In George Gissing’s novel The Nether World, an intelligent and philanthropic young man of means establishes a reading-room for workingmen, and endeavors to organize discussion-circles in the Clerkenwell slums. He fails in very short order: after a brief experience of Great Books, the workingmen’s circle shrinks to two—one of whom hopes for the job as librarian. Even in earnest late-Victorian times, the workingman successfully resisted Culture with a Roman C. More recent attempts of the sort in France, as Roy Campbell wrote somewhere, also have collapsed because of the instinctive resistance of the workingman.
All the same, English working-people once had their own strength of character, inner resources, harmless occupations and amusements, and even decent literary inclinations of a sort. Some part of the working classes of Britain still retain these merits—particularly the generation that is passing. But the great majority appear to be sinking into the dreary condition of a true proletariat, rootless and apathetic, bored and loveless.
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