Looking at my Substack feed yesterday I was struck by this post from Alexander Thompson, which can be read below:
How much do you think the average working-class 12-year-old boy read a year in 1940?
The total is ridiculously enormous. According to Jenkinson’s 1940 study:
48 books for pleasure
24 books in quiet reading time in school
9-12 books in literature class
48 “boys magazines” (also known as ‘bloods’)
13 periodical hobby magazines
26 newspapers
The 1570 boys studied by Jenkinson read 7371 books a month - and the girls read even more!
What were they reading? A vast mixture of high and low-brow fiction. Firm favourites included Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Sherlock Holmes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Treasure Island; and Gulliver’s Travels.
I am often reminded of how the past is a foreign country. I can hardly believe these figures, yet Jenkinson did not regard them as particularly impressive. If anything they “needed improvement”. Hence the wholesome reading strategies of the inner-city teacher:
During the first year [of middle school] there is little difficulty. The boys are unsophisticated, avid, joyous in their reading. Moreover, we give them suitable stuff to read – ballads, simple lyrics, the jollier narrative verse (e.g. “Horatius, John Gilpin, the Pied piper, Goblin Market, stories of Greece, Rome, of the Norsemen, of Robin Hood”).
I shared it with some friends and think it may be of interest to readers of this blog. It was quite an eye-opener to see how the formation of young people has changed, and not, I think, and indeed fear, for the better.
This study antedates the famed 1944 Education Act, let alone the fickle educational policies of successive British governments of all configurations. I know it is before the advent of the restored television service of the1950s, but, alas, television these days has lost the moral seriousness ithad in the 1950s and 1960s, or the quality adaptations of classic books and dramas from the 1970s and 1980s
The Internet offers so much, but so much therein is bad or just lazy ‘click bait’.
Reading the post made me all the more grateful for The Queen’s initiatives to get young, and not so young people reading.
