Steel City Readers

Front matter

Reading for Pleasure in T Sheffield, 192589955 bz È — ‘9 » MARYGROVER $

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Reading for Pleasure in Shefheld, 1925-1955

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the 65 men and women who shared their reading histories with the community history group ‘Reading Sheffield’ between 2o11 and 2019. They are listed by date order of the year of their birth and by the name by which they chose to be referred to in this book. Most of the married couples were interviewed together. Jean H, Winnie Lincoln and Joan T were interviewed twice: once on their own and then as a group of friends.

Both audio records and transcripts can be found on the ‘Reading

Sheffield’ website: www.readingshefheld.co.uk and in the Sheffield City

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading: ‘I saw no living in it 1 At Home with Books

II

If possible, I borrowed from students their personal favourites, but there were all too few opportunities to encourage personal and independent reading. As any teacher knows, it is the habit of reading that delivers fluency and confidence with the written word, and the courses I taught were never designed to create that competence.

When I went on to work in a university, I taught the kind of twentieth-century literature that demands a great deal of its readers. Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, for example, defined themselves against the kinds of texts that you could read at a gallop and thereby establish an ease with the written word. Although it gave me great pleasure when a seminar group took to Woolf’s masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, it was the negative attitudes of Woolf and other intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century to the popular reader that came to dominate my own research. The cultural snobbery of the 1930s was my focus. I explored the texts hostile to ‘mass culture’ and the novels that were thought to epitomise its ills.2° What I was unable to do, because such readers do not tend to record their views, was to hear the voices of the ‘masses’ whose taste for such novels was regularly condemned.

“Mental dramshops’

My attention to the voices of these Sheffield readers is a response to the ways in which cultural commentators, over many years, have denied the value of such reading lives. In the 1930s and 1940s, when our young adult readers were absorbed by writers as diverse as A.J. Cronin, Daphne du Maurier, Charles Dickens, J.B. Priestley and Edgar Wallace, their pleasures were being identified by a wide range of commentators as substandard, uninteresting and uniform. Indeed, their tastes were held to be symptomatic of an encroaching mass culture which threatened the values of civilised society. At a time when those values were indeed under threat throughout Europe, it is no surprise, but deeply disturbing, that intellectuals turned on the ever-growing number of people who were, thanks to improved education and library provision, being given, for the first time in the history of their families, the opportunity to become habitual readers.

20 Mary Grover, The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009; Erica Brown and Mary Grover, eds, Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

I2

Fear and criticism of this new reading public came even from librarians. The headline for a report on a Library Association conference in Sheffield in 1913 was “Young Librarians’ Contempt for Fiction’*! These ‘young’ librarians were set to become the senior staff of the libraries used by our readers in the 1930s. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported that members of “The Sheffield Libraries’ Committee were afraid that novels were getting too great a hold upon the people, and to some extent they discouraged the use of them as far as possible’. A total ban on any fiction in free libraries was advocated, Mr Proctor from Leeds arguing that the intellectual life of the working classes was imperilled by the ‘mental dramshops’ of libraries stuffed with intoxicating fictions.

At least these early twentieth-century librarians implied that the working classes had intellects that could be nurtured. They placed the needs of the reading public at the heart of their debate. The rhetoric of later commentators on the evils of popular fiction conflated the supposed shoddiness of popular fiction with the inferior nature of its consumers, which was apparently intrinsic to their social class and suburban environment, the kind of suburbs that were not extensive in the overwhelmingly industrial city of Sheffield in the 1930s. The tastes of the urban working class were not, in fact, the target of the scourges of mass culture.

