Labouring Classicists -- and New year Resolutions

It’s New Years day and my birthday (OK.. 53). And my devotion to study on days that might in other circumstances be devoted to jollity is, I am afraid, getting to be a habit.

Today, I’ve been writing a paper for a big Classics conference (“the APA”)  in Chicago, where I’m going on Thursday. I promised a talk on “working-class engagement in Classics” in the nineteenth century. I’ve been fed up for a long time with the usual line that Classics has always been an exclusively elite subject, designed only to shore up such dubious notions as British imperialism and the un-contestable superiority of the British elite.

The idea in proposing this paper was to try to get some flesh on those doubts. It turns out that I only have to talk for 20 minutes, into which you can hardly squeeze much of an argument. But even so I’ve left it a bit to the last minute. Hence full steam ahead to today.

Actually – never mind the argument of the paper -- I’ve found some tremendous characters. My particular favourite is Alfred Williams (born 1877 and the man in the picture), and author of Life in a Railway Factory, who taught himself Greek and Latin, partly by chalking up his irregular verbs on the casing of his forge.

Needless to say, this was a little trick which (however innocent) didn’t appeal to the foreman. To stop Williams using the side of his forge as an aide memoire for the nastier parts of the “–mi verbs” (classicists will sympathise), he had it covered with oil. Even this didn’t stop Williams. As his first biographer explained, “With characteristic determination Alf. dared to clean off the oil thoroughly – in his own time of course, for he was always careful to avoid placing a weapon in the hand of his oppressor – and rewrote the Greek.”

There was a celebrity element in all this. The Daily Mirror in 1910 carried a picture of Alf composing a sonnet in his lunch-break, in front an audience which apparently included "Mr Swinburne" (not the Swinburne, who died in 1909 -- but it still makes me wonder how far the cultural establishment had taken over this autodidact).

A close second for me comes a women poet, whom I should have known before – as she’s a great symbol for all us female classicists. This is Ann Yearsley, a late eighteenth-century milkmaid, who penned a wonderful satire entitled: “Addressed to Ignorance: occasioned by a Gentleman’s desiring the Author never to assume a Knowledge of the Ancients”. In it, the great heroes of antiquity have been turned into animas or homely British labourers.(“Stout Ajax, the form of a butcher now takes . . .” and so on). Up yours is. I think, the message.

And there’s plenty more --  all good news for me, as I have a bigger project in mind on Classics and the “non-elite” in the nineteenth century: from autodidacts to Ben Hur.

Oh yes – those resolutions? None made this year. But for those regular readers wanting an update on progress from last year, let’s admit it: rather slow but not nothing.

ana Mary. ana min Cambridge. ana ingiliziyya.

I know, I know. A long way still to go. Festina lente, as Alf Williams would have said.

Comments

[latinlass]

Bit late posting this but I am just catching up on comments. My Father, of Irish immigrant roots, went on to a PhD. in the Classics at Columbia University. It was one of his disappointments in life that my high school did not offer Greek (much to my relief!)although I had many years of Latin.
Now, his family were certainly humble but there was that desire for education that I have found to be so characteristic of immigrant families in the USA in the past. This desire certainly led to the foundation of many institutions of higher learning.
One wonders if this educational ambition by the working classes in the USA was spurred on by their immigration to the "promised land" whereas people who were/are
rather permanently mired in the
lower classes in their native country had such ambition stifled?

[Oliver Nicholson]

Obituaries of library staff in the Bodleian Library Record until recently sometimes recorded that the librarian (often a distinguished figure) had started life as a 'Bodley boy' - a young man (or woman) who had come to the LIbrary on leaving school at 14 or so and after some years work there was able to do an Oxford degree at the Library's expense. Did Cambridge have such a scheme ?

[montag]

Lovely stuff.
The Arabic surprised me and I stumbled over it, reading then your last sentence as "...as ALIF Williams would have said."

[Paulo]

Yes, Venables, certainly there were Jesuits involved. James Joyce would have agreed with your sour implications, but he was, wasn't he, educated. The church may have been a glorified protection racket, but where else do you go?

Paulo

[dr venables preller]

Good point Paolo. Presumably those educational establishments would have included Jesuit schools.

Now, there's an effective educational system for you, with full responsibility accepted for any quality shortfall in end product...provided learning commenced in the formative years!

[David Kirwan]

Happy birthday, Mary!

A great-uncle of mine, who would have been roughly contemporary with Alfred Williams, taught himself Latin and Greek while carting books to and fro in the behind-the-scenes recesses of the Bodleian for the learned men to read. But that's as much as I know and I had that from my mother, who has gone where no further enquiry is possible, so he's not a suitable candidate for inclusion in your paper.

[paul potts]

From Autodidacts to Ben Hur doesn't take you very far. Down the Dictionary to "I" you'll find Irish, who throughout the English oppression maintained through the Church a system of education for the poor. In that I include the religious training houses, whose scions were certainly not the offspring of the great and greedy, and would have been taught Latin. That may seem outside your brief, except for the Famine of 1845, which halved the population through death or emigration, much of it to England. Cardinal (as he then wasn't) Newman's difficulties with dealing with them in Birmingham are quite funny really in retrospect. The emigration continued for a century and a half, when Ireland joined the EEC, since when its population has started to grow again. Still nothing like 1844 levels, however.

