Why working-class Britons loved reading and debating the Classics | Aeon Essays
aeon.co · 3,557 words · saved by 1 readers
A classical education was never just for the elite, but was a precious and inspiring part of working-class British life
The hero of Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village who is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes, from the top of a ladder leaning against a rural barn, on the spires of the University of Christminster (a fictional substitute for Oxford). The spires, vanes and domes ‘like the topaz gleamed’ in the distance. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but it is also one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when…
saved by
related reading
- Social class in the United Kingdom - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- Why we stopped making Einsteins - by Erik Hoelerikhoel.substack.com
- Why we stopped making Einsteins - by Erik Hoeltheintrinsicperspective.com
- Érudits Maudits | Haquelebachaquelebac.wordpress.com
- Mediumeidolon.pub
- JOINT REVIEW: Class, by Paul Fussellthepsmiths.com
- The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - The American Scholartheamericanscholar.org
- The Epicurean Dealmaker: Improve Yourselfepicureandealmaker.blogspot.com
- The Theory of the Leisure Class.pdfmoglen.law.columbia.edu
- The Sedimentary Faultlines. - by Aurelia Zhangmuonneutrino.substack.com
- Liceo classicoen.wikipedia.org
- Research: How You Feel About Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Classhbr.org