[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 Superor 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
'I am wholly delighted with your "R.[iceyman] S.[teps]. Wholly. You will give me credit for not having missed any special gems but it is the whole achievement as I went from page to page that secured my admiration. [...] I closed the book at 7 in the morning after the shortest sleepless night of my experience [...]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
