And I've pretty much been told by everyone I've asked that there would be a non-compliance. It wouldn't necessarily be walkouts, but it would be, no, I'm not gonna do it, I would subvert it. And lots of people are worried about the state of the education system because they send kids off to school and they come back indoctrinated in some other way. Uh people argue that the the uh secular institutions can be even more dogmatic than the religious ones that have supposedly freed everyone up from. So I suppose the question is, is if this is the case and people are worried about the quality of education, they want to get back to civilizational inheritance, and the institutions are so captured and the government can't do anything about it, do we need the autodidact tradition to effectively metastasize or in the in a positive way towards a homeschooling network where people there's an organic growth once more of this tradition instead of expecting the state to fix things, instead of expecting uh policy to fix things, um what do you think the chances are of this uh of such a an approach taking root once more in the institutions, or do we have to go and do it ourselves?

SPEAKER_00 48:53

I j I do think that uh parents, families should have more control over education. And that that is that that is essential. How is how is that achieved? In some cases it could be through homeschooling. Not everyone's capable of that or wants to do it, but that that that'd certainly be an option. Uh here in America we have what charter schools uh which are uh are are more they are still public schools, but they are more self-governing and not subject to all the bureaucratic regulations that public schools are are uh are subject to. They are especially popular in uh inner city black and Hispanic neighborhoods, precisely because the public education there is so poor and parents want a better education for their children. Um they do tend to enforce more traditional discipline, they do tend to have more traditional curricula. Um and uh uh that I think should be very, very much encouraged uh because that gives um um even yeah uh uh John Stuart Mill, when he was writing about uh the prospect of a public education system, said, Look, I do believe everyone should be educated, but I'm worried about uh the state controlling everything. And therefore he did propose something like a voucher system where um uh uh you know parents could they'd have to educate their children, but they could choose which kind of school they wanted to send their children to. Uh perhaps that's that I think that's the direction that we should move in, frankly.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

Hmm. Well, that that leads me on to penultimate question. And uh apologies if it sounds like I'm asking you to lay out a policy program, but yeah, I think people would be interested to hear what recovery would require. So if you were to design an educational and cultural program that was aimed at specifically at recovering something of what you've documented in your your excellent book, not not necessarily as nostalgia, though I'm uh I can be fond of a bit of nostalgia, but as a genuine transmission, what do you think the essential conditions of that would look like?

SPEAKER_00 51:09

I think if you are a billionaire who would like to donate money to promote education, okay, of which there's some, uh don't bother giving it to elite colleges. They have more than enough money and they're they're they're they're enormously wealthy. Uh set up a school in the inner city, uh, endow it, and um uh you know you can even specify that the only uh children who can attend are within a certain geographical limit, yeah, i.e. the that that particular neighborhood, and uh establish your own your own rules and uh uh for the for faculty and curricula, and uh you will do it you will do a great deal of good for those who are less fortunate. That's that would be a big start.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

And what would you say to the individual curious about the canon and uh perhaps impressed upon by the lives of the British working classes a couple of centuries ago or a century ago? Uh what would you what would you say to people who sought to uh recover tradition in their own way?

SPEAKER_00 52:19

Okay, join a reading group. And there are thousands of them, both you know, yeah, in America and and and in Britain. They're still flourishing. Um meet once a week or one or once a month. Uh re-read through the canon yourself, talk about it yourself. It would be very similar to these mutual improvement societies, which existed like 150 years ago. Uh no professors need apply. Uh, and um uh and direct yourself. And you there are also online discussion groups. We don't have any more literary critics like, say, Lionel Trilling, who could command enormous respect uh in in the printed word, uh in printed media. Uh, but we have individual readers who are exchanging ideas about books online and are basically, you know, doing doing it's DIY criticism, basically. So, yes, that's one way you could approach that that that uh that that challenge it's something which I would like to see more of, and I I I often toy with it myself.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Uh make sure I get out of the digital realm. Yeah, I do consulting professionally, and it's it's from home and lots of digital calls, but nothing ever uh substitutes the the in-person dynamic. I found up when I've gone and done events and places, the energy in the room from people engaging with ideas and topics. But I know you wrote about this in your book, the difference between the various institutes that uh were set up by the different classes for their own purposes. And I always found it really interesting that those mutual improvement societies set up by the working classes were actually uh for uh for properly free extra expression. There weren't any limits from the the diaries you shared. Uh it was go away, figure out what this means and come back and present back to the group, make an argument, it can be anything. But the the middle class institutes like the mechanics institutes, and there's a the husk of one just a few minutes down the road from me, a beautiful building, but it's used for ballet dance classes or whatever by the locals these days, is they they excluded uh certain topics, so no politics and no religion, and um it it did make me just think about how the there's been a shape-shifting between the classes over time with regards to those who are the higher-ups dictating what can be spoken about in some way, and what what was happening in the mechanics institutes seems to have happened, it seems to have shapeshifted into other things like in polite society, we do not talk about XYZ, and um all just seems to be a way of suppressing a kind of dissent on anything. Um is that your read on it as well? They just don't want people to get above their station.