Readers of popular fiction have always been vilified, but most vehemently in the interwar period. Intellectual distaste for the tastes of ‘the masses’ united commentators of every political complexion: Marxists, modernists and those suggesting that the study of the great works of English literature would counter the moral and cultural decline caused by industrialisation. The Marxist György Lukács discussed in 1923 the evils of the culture industry which peddled misrepresentations of reality, such as works of popular fiction. These were designed to foster a ‘false consciousness’ that concealed the ways in which their oppressed consumers were exploited by capitalism.?? Chris Hopkins notes that British Marxists in the late 1930s tended to respect the nineteenth-century canonical novel because of its wide social scope and its dramatisation of the incoherence at the heart of the bourgeois model

21 ‘Mental Dramshops: Young Librarians’ Contempt for Fiction’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 18 September 1913, 7.

22 Gyorgy Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1923].

of social order. In contrast, popular contemporary fiction was considered narrowly generic and apolitical.*?

Like many other intellectuals in the 1930s, Graham Greene characterised readers of popular fiction as ignorant and passive. In 1936 he addressed such readers directly and with contempt: you read ‘while you wait for the bus, while you strap-hang, in between the Boss’s dictations, while you eat your A.B.C. lunch’. Clearly ‘you’ are female and more vulnerable than a male reader to the corrupting influence of novels ‘written without truth, without compulsion’.”4

The modernist novelist Virginia Woolf was relatively comfortable with the masses whose tastes were confined to fictional dope. Her venom was reserved for those readers who deluded themselves that a novel could be both readable and serious. From a position of inherited cultural capital, Woolf only tolerated popular fiction readers when they were locked into an addiction to genres of the most predictable and lurid sort, riding what Rebecca West called ‘the tosh horse’*? in a merry and unthreatening way: unthreatening because such readers were, in Woolf’s opinion, unlikely to advance into the literary territory she commanded. Woolf violently denounced readers she characterised as “betwixt and between’, those who, like our readers, had a taste for a range of fiction, whose tastes were not exclusively lowbrow.?°

Class-ridden and anti-democratic though these attitudes were, none were as complex as those influenced by the Cambridge academics F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. Though rarely discussed on English literature courses today, these campaigners for a reform of English teaching had far greater influence in the grammar schools of the 1940s and the 1950s than did Woolf or Marxist critics of the culture industry. Like the Marxists, the disciples of Q.D. and F.R. Leavis promoted the value of the great Victorian realist novels, in part because their authors were hostile to the effects of industrialisation. The commercialised culture produced by an industrialised society was preceded by a supposedly Golden Age when the reader was closely connected to nature and heir to a rural folk

23 Chris Hopkins, “Thrillers and Dystopias: Leftists and Thrillers: The Politics of a 1930s Sub-Genre’, in Chris Hopkins, English Fiction in the 1930s, London: Continuum, 2006, 123-37.

24 Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, London: Heinemann, 1936, 14-15.

25 Rebecca West, “Ihe Tosh Horse’, in The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, London: Jonathan Cape, 1928, 319-25.

26 Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, London: Hogarth Press, 1942, 127.

culture. This Leavisite hostility to contemporary popular fiction affected secondary modern and grammar school pupils differently. Margaret Matthieson observes that those teaching able children ... responded to Leavis’s conviction by investing great value in their pupils’ capacity to respond sensitively to great literature. Those involved with less able pupils, particularly from working-class backgrounds, have turned to pupils’ creativity to compensate for the inadequacies of industrial society.?”

‘The truth of this was borne out by my experiences of teaching English in a non-selective boys’ secondary school in inner-city London in the early 1970s. The reading act was usually to be followed by a creative rather than a critical response, the authenticity of the text unlocking access to an authenticity in the reader. Yet the boys had never been encouraged to acquire a familiarity with print that might have helped them develop a written language of their own and that would have fitted their creative purposes. None of my English lessons were designed to encourage reading for pleasure, a habit which, more than anything else, gives us ease with the written word.

