The Classic Are Classics For a Reason

One of the tenets of revision of the modern literary canon is that blacks, women, minority-this and minority-that can't "relate" to the thoughts, no matter how penetrating or profound, of dead white European men. After all, what does Shakespeare have to say to the modern condition? Hamlet's alienation and despair mean nothing to today's urban youth. Romeo and Juliet's desperate attempts at love in the midst of family fueding doesn't speak to instant messaging kids. European anti-Semitism? Please....

City Journal, a magazine I'm going to have to pay more attention to, has an excellent article called The Classic in the Slums. Jonathan Rose looks at how well versed in the classics the very poor of 19th and early 20th century England were and what it meant for them. He also clears up some myths and misconceptions that have arisen in recent decades.

Clearly, something more radical needs to be done. Literary studies, I suggest, could be revitalized, and could once again engage the general public, by turning its attention to the ordinary reader in history.

Some groundbreaking scholars have done precisely that. In The Cheese and the Worms (1980), Carlo Ginzburg recovered the story of Menocchio, a miller in sixteenth-century Italy who acquired and read (with a highly independent mind) a vernacular Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, travel books, perhaps even the Qur'an. In Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (1989), William Gilmore found Vermont farmers stocking their home libraries with Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Dr. Johnson, Walter Scott, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, and John Locke. In Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (2001), Martyn Lyons discovered workingmen who haunted second-hand bookstalls along the Seine, devouring Châteaubriand, Alexandre Dumas, Goethe, Shakespeare, and the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Elizabeth McHenry's prizewinning Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies (2002) unearthed a tradition we scarcely knew existed: black Americans discussing Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar, and Sappho, as well as Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Impressive networks of workers' libraries were set up not just by Welsh colliers, but also by Colorado miners, the Social Democratic Party in imperial Germany, trade unions in interwar Poland, study circles in Sweden, the Histadrut labor federation in mandatory Palestine, and anarchists in pre-Franco Spain. And in Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Anna in the Tropics, cigar makers listen to the classics read aloud while they work—a Cuban tradition, but also practiced in many other parts of the world. Everywhere we look, in a diversity of cultures and historical periods, we find "common" readers tackling remarkably challenging literature.

A fascinating, eye-opening work.