SPEAKER_00 55:14

I think certainly these mutants and brumin societies had uh yeah, there was complete freedom of expression. Uh the only rule was that there were no rules. Uh the uh uh uh it was uh uh uh it was it was dedicated to to free and open debate. And um uh you know that's the way of you know uh getting these ideas, uh these controversies out into the open and and working them through. Because if you figure certain subjects off limits, uh that only creates frustration, it only creates resentment. Uh they c they they the expression will come back in other forms which are much less attractive and uh and and frankly hateful. So uh uh my feeling is that there should be no restrictions, no legal restrictions, which to say, on so-called hate speech, because in fact it's defined much too much too broadly. Uh the way to deal with these issues is to get them out in the open and thrash them through and subject them to public scrutiny. Um uh so I don't, you know, when I support freedom of expression, it's not because I consider all ideas equal and all ideas beneficial. Obviously, they're not. Obviously, some ideas are poisonous, but um uh uh it is only through critically examining them and understanding why they're poisonous that you'll ever be able to defeat them.

SPEAKER_01 56:42

Here, here. Uh well, Jonathan, you've been very, very generous with your time so far, and indeed your time prior to this engagement. So thank you for joining. But before I let you go, there's a question I ask all of my guests. So this is a a standard close, and it's about what you changed your mind on during the course of your life. And it might have been something large, it could have been a moral absolute, perhaps, that you held, or it could have been something specific to your work, or something more of a daily concern that you always thought was there. And what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_00 57:15

If I had to you know uh rewrite the book now, I wouldn't do it because it's been out. I would not be as pessimistic about the uh the autodidact tradition dying out. I do think that while much of it, uh the loss of the reading is distressing, loss of the reading habit is distressing, I think in some ways, especially on the internet, it is it is surviving and still flourishing. And the impulse certainly is still there. So I did change my mind about that.

SPEAKER_01 57:42

Hmm. Fascinating. And and I exhort, as I said already, that everyone to go and read this book. It is it is fantastic. Uh the the people who gave you the uh the the blurb commendations at the time were rather learned people, John Carey, Christopher Hitchens, and many others. And uh it really is uh a captivating book, re reading these uh not only your your analyses of the times and people's contributions, but actually getting into the heads of these people in ages gone by in uh much lower social stations than than many can imagine today, and realizing just how impressive they are, they their grasp of the language, but what uh this uh autodidact tradition did to inspire them to more uh people becoming published authors whilst they were cloggers and all the rest of it, it is fascinating. Jonathan, you've had a long and distinguished career. Uh that's some sample of your work. What else uh do you think people might be interested in? And are you working on anything that we can expect to be hitting the shape of the stuff? That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 58:53

Yes, I I am I'm the book I am now writing, and again, I like writing on sort of unconventional subjects, and it is uh uh a history of Playboy magazine's female readers, of which there were millions. Uh in fact, one-third of all their readers were women. Uh again, and I think you can see a certain common thread here. We assume that working class readers didn't read serious literature, we assume that women were all hostile to Playboy. By no means is either generalization true. And uh, once again, I go back to their memoirs, I go back to their letters of the editor, and uh and find out what they found so fascinating about this magazine. And it says a lot about both the history of intellectual culture in America, because it was actually a fairly highbrow magazine, very literary, and uh, and also, of course, something about the history of sexuality in the in mid-20th century America. So um uh that's uh that's my latest project.

SPEAKER_01 59:57

Well, you caught me off guard that I was not expecting you to say that's what you're writing about, but I I'm gonna cover that. Yes, right. Yes, well, uh that's that that means it's gonna fly off the shelves. Uh when do you expect that might be out, Jonathan? Well, I'm still still in the process of writing, but I'm I must say I'm I'm enjoying working on it. Good, good. Well, good luck with it. Keep fighting the good fight, and um I hope to be able to speak to you about that when it's ready. But in the meantime, uh thank you very much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure, and your your work has uh been most enlightening.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

Oh dear. Thank thank you so much, Sean. I'm most grateful for this opportunity. Thanks, Jonathan. All the best.