While contemporary readers seem overburdened by choice, purchasing books but rarely reading them, the autodidactic of the past read what they could, when they could. Jonathan Rose like the Scottish weavers he so eloquently describes has seamlessly woven a vast collection of working class memoirs into a compelling piece of prose with an essence of John Clare. They read an entire canon of classical literature this way, an army of working class autodidacts, learning at their work station.
Mill workers carrying out intricate and tough manual labour, while next to them perched on a reading stand was a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey. Today readers assimilate classical literature by first buying a `Beginners Guide`, it can only be imagined what the Scottish weavers of the Industrial Revolution would have thought of this.
Cardus a brilliant autodidactic represents a highly prevalent though largely forgotten feature of our industrial past. Rose compares Leonard Bast with Manchester clerk Neville Cardus, he and a companion we are informed, “talked and talked…not to air our economic grievances, not to spout politics and discontent, but to relieve the ferment of our minds, our emotions after the impact of Man and Superman, Elektra, Riders to the Sea, Pelleas and Melisande, Scheherazade, Prince Igor”. Although such hostility is not new as the working class portrayal by EM Foster in Howard`s End indicates, the caricature of Leonard Bast, soundly critiqued in this text. Jonathan Rose has provided a service to the working class, an increasingly ignored and demonised section of UK society clearly there is more to this maligned group than the sobriquet, Chav.
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