Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 5739

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'Lancashire journalist Allen Clarke (b.1863), the son of a Bolton textile worker, avidly read his father's paperback editions of Shakespeare and ploughed through the literature section (Chaucer, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Pope, Chatterton, Goldsmith, Byron, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt) of the public library. With that preparation, he was winning prizes for poems in London papers by age thirteen...[he] went on to found and edit several Lancashire journals'.
Century: 1850-1899
Date: Between 1 Jan 1870 and 31 Dec 1876
Country: England
Time: n/a
Place: city: Bolton
county: Lancashire
   
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:Allen Clarke
Age Child (0-17)
Gender Male
Date of Birth 1863
Socio-economic group: Labourer (non-agricultural)
Occupation: textile worker's son, later journalist
Religion: n/a
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: Francis Beaumont
Title: [unknown]
Genre: Drama
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: borrowed (public library)
from Bolton public library

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 5739  
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: 419-20
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 419-20, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=5739, accessed: 28 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Allen Clarke, "The 'Good Old Days' When Children were Bred for the Factories" and other articles in the Liverpool Weekly Post (from April-July 1934)

 

 

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