Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 4131

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
The parents of playwright Arnold Wesker were both immigrants, tailor's machinists, Communists and culturally Jewish atheists. Wesker admitted he was "a very bad student", but his parents provided an envionment of "constant ideological discussion at home, argument and disputation all the time... it was the common currency of day-to-day living that ideas were discussed around the table, and it was taken for granted that there were books in the house and that we would read". The books mostly had a leftward slant (Tolstoy, Gorky, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis) but Wesker soon reached out to Balzac, Maupassant and a broader range of literature'.
Century: 1900-1945
Date: unknown
Country: England
Time: n/a
Place: city: London
   
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:Arnold Wesker
Age Child (0-17)
Gender Male
Date of Birth 24 May 1932
Socio-economic group: Labourer (non-agricultural)
Occupation: son of tailor's machinists, later playwright
Religion: Atheist
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: England
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
n/a
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Jack London
Title: n/a
Genre: Fiction
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: owned

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 4131  
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=4131, accessed: 28 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Arnold Wesker in Goldman, 'Breakthrough', pp.176-9. No further reference traceable in Rose.

 

 

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