Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 4143

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.
Century: 1900-1945
Date: unknown
Country: England
Time: n/a
Place: city: London, East End
specific address: Davenant Foundation School
   
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:Ralph Finn
Age Child (0-17)
Gender Male
Date of Birth 24 May 1912
Socio-economic group: Clerk / tradesman / artisan / smallholder
Occupation: market stall holder's son
Religion: n/a
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: England
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
reading promoted by schoolmaster so presumably in class at school
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Christina Rossetti
Title: n/a
Genre: Poetry
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: read in situ
read at school

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 4143  
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: 228
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 228, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=4143, accessed: 28 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Ralph L. Finn, 'Spring in Aldgate' (London, 1968) pp.73-4, 85-7

 

 

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