
One of my projects that's at a very early stage of development involves trying to understand how people watched television in 1930s and 1940s. How did they learn what television was and what it could do? What meanings did they take from the medium and from its programmes? I'm fascinated by the challenge of reconstructing this, since of course there are only a few people around who might remember anything -- and it was a very long time ago.
Then I picked up a copy of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the paperback of which has sat unread on a shelf at home since it was published in 2002. And rather wonderfully, he addresses more or less exactly the question I'm faced with, except that he is concerned with reading in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first words of his Preface are as follows:
This book addresses a question which, until recently, was considered unanswerable. It proposes to enter the minds of ordinary readers in history, to discover what they read and how they read it.
A little further on, referring specifically to the work of the historian Robert Darnton and more generally to those in the emerging discipline of "book history", Rose suggests some of the sources on which he and others can draw:
...memoirs and diaries, school records, social surveys, oral interviews, library registers, letters to newspaper editors (published or, more revealingly, unpublished), fan mail, and even in the proceedings of the Inquisition.
I don't expect to rely on the Inquisition but his other ideas chime with the ways I'd been thinking about developing my research. And the remainder of his Preface details other methodological problems and solutions which are equally as stimulating.
Opening his book this morning felt like a particularly pleasing occurrence of serendipity.
(Image of a 1931 Charles Jenkins Co. television from the Early Television Foundation.)