Classics and class

From Classics for the people by Edith Hall. Explores one of the more fascinating educational epochs circa 1850-1950 when working class people in Britain were as likely as any others to have read and discussed the classics.

Working-class libraries and archives, the writings of autodidacts and the annals of adult education have been analysed by several scholars since Richard Hoggart’s pioneering The Uses of Literacy and R D Altick’s The English Common Reader, both published in 1957; the most famous, focused primarily on literature in English, are David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1981) and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). But Classical materials have also been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks. Classical topics were included on the curricula of Mutual Improvement Societies, adult schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, university extension schemes, the Workers’ Educational Association, trade unions and the early Labour Colleges. These initiatives did much to counter the sluggish legislative response to workers’ demands for education: it was not until the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 that even rudimentary instruction in literacy and numeracy, let alone access to classical culture, became universally and freely available to children under 13.

But there had long been other ways to learn about the Greeks and Romans. Museums in Britain were visited by a far wider class cross-section than their Continental equivalents, where the admission of visitors to the princely galleries was closely monitored. There was a sense that art and archaeology somehow belonged to the nation rather than exclusively to wealthy individuals; free admission was customary. A Prussian traveller in London was disturbed to find in 1782 that the visitors to the British Museum were ‘various … some I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people, of both sexes, for as it is the property of the nation, everyone has the same right … to see it, that another has’. And classical sculptures such as the Parthenon frieze and the Venus de Milo were endlessly reproduced in forms accessible even to the poorest Briton: plaster reproductions in municipal museums across the nation, cheap self-education magazines such as Cassell’s Popular Educator, and volumes published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, available in libraries of Mechanics’ Institutes. Lower-class visitors’ memoirs often imply that what they saw in museums nurtured an impulse towards self-education.

In her concluding paragraph there is an observation which sparks a different thought. Emphasis added.

The experiences of classical antiquity by the historical British working class have been messy, complicated and diverse. They have, by turns, been inspirational and depressing, too. But, finally, they can also help us think about the place of the ancient Greeks and Romans within the modern curriculum. Classical education need not be intrinsically elitist or reactionary; it has been the curriculum of empire, but it can be the curriculum of liberation. The ‘legacy’ of Greece and Rome has been instrumental in progressive and enlightened causes, both personal and political. Understanding the ancient world can enrich not only the imagination and sociocultural literacy but also citizenship skills and the power of argumentation and verbal expression. Recovering the working-class classicists of the past can also function as a rallying cry to modern Britain to support the case for the universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient history, and for the revival of the proud tradition of free or affordable university extension schemes across the nation.

I agree. But the thought this sparks is that this was true before. In other words, there wasn't really much of a thinking class before 1700, principally because prosperity was markedly limited in depth and extent. There notably few people who could anticipate the prospect of a life of intellectual effort or leisure.

Our Founding Fathers were among the first of that ilk. They were financially precarious but less so than in earlier generations. We are struck by just how sophisticated was their reading as a predicate to their thinking about the structure of a new nation founded in liberty and freedom.

In 1750, a plantation owning Jefferson or heirs to merchant fortunes could be reading broadly and from the original classics. By 1850 it was possible for anyone from any strata of society. Classics were associated with the wealthy classes because at the beginning of the Great Economic Transformation circa 1750, only the upper class could afford it.

But once upon a time, a hundred years into the Great Economic Transformation, the classics became universally accessible. It was not a matter or difficulty or accessibility. It was a matter of general prosperity. But then, for reasons unknown to me, the perception of class re-intruded.