The Leavises inspired a cohort of committed teachers, but pupils were actively discouraged from reading what simply happened to come to hand. For the grammar school child, each reading act should be an act of discrimination, of rejection or of virtuous choice: how to tell diamond from coal. The title of Margaret Mathieson’s book about English teaching in the first half of the twentieth century rightly characterises the Leavises and their followers as ‘Preachers of Culture’, who equated skills in literary discrimination with moral superiority and promoted ‘the redemptive power of English’.?® The Leavises inspired many of their ‘disciples’ to teach in secondary modern as well as grammar schools.?? Unfortunately such recruits were urged to be conscious of their moral and intellectual superiority to the mass of those they taught. In 1932 Q.D. Leavis asserted her membership of ‘the sensitive minority’ set apart

27 Margaret Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and Its Teachers, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975, 96.

28 Mathieson, Preachers of Culture, 96.

29 As a teacher in a boys’ comprehensive school in 1970s London, I owed much to the quality of books inspired by Leavisite ideals: Raymond O’Malley and Denys Thompson’s poetry anthology, Rhyme and Reason (1957), and David Holbrook’s two-volume collection of short stories, People and Diamonds (1962). But it should be noted that Holbrook would never have called himself a “Leavisite’.

I5 from benighted readers of all classes who, in misattributing value to shoddy writing, were colluding with an attack on ‘the world of letters which is quite unprecedented’°

The implication that members of the majority cannot be ‘sensitive’ is misguided and unpleasant, but it is important to acknowledge that mine and other readership studies owe a huge amount to Q.D. Leavis. Leavis actually read the novels she anathematised: bestselling novels such as Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son (1925) and Gilbert Frankau’s Gerald Cranston’s Lady (1923), for example. She examined information from many sources that would help her understand how ‘the herd’ was reading: responses to competitions in the Sunday Dispatch newspaper, the Cambridge Daily News in 1930 which prompted readers to share their literary tastes, marketing from the Book-ofthe-Month Club and sales figures of various sorts, and a range of contemporary writing. She set her 1930s study in a historical context of popular reading in the preceding centuries. Her intellectual energy and passionate engagement with her theme are never in doubt. She is never dull. Though she may not have respected the readers of popular fiction, she afforded them her full attention. What she never did was to address, interrogate or listen to such readers.

Telling the story

The principal aim of the initial ‘Reading Sheffield’ project was clear: to record how two generations of Shefheld readers described the way in which they became habitual readers. It is important to acknowledge what the project was not. It was not setting out to construct a definitive map of what was read by a particular class, in a particular kind of city at a particular moment in history. My study does indeed examine how an individual’s reading tastes were the product of societal circumstances. Each narrative is understood in the context of historical sources of many kinds, but my chief interest has been in how these stories have been told. I hope future researchers in all sorts of fields might find the nature of this project useful.

30 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, London: Bellew, 1990 [1932], 67.

31 I value two American studies of reading in a specific time and place: Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly’s What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City, Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, 2015; and Christine Pawley’s Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in

At the beginning of our interviews, we elicited factual information about our readers’ backgrounds and then helped them recall the contexts of the different stages of their reading development. These developmental stages shaped the structure of each interview and the structure of this book. The interview prompts (to be found in Appendix 1) were tools to aid narration. We were prepared to abandon a prompt if it caused confusion or distress, as could happen, and to stay with an approach that a reader found comfortable or exciting.

Less useful than the series of prompts were lists of authors that readers might be familiar with. We had prepared these lists as an aid to recollection, but they often closed down the process of self-reflection. They could trigger a reader’s anxiety that he or she was lacking in some way. Mary Robertson, pulled out of school at 14 to attend to the needs of her family, was shown our list of ‘Classics: “Nope, I never read Jane Austen or the Brontés. I should have done.’ Or if, in scanning our list of bestselling authors of the 1930s and 1940s, a reader ‘confessed’ that she had not heard of Mary Webb or Hugh Walpole, for example, she could feel she had failed some sort of test and fall silent. The list could also trigger an acceleration in Pace, setting interviewer and interviewee on a rapid gallop through all the authors listed and interrupting the unfolding narrative of discovery. When we realised that our list could cause our readers to lose control of their own narrative and suppress their individual voice, we came to use it sparingly. Above all, we sought to enable our readers to map their own reading journeys in terms, and in a sequence, with which they felt at ease.

