'By age fourteen Durham collier Jack Lawson ...would find... emancipation at the Boldon Miners' Institute... "And didn't I follow the literary trail, once I found it. Like a Fenimore Cooper Indian I was tireless and silent once I started. Scott; Charles Reade, George Eliot; the Brontes; later on Hardy; Hugo; Dumas and scores of others. Then came Shakespeare; the Bible; Milton and the line of poets generally. I was hardly sixteen when I picked up James Thomson's Seasons, in Stead's 'Penny Poets'... I wept for the shepherd who died in the snow".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Lawson Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'Theodore Watts-Dunton remembers Algernon Swinburne's fondness for reading aloud during his last years at Watts-Dunton's home: "... he would read for the hour together from Dickens, Lamb, Charles Reade and Thackeray."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Algernon Swinburne Print: Unknown
'At age thirteen or fourteen John Edmonds, who was reading "The Cloister and the Hearth" with a lower-midddle-class girlfriend, asked her how Margaret had become pregnant. (He assumed pregnancy followed automatically from marriage and cohabitation). She laughed, told him he was silly, and offered a "surprisingly accurate" explanation'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Edmonds Print: Book
'Stella Davies's father would read to his children from the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress", Walter Scott, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickens, "The Cloister and the Hearth", and Pope's translation of the "Iliad", though not in their entirety: "Extracts suitable to our ages were read and explained and, when we younger ones had been packed off to bed, more serious and inclusive reading would begin... We younger ones often dipped into books farf beyond our understanding. It did us no harm, I believe, for we skipped a lot and took what we could from the rest".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stella Davies Print: Book
'[Ethel] Mannin was firmly rooted in the autodidact tradition. In her father's library she enjoyed Gissing and Wells, "Adam Bede" and "The Cloister and the Hearth". A Clapham letter-sorter, he collected Nelson's Sevenpenny Classics, which she applauded as "a great boon to poor people"... By age fifteen she was quoting Wilde, Dr Johnson, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Browning, Omar Khayyam, Anatole France, Emily Bronte, Shaw, Hazlitt, Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Schopenhauer in her commonplace book...Except "Orlando", she read nothing of Virginia Woolf, whom she found "too intellectual, too subtle and complicated and remote from reality"...Mannin made sure to read "Ulysses" (or at least the final chapter) and she admired Gertrude Stein'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Mannin Print: Book
'As I began to mend, the Governor, to keep me from brooding too much, gave orders that I was to have all the reading matter I wanted within the limits of the prison library, and my book changed just as often as I liked and at any hour of the day. To a man eager to improve his acquaintance with standard literature such a privilege was immeasurably great, and for the next six weeks or so I browsed among the Victorian novelists - Austin [sic?], the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, Lytton, Kingsley, Reade, Hughes, Trollope and others.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'Mustered & then lazily read The Cloister & the Hearth by Read until Polly came home to tea'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Came home to tea & spent the evening reading "The Cloister & Hearth".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'The subject of Chas Reade & his work was then taken. H. R. Smith gave some description of Reade's life & Mrs Pollard read from Christie Johnson of a thrilling rescue from drowning.
F.E. Pollard spoke of the characteristics of Reades work. Following & arising from his remarks a lively discussion arose on Art & Propaganda & the artists right to exaggerate and T.C. Elliott read a vivid & amusing scene from "the Cloister & the Hearth". C.I. Evans also read from "Hard Cash".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Pollard Print: Book
'The subject of Chas Reade & his work was then taken. H. R. Smith gave some description of Reade's life & Mrs Pollard read from Christie Johnson of a thrilling rescue from drowning.
F.E. Pollard spoke of the characteristics of Reades work. Following & arising from his remarks a lively discussion arose on Art & Propaganda & the artists right to exaggerate and T.C. Elliott read a vivid & amusing scene from "the Cloister & the Hearth". C.I. Evans also read from "Hard Cash".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: T.C. Elliott Print: Book
'The subject of Chas Reade & his work was then taken. H. R. Smith gave some description of Reade's life & Mrs Pollard read from Christie Johnson of a thrilling rescue from drowning.
F.E. Pollard spoke of the characteristics of Reades work. Following & arising from his remarks a lively discussion arose on Art & Propaganda & the artists right to exaggerate and T.C. Elliott read a vivid & amusing scene from "the Cloister & the Hearth". C.I. Evans also read from "Hard Cash".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Evans Print: Book
'The subject of Chas Reade & his work was then taken. H. R. Smith gave some description of Reade's life & Mrs Pollard read from Christie Johnson of a thrilling rescue from drowning.
F.E. Pollard spoke of the characteristics of Reades work. Following & arising from his remarks a lively discussion arose on Art & Propaganda & the artists right to exaggerate and T.C. Elliott read a vivid & amusing scene from "the Cloister & the Hearth". C.I. Evans also read from "Hard Cash".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Pollard Print: Book
