The intellectual life was never something that only the elites enjoyed. In 2001, university professor Jonathan Rose published The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, one of the most illuminating cultural histories of the past few decades. Through an extraordinary range of sources including autobiographies, letters, library archives, miners’ reading circles (more on those later), and Sunday school curricula, Rose overturns the assumption that the working classes of industrial Bri...

The intellectual life was never something that only the elites enjoyed. In 2001, university professor Jonathan Rose published The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, one of the most illuminating cultural histories of the past few decades. Through an extraordinary range of sources including autobiographies, letters, library archives, miners’ reading circles (more on those later), and Sunday school curricula, Rose overturns the assumption that the working classes of industrial Bri...