Though common patterns of influence emerged during the course of the project, it was difficult to resist the delight in what was least expected. Alongside the appetite for pleasures desired for their very predictability (Angela Brazil, Edgar Rice Burroughs and then Enid Blyton, for example), there were many reading choices that appeared to be acts of pure serendipity. Such literary encounters were, perhaps, the most unpredictable pleasures experienced in our readers’ day-to-day lives.

Cold War America, Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, 2010. The nature of the evidence collected by both studies differed from the Sheffield oral history data but, in different ways, we are all seeking to reflect the experience of the general reader in a particular social context. When we shared the ‘Reading Sheffield’ project with academic groups, the Society of the History of Reading and Publishing, Roehampton University’s Centre for Book History and the Oral History Society for example, we did not hear of comparable projects in Britain or in other English-speaking countries.

I7

And these moments of revelation had been rarely shared. The eloquence of many of our readers and the pleasure they seemed to experience as they recounted their reading histories derives in part from the privacy of their reading experiences. It is difficult for those of us who have read for a living or who have grown up in the age of the reading group to appreciate that for the greater number of our readers, whatever their social class, reading was a private pleasure: sometimes even concealed from others, certainly rarely discussed at home, school or work. This means that the men and women we interviewed had had few opportunities to rehearse or mythologise their lives as readers. They often took time to respond to a prompt or question. With one exception, we listened to narratives which were in the making, not made earlier. Nearly every speaker had their own repeated phrases that signalled that their account was, in some ways, tentative: Frank’s ‘funnily enough’, Winnie’s ‘I think so’, Peter Mason’s ‘It’s just my opinion’, Wynne’s ‘it might have been’, Erica’s ‘I don’t remember but .. and many more.

It is interesting to compare the self-presentation of our readers with the kind of personal myth-making examined in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson’s The Myths We Live By (1990).3* Many of the narrators of the autobiographies described in that book were placing themselves in relation to a past that was difficult, dangerous and public. Migrants recounting a past that enabled them to live with dignity in a community with no recognition of the cultures from which they had been displaced, or political activists seeking to reconcile themselves to their part in the failure of the revolution on which they had set their hopes, were under enormous pressure to mythologise their pasts. Much less was at stake for our readers in the telling of their lives. Most of them had never expected their reading to be chronicled. Our readers were not seeking to locate their lives in history. This does perhaps make their narratives a more reliable reflection of their lives than are the narratives of those who know that their stories will be exposed to possibly hostile scrutiny.

Though every oral history is shaped by pressures to conceal, elaborate or possibly to invent, by contrast with the narrators discussed by Samuel and Thompson, our readers gave us a sense of a story unfolding rather than one being handed over. This sense of process, of a story in the making rather than ready-made, was enhanced by the reading backgrounds of the team of twelve interviewers. All but two were the first in their

32 Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, The Myths We Live By, London: Routledge, 1990.

family to have been able to access higher education. That access had in large part been gained because they were confident, independent and habitual readers. A shared sense of the personal significance of acquiring a reading habit frequently contributed a sense of collaborative dialogue during the interviews.

‘The subject matter of our project, as much as the way it was conducted, contributes to the huge range of ways in which our readers told their stories and the props they used to illustrate them. We were attending to aspects of their lives that they had rarely talked about. If, for example, we had been exploring with them their experiences of the Second World War, it would have been difficult to escape the individual myth and how it played into a shared national myth, because so much has been asked, shared and written about the interplay between individual and collective memory in relation to that event. What is perhaps most unusual about our project is that it was about private pleasure, and it gave pleasure to all who participated in it, as our readers’ engagement with our annual gatherings testifies.

