Record Number: 1936
Reading Experience:
Evidence:
'When radical weaver Samuel Bamford first discovered Pilgrim's Progress, it impressed him as a thrilling illustrated romance: woodcuts of Christian's fight with Apollyon and his escape from Giant Despair encouraged "the exercise of my feeling and my imagination". Then The New Testament became "my story book and I read it all through and through, but more for the interest the marvellous passages excited, than from any religious impression which they created". At a bookshop he picked up stories about witches, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, St George and the Dragon and the History of the Seven Champions, all with the same deliciously garish woodcuts he had found in Bunyan. Since these stories followed the same narrative conventions, there was no reason to doubt them. "For my part I implicitly believed them all, and when told by my father or others that they were 'trash' or 'nonsense', and 'could not be true', I, innocently enough contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve'."'
Century:1700-1799
Date:unknown
Country:n/a
Timen/a
Place:n/a
Type of Experience(Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
(Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Reader / Listener / Reading Group:
Reader: Age:Child (0-17)
Gender:Male
Date of Birth:1788
Socio-Economic Group:Labourer (non-agricultural)
Occupation:later a weaver
Religion:n/a
Country of Origin:n/a
Country of Experience:n/a
Listeners present if any:e.g family, servants, friends
n/a
Additional Comments:
n/a
Text Being Read:
Author: Title:The History of The Seven Champions
Genre:Fiction, Children's Lit
Form of Text:Print: Book
Publication Detailsillustrated edition
Provenanceunknown
Source Information:
Record ID:1936
Source: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:95
Additional Comments:
n/a
Citation:
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven, 2001), p. 95, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=1936, accessed: 05 October 2024
Additional Comments:
See Samuel Bamford, 'Early Days'.