The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes Jonathan Rose Yale University Press, 538pp, £29.95 ISBN 0300088868

Holidaying near Hay-on-Wye over the years, I have spent too much time and money in its famous second-hand bookshops, observing sadly, if opportunistically, the break-up of the great libraries of the Foreign Office and the BBC. Yet, more poignant is marking the brutal dispersal of the libraries of the miners' lodges, the mechanics' institutes, the Workers' Educational Association, and the various guilds and trades organisations that once formed the backbone of the autodidact culture of the British working class. Jonathan Rose has written a fascinating book about that culture, and he hints at the tragedy of its destruction. Raphael Samuel, thou shouldst have been living at this hour, I found myself thinking. His name may only appear once in the index, but Rose's book is a perfect memorial to all the values that Raphael and his History Workshops once held most dear.

An American astonishingly well briefed about the British literary past, Rose is concerned here with the peculiarly British autodidact culture that flourished at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the period after the achievement of mass literacy and before the arrival of radio and television (although he thinks that it can probably be traced back as far as the late Middle Ages). Trawling widely through the memoirs of the period, he discovers what books people read, what they talked about and the music that they played or listened to.

This is "intellectual life" fairly narrowly defined - he omits the fine art that the workers might have constructed or admired. He has some problems with definition, referring to the "working classes" in the plural, and finds them to be engaged in a very wide range of economic activities. Almost anyone who is not demonstrably middle or upper class is dragooned into his capacious net. House painters and lorry drivers, policemen and gardeners, blacksmiths and piano makers, are all lumped together with miners, mill workers and merchant seamen. This makes for a genial, wide-ranging and provocative read, but Rose's conclusions are impressionistic rather than scientific. I am not altogether sure that the father of C H Rolph, a distinguished New Statesman contributor over several decades, should be included as a member of the working classes. Rolph Sr was a policeman and a flautist in the City of London police band. Although plainly not middle class, he was not obviously in the category that the late E P Thompson would have recognised as "working class".

Rose is anxious not to examine his subject through rose-tinted spectacles, nor does he seek to make any specific political point. The working-class autodidacts of 1900 were just as likely to vote Conservative as Labour or Liberal. Some were Little Englanders, others enjoyed the imperialist tracts of G A Henty. Margaret Thatcher's past hovers over this story just as much as John Prescott's.

In a chapter entitled "A Conservative Canon", Rose discusses the "proletarian cultural conservatism" that was transmitted by the first generation of schoolteachers called into existence by the Education Act of 1870. These teachers were themselves often from working-class backgrounds, and what little training they received was usually "seriously obsolete". J M Dent, who set up the Everyman Library, planned as a thousand volumes of English and world literature, was a typical product of the working-class autodidact tradition, the son of a house-painter with musical interests. But his literary tastes, writes Rose, "were naive, old-fashioned, petit bourgeois, and blindly worshipful". While many of the working-class autodidacts of the beginning of the 20th century read "the classics", they almost always ignored all contemporary writing, and they were usually oblivious of the writers of the entire 19th century.

Yet the autodidact class was an important element in the formation of the traditions of the Labour Party, and the extraordinary fact remains that the prime minister, the chancellor and the 12 other members of the Labour government of 1945 had all been tutors in the Workers' Education Association. A further 56 of its tutors, executives or students were members of parliament. How different from the serried ranks of lawyers, journalists and social workers that now occupy the Labour benches.

Richard Gott is working on a book about imperial rebellion

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