Though many of you will read this in digital form, at every stage of the project the power of the book as a physical object was demonstrated. We are often invited to share our project with community groups, which we do with the aid of physical copies of the books our interviewees read and loved. A copy of the 1937 Girls’ Crystal Annual, the cover of Anne of Green Gables or an illustration from Just William have the power to trigger memories so strong that years of silence can be broken. We are frequently told that group members have spoken for the first time in a meeting as they lay their hands on a copy of a book whose physical familiarity plunges them back into the past. The physical copy evokes the place in which the book was read, the feeling and thoughts it excited, the people who gave, lent or read it aloud and the people with whom it was shared. Its power derives from a sense of permanence; the object that might now have vanished did, at one time, seem all one’s own and is now lodged forever in the mind.

‘The next seven chapters are based on the different stages of development in the reading lives of the men and women we interviewed, each stage being dealt with in turn. The final two sections of the book are different. Chapter 8, ‘Anna Karenina, you know, and all the normal sort of things’, spans the first three or so decades of our readers’ lives and asks how authors now regarded as in some way canonical came into their hands, if indeed they did. As 1930s readers, did they read ‘thirties’ authors? Did they have a sense of what was a classic and what was not? The patterns revealed would soon begin to change as, from the 1950s onwards, a more extensive radio service, a developing television service, wider educational opportunities and greater affluence increasingly influenced the way reading choices were made.

In my final section, three of our readers, Mavis, John D and Malcolm Mercer, have “The Last Word’. I never discussed with interviewees my own reading background or underlying research questions but, occasionally, my personal interests and perspectives were directly addressed. I am grateful to all three of these readers for deepening my understanding of why I asked the questions I did.

Chapter One

Mary Robertson, born in 1923, was one of the few of our readers whose family could afford a holiday in Bridlington. Not only did her older sister take her paddling, she also read to her from the books on the family shelves. Her father was an industrial chemist with the renowned steel firm of Vickers Armstrong, a leading Sheffield employer in the 1930s. The family lived on the smoke-free hills on the western side of the city.

On Sunday we always had the roast lunch, Sunday lunch time, and the fire would be [pause] and we always read after Sunday lunch. We had lots of armchairs and that is where we always read. Mother, my sister and I, I don’t think my brother did.

1 Mary Robertson, born 1923, interviewed by Susan Roe, 7 March 2013.

A story with no beginning

I remember one book. I can see the front cover: it had a little girl on it. At the end a fairy had three wishes and she had to choose one. One was a purse that always had another penny in it, one was a book that when you got to the end always had another page to read — I can’t remember the third wish. I always chose the book that never ended.

Joan Challenger?

When our readers were asked to recall the very first books they had read to them, they were often ill at ease, wanting to be accurate but unable to recall what those first books might have been or whether indeed they were ever read to. None of our readers could share the opening chapter of their reading story. Together we tried to tease out the probable pattern of their first encounters with books. As our readers retrieved memories of their first books, they also called to mind the friends and family members who put those books into their hands, and, if they were lucky, read to them. The process of retrieval was coloured by the feelings aroused by those adults and by the physical nature of the books themselves.

Those of our readers who came from families without the means to buy infant books were the most emphatic in their conviction that they were never read to as infants. Mary Brothers, the daughter of a miner, was born in 1923. She declared that nobody read to her when she was young: ‘I don’t think it was something people did back then. There were so many jobs to do around the house. My mum took in washing.’ Dorothy H, born in 1929 and the daughter of a butcher, was also sure that she was never read to: her mother ‘hadn't got time. There were eight of us.’ She reflected on that endless sequence of pregnancies: “They went in for it in those days, didn’t they?4

It was obvious to Mary and Dorothy that they could not have been read to: no parental time and no books to hand. Our readers from homes where they might have been read to were more puzzled and uncertain: ‘they must have read to me’ and ‘they probably read to me’ was a recurring refrain. Though Maureen L cannot remember being

2 Joan Challenger, born 1941, interviewed by Jan Chatterton, 9 March 2012 (summary only).

3 Mary Brothers, born 1923, interviewed by Ruth Owen, 21 March 2013 (summary only).

4 Dorothy H, born 1929, interviewed by Susan Roe, 7 May 2013.

read to she has been handed down a story that demonstrates that she was.

They must have done, because my mum used to tell me I always cried when she read Little Bo Peep, so she stopped reading it. I think I had it on a handkerchief and she threw it away because I got upset about these sheep being lost! So, they must have done.’

Experiences before the age of three and a half are irretrievable for most of us. Yet events from these earlier years can be rescued from what psychologists call ‘childhood amnesia’ in all sorts of ways. Material objects, books for example, can come to enshrine what ‘must have been’, unless, like the Little Bo Peep handkerchief, these objects have been thrown away or handed on. By telling and retelling the story of her daughter’s sorrow Maureen’s mother created the illusion of memory, the image of the handkerchief reinforcing its reliability. Maureen’s vivid recollection of her mother’s story, not the object itself nor the experience of being read to, illustrates the power of what has been called ‘the maternal narrative’, the version of a child’s past that is relayed by others and then becomes the stuff of imagined memories.®

Any parent can be this narrator, a guardian of family legend, a legend that acquires force if there are props to back it up with: a handkerchief, a photograph or a book. The attempt to retrieve a memory of being read to often woke a sense of loss. Some readers found it difficult to revisit a childhood where the absence of books was so clearly linked to the absence of parental time and attention. Parents from working-class families in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s rarely had the time to share any activity that was purely recreational or private. The physical labour of earning a living and providing warmth and food for a family meant that the time that needs to be invested in reading any book to an infant was in short supply. Few of the men and women we interviewed had been read to as children.

Hazel B, who like Mary and Dorothy was born in the 1920s, was destitute as an infant. Her father died in 1931, when she was two years old. She struggled in response to the question, ‘So there was no money for books?’ because it led her straight back to desperate times. ‘I don’t

5 Maureen L, born 1941, interviewed by Mary Grover, 30 April 2012.

6 Qi Wang and Sami Giilgéz, ‘New Perspectives on Childhood Memory’, Special issue, Memory, 27.1 (2019), 1-5; and P.J. Bauer, Remembering the Times of Our Lives: Memory in Infancy and Beyond, Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2007.

know what we'd do without me grandma. There were no books, no, no money for anything ... food either. Somehow an elder sister found some reading matter to share with her younger sister: ‘I think she’d read to me and I think I would be asleep before she knew. You know, it were like a sleeping tablet. She were kind to us.”

Even if a family had the means to buy books for children, they would have struggled to find them; few were published. It was not until the production of the Little Golden Wonder Books in 1942 that a plentiful supply of affordable picture books began to be available. Interwar children’s books were often marketed on the high quality of their illustrations, which were costly to produce. Beatrix Potter’s ever-popular tales sold for 1/6. They were only ever mentioned by middle-income families who possessed rather than borrowed them.

Where were the libraries?

When we first started interviewing, we assumed that families with few or no children’s books of their own must have found some in the junior sections of the city libraries. ‘A Survey of Children’s Reading’ published by Sheffield City Libraries in 1938 demonstrates why this was not so. The survey looked at the reading of children aged seven and upwards. It is clear that Sheffield Libraries’ focus was on the needs of children who had become independent readers and not on providing early readers or picture books that might prepare children to become readers. For the last fifty years the parents of young children in Shefheld have enjoyed the opportunity of spending a weekday hour with their young child alongside the library’s boxes, dipping in and out of lavishly produced picture books. This was not an experience any of our readers could possibly have shared. ‘For administrative reasons’, junior libraries and sections were only open when schools were closed.?

So, unless young children had books in the home in the first half of the twentieth century, they were unlikely to enter school with any kind of familiarity with books. The only memory of a young child borrowing ‘picture books’ from the library is from James Green, born in 1936, so this is a wartime memory. Somehow Attercliffe Library, without a separate