Record Number: 1930

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Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'When radical weaver Samuel Bamford first discovered Pilgrim's Progress, it impressed him as a thrilling illustrated romance: woodcuts of Christian's fight with Apollyon and his escape from Giant Despair encouraged "the exercise of my feeling and my imagination". Then The New Testament became "my story book and I read it all through and through, but more for the interest the marvellous passages excited, than from any religious impression which they created". At a bookshop he picked up stories about witches, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, St George and the Dragon and the History of the Seven Champions, all with the same deliciously garish woodcuts he had found in Bunyan. Since these stories followed the same narrative conventions, there was no reason to doubt them. "For my part I implicitly believed them all, and when told by my father or others that they were 'trash' or 'nonsense', and 'could not be true', I, innocently enough contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve'."'

Century:

1700-1799

Date:

unknown

Country:

n/a

Time

n/a

Place:

n/a

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

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Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Samuel Bamford

Age:

Child (0-17)

Gender:

Male

Date of Birth:

1788

Socio-Economic Group:

Labourer (non-agricultural)

Occupation:

later a weaver

Religion:

n/a

Country of Origin:

n/a

Country of Experience:

n/a

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

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Text Being Read:

Author:

John Bunyan

Title:

Pilgrim's Progress

Genre:

Other religious, Fiction

Form of Text:

Print: Book

Publication Details

illustrated edition

Provenance

unknown

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Source Information:

Record ID:

1930

Source:

Print

Author:

Jonathan Rose

Editor:

n/a

Title:

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Place of Publication:

New Haven

Date of Publication:

2001

Vol:

n/a

Page:

95

Additional Comments:

n/a

Citation:

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven, 2001), p. 95, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=1930, accessed: 22 November 2024

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Additional Comments:

See Samuel Bamford, 'Early Days'.