#127 - Jonathan Rose - Literacy Is At Record Lows But It Wasn't Always. What The British Working Class Built And How It Was Destroyed

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 dyingFind 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.eduAbout 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.▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclassesNew episodes every week.