Page 96 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 85

Radical literature, in any event, was a prominent means of fostering class
consciousness and political awareness, and Thompson quoted Sherwin’s Po-
litical Register (1817) as declaring: “If the Bible Societies, and the Sunday
School societies have been attended to no other good, they have at least pro-
duced one beneficial effect; they have been the means of teaching many thou-
sands of children to read.” 148 Thompson noted it had been of some contro-
versy in the Sunday Schools whether children should be taught to both read
and write, or read only; while being able to read, it was felt, would increase
working class children’s exposure to “proper” literature, being able to write
might equip them to agitate more effectively when they grew up. As it turned
out, the working class gravitated in any event to radical literature and the
“great unstamped” periodicals (The Poor Man’s Guardian, Working Man’s
Friend, Poor Man’s Advocate) provided foundations for “emphatically a
working class press.” 149 Thompson recounted that “at Barnsley as early as
January 1816, a penny-a-month club of weavers was formed, for the purpose
of buying Radical newspapers and periodicals.” 150 He recounted, too, that by
1833, “at John Doherty’s famous ‘Coffee and Newsroom’ attached to his
Manchester bookshop, no fewer than ninety-six newspapers were taken every
week, including the illegal ‘unstamped,’” adding that “in the smaller towns
and villages the reading-groups were less formal but no less important.” 151
Thompson summarized:

This was the culture—with its eager disputations around the booksellers’ stalls,
in the taverns, workshops, and coffeehouses—which Shelley saluted in his
“Song to the Men of England” and within which the genius of Dickens matured.
. . . The working class ideology . . . put an exceptionally high value upon the
rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty. 152

Thompson judged that in no other country was the battle for press freedom
identified as closely with the cause of the artisans and laborers as in England, 153
making all the more ironic Hoggart’s observations concerning the bemusement
with which working people after World War II scanned their newspapers—but
by then, of course, the commercial press predominated. 154 For Thompson,
though, in writing about the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, “the rights of a ‘free
press’ were won in a campaign extending over fifteen or more years which has
no comparison for its pigheaded, bloody-minded, and indomitable audacity.” 155
Thompson insisted that “social relations” affect fundamentally the ways in
which facts—events such as crop failures, floods, earthquakes, and business
cycles—are worked out:

Behind [a] trade cycle there is a structure of social relations, fostering some sorts
of expropriation (rent, interest, and profit) and outlawing others (theft, feudal