What the English Working Classes Read.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 178, 13 November 1886, Page 2

What the English Working Classes Read.

Years ago had one walked into almost any poor but respectable man's room in the Kingdom one would probably have found two books at least — the Bible and the " Pilgrim's Progress." Both were held in extreme veneration. Now it is to be feared that very few workingmen and women read the " Piigrina'a Progress," and the Bible is far from being what it was— the book of the home. For this the propagation of Sunday new B'papers is largely to blame. The weary toiler now spends his Sunday afternoons smoking hh pipe and digesting the week's record of criminalitiee. Formerly, if not addictud to diinking or wasting his hours with boon companions, he became one of ihe family gathering, while his wife or daughter, or perchance he himself, read a chapter from the Book of books. Ido not intend to say that the working claeees da not read the Bible now ; what I do Bay and believe is that they do nofc read it aa extensively and regularly as they did a generation or two previously. It is not easy to indicate precisely what other books they read. There can be no queaf ion, however, that when they read, books they usually read good books. They do notread many, but what they read are of a hk'h order. Cheap editions have brought standard works within their reach, and though the privilege is not largely availed 01, it ia altogether neglected. No idea, of the reading of the working classes can be arrived at by comparing it with the reading of the upper classes. The latter read everything possible of nearly every author. Tbo former read one or two works in a lifetime, but they usually re-read them several times. Such a method may tend to narrowness ; it at least tends to thoroughness, as far as, it goes. Lota of workinginen have studied with great care* one or two of Shak^penre's plays j others know one or two of Dickens's works almost by heart. ' One workin^man I knew claimed to have read carefully only two books — tho Bible arid Shakespeare. To say nothing of •what it would mean to acquire an adequate perception— and of course hehad not done so — of all the glories of these two glorious works how many people of culture have ever read both, word by word? Another member of the democracy had plunged into the deep waters of " Paradise Lost " and gone from cover, to , cover. ( At the same time, there aro workingmpn who will devour every ! book tfhey can buy or secure from friends, and a curious undigested, if not indigestible mass they do sometimes get hold of. Hundreds, on the other hand, have never read a line of * book.