ABSTRACT
The most prodigious British working-class classically trained scholar born in the 19th century was indisputably Joseph Wright. He began with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Bible, and attended a night school for working lads run by John Murgatroyd, a Wesleyan schoolmaster. He also bought the fortnightly Cassell’s Popular Educator and started teaching himself languages: French, German and Latin from Cassell’s Latin Grammar. Joseph Wright quietly pointed out that ‘manual labour’ meant physical work, for example with a wheelbarrow. In adulthood he was always regