Jonathan Rose The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Jonathan Rose The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. novel Haven: Yale University Press. 2001 Pp ix, 534 $5000 ISBN 0-300-08886-8

This is a volume for which its publishers make large claims. Its control is the autodidacts, the working-class intellectuals of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries; its aim, to uphold the canonical literature of the period and the way it was read by means of these autodidacts. Jonathan Rose attempts to get back this reading via what he calls "audience history:" by means of the autodidacts' own words as

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