So here you have a sub-class with their Latinate pastors, setting up schools and providing literacy to people who from that point of view were already better off than, say, Lizzie Hexam or her brother in "Our Mutual Friend". This was boom-time for Catholic educational organisations and religious orders, women much more than men. If Classical learning survives in England, it's got something to do with them.

Paulo

[paul potts]

From Autodidacts to Ben Hur doesn't take you very far. Down the Dictionary to "I" you'll find Irish, who throughout the English oppression maintained through the Church a system of education for the poor. In that I include the religious training houses, whose scions were certainly not the offspring of the great and greedy, and would have been taught Latin. That may seem outside your brief, except for the Famine of 1845, which halved the population through death or emigration, much of it to England. Cardinal (as he then wasn't) Newman's difficulties with dealing with them in Birmingham are quite funny really in retrospect. The emigration continued for a century and a half, when Ireland joined the EEC, since when its population has started to grow again. Still nothing like 1844 levels, however.

So here you have a sub-class with their Latinate pastors, setting up schools and providing literacy to people who from that point of view were already better off than, say, Lizzie Hexam or her brother in "Our Mutual Friend". This was boom-time for Catholic educational organisations and religious orders, women much more than men. If Classical learning survives in England, it's got something to do with them.

Paulo

[Mary]

GI.. the husband and daughter saw loads of Mongolian Horses, for a start, m

[Lee J Rickard]

Superb! I echo the desire to read your paper when it is done.

[william Howard adams]

Dear Prof. Beard, If I had only known I would have toasted you at another birthday party yesterday in Waterford Va. and shared our Alabama caviar from a sturgeon of that state Do stop off on your return from the Windy City (nothing personal) and best wishes from west Virginia. WHA

[dr venables preller]

Perhaps it’s time for an honest revival of the workers’ education movements, the co-op education outreach arm and night schools, to help to divert current educational wheezes from anti-elitist pursuit of mediocrity per se, before politically correct diversity engulfs all in language obfuscation, and excellence is finally routed.

One difficulty might be in negative thinking around the word ‘worker’, which tends to be associated with a humdrum background, so it might be time for judicious renaming, with aspiration, life choices and improvement allowed free reign.

There could also be a role for the Temperance Movement in a culture of binge, and there’s a useful musical education to be picked up from joining the Salvation Army, with brass and percussion a specialty along with targeted help to the community .

Samuel Smiles has much to teach us, and mandatory study of self help could assist in shifting much of the burden of government policy formulation into home discussion.

[abc]

Mary bought herself a birthday cake. Very impressive. Happy Birthday, Beard. Let us examine the bones of Mary Beard when she is gone and chuck her a bottle! Ho hum...And, yes, it'll be me!

[Xjy]

Silly me...

Happy Birthday, Mary!

Happy New Year, Everybody!

[Xjy]

Don't forget the impression made on millions of politically active working-class Marxists in the days when they still read Marx himself (and other serious revolutionary socialists). The constant references and allusions to the classics in his works, the quotations in the original, the tracing of ideas and movements from antiquity to the modern age, the linking of art, thought and material reality, the demonstrations of the way the bourgeoisie was fudging its own philosophical heritage - all this created interest and inspiration in the workers movement, worldwide. The whole autodidact movement of workers adult education was grounded in classical ideals of the whole "man" and the new polytechnical ideal of the rounded "man" combining material skills with learning and letters - classical humanism without the slavery.

Do-it-yourself enlightenment in the service of humanity in cooperative and constructive harmony. None of the idiot savant technicalities of today's splintered, narrow, gutted, cynical and dispirited intellectual world.

Looking forward to seeing the jewels you unearth in your dig!

[Hein Maassen]

What about Heinrich Schliemann, who unearthed Troja? He was of lowly origin too, I remember.

[Gi]

Happy birthday to you! and a happy new year too, of course.

I've been visiting your blog for months now and enjoying it very much.

BTW, the text on Chernobyl becoming a wildlife sanctuary is seven and a half years old; have husband / daughter learned about what's been happening since?

[kathz]

Happy Birthday! And please post more about your paper, which sounds great. I've been interested in the ease with which the 1730s peasant poets Stephen Duck (thresher) and Mary Collier (day-labourer, charwoman and laundress) swap classical references in The Thresher's Labour and The Woman's Labour (there are two versions of The Thresher's Lsbour). And do you talk at all about Thomas Cooper, the Chartist? The People's Edition of his long poem The Purgatory of Suicides is full of classical references. He taught himself while working as a cobbler and later became gave lectures on literary and cultural history. The level of learning among self-educated/working-class women and men certainly gains respect from today's students.

Will your paper be available anywhere, please?

[Gabriel M.]

January 1st? That's my birthday too!

[The Remembering Site]

Love, love, love your blog! Could you please encourage your readers to make a new year's resolution to write your life story at The Remembering Site, a non-profit organization started in 2004 to make it easy to write, share and publish cherished memories and photos. www.TheRememberingSite.org