Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 1379

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'Emrys Daniel Hughes, [an] imprisoned CO and son of a Tonypandy miner, learned that the authorities were not unaware of the subversive potential of great literature. Following a Home Office directive to examine prisoners' books, the chaplain confiscated a volume of Shelley, though not before Hughes had a chance to read and discuss it. The padre also apparently removed Tristram Shandy from the prison library: Hughes found it whilst cleaning the chaplain's rookm and had read it on the sly... In More's Utopia he discovered a radical rethinking of criume and punishment. The World Set Free, in which HG Wells predicted the devastation of nuclear war, naturally spoke to his antiwar activism, and he was greatly impressed by the Quaker idealism in George Fox's journal, a biography of William Penn and Walt Whitman's poems.'
Century: 1900-1945
Date: Between 1914 and 1918
Country: n/a
Time: n/a
Place: other location: prison
   
Type of Experience (Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Type of Experience (Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Reader/Listener/Reading Group:

Reader:Emrys Daniel Hughes
Age Adult (18-100+)
Gender Male
Date of Birth 1894
Socio-economic group: Labourer (non-agricultural)
Occupation: son of miner
Religion: n/a
Country of origin: Wales
Country of experience: n/a
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
n/a
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author:
Title: [biography of William Penn]
Genre: Biography
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: borrowed (other)
Prison library

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 1379  
Source - Print  
  Author: Jonathan Rose
  Editor: n/a
  Title: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
  Place of Publication: New Haven
  Date of Publication: 2001
  Vol: n/a
  Page: 51-2
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 51-2, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=1379, accessed: 28 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Emrys Daniel Hughes, "Welsh Rebel" in The National Library of Scotland

 

 

Reading Experience Database version 2.0.  Page updated: 27th Apr 2016  3:15pm (GMT)