The rise and fall of self-taught man

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During the Crimean War, a clayworker called Samuel Taylor read the celebrated despatches of Times reporter William Russell to crowds of 10,000 in the Staffordshire market town of Hanley. These later became "penny readings", where thousands paid a penny to hear the written word spoken. Too many patronised the working classes, assuming they read little and had little interest in doing so. Yet from nonconformist Bible reading in the late 18th century through penny readings to the Workers' Educational Association early this century, a very different tradition existed. It is recalled by those who lived it in Jonathan Rose's absorbing and thoughtful new book.

The self-taught man, or "autodidact", was common in working-class areas, many taking a keen interest in literature, classical music and Shakespearean theatre. "Mutual improvement" societies flourished, where a paper on a topic of general interest would be followed by a lively discussion. In one such society, members started with safe subjects like "good habits", then moved on to more controversial areas like Irish home rule and women's suffrage.

Workers' libraries flourished, supported by subscriptions of up to six shillings a year. They were especially popular among weavers in the North and Scotland, and among Welsh miners. In Wales, they became thriving clubs with cinemas, concerts and theatres that lasted well into this century. Subscription libraries diminished with the growth of the public library and affordable versions of the classics, but such learning thrived after the BBC was born in the Twenties.

The Board of Education primary schools produced by the 1870 Education Act were a big improvement on what they replaced. Contrary to other historians, Rose argues: "Most late Victorian and Edwardian schools did a fair job of teaching the basics, and often something more than the basics." Edgar Wallace, an adopted son of a Billingsgate fish porter, remembered his teacher's spellbinding rendition of Arabian Nights: "The colour and beauty of the East stole through the foggy window of Reddin's Road school." Secondary education remained beyond many working-class youngsters until after the Second World War. Two notable institutions sought to fill the gaps. Ruskin College, Oxford, founded in 1899 as Ruskin Hall, offered working people, including many who became prominent Labour politicians (such as John Prescott in recent years), the chance of a liberal university education. The Workers' Educational Association, founded four years later, brought university lecturers into working-class communities. Many of Attlee's 1945 Labour government had a WEA background.

From 1870 until at least 1914, Rose believes, there was a golden age of learning. Many devoured classic authors like Charles Dickens, John Bunyan or Daniel Defoe. Interest was strong in new scientific thinking. Newspapers were more widely available.

And the children of that age went on to become the clerks and middle-class suburban dwellers of the next generation, only to find authors like EM Forster looking down on them. Rose cites Forster's Leonard Bast in Howards End, who is derided because like many of the self-improvers, he "hoped to come to culture suddenly, much as a Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus". Yet the real-life Leonard Basts hoped for such a conversion and did a lot to bring it about. They themselves had "attended Board schools, read cheap editions of the classics, enjoyed concerts and took one step onto the lower ladder of the middle classes", and went on to develop a thriving network of suburban literary societies.

With mass secondary education and the growth of television, such traditions died in many communities, although the Open University has kept it alive for some. Forster and his contemporaries were replaced in the Sixties by those who "grew frankly contemptuous of a culturally conservative working class". Such contempt undermined traditional teaching in schools, until its recent revival. Rose is right to mourn the "withering away of the autodidact tradition". With its passing, we lost something which it will be hard to foster again, even in the modern guise of lifelong learning.