The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

This book simply changed the way I do business as a historian and a reader. I love the groundbreaking use of diaries, census records, worker’s memoirs, and library registers to sketch a detailed picture of real books read by real people—not just the official academic record of fine editions with countless mentions of that nameless creature, the “nineteenth-century reader.”

It inspired me to pursue the stories behind the names and comments scratched into abandoned books that find their way onto eBay and the dusty shelves of second-hand bookstores.

This is brilliantly written and deeply researched, with a wonderful cast of working-class autodidacts and some surprisingly well-known middle-class authors who did everything in their power to denigrate this hard-won learning.

It’s both revelatory and deeply moving. My only reservation was confessing that I had taken so long to discover it. It is a fantastic book and still the fundamental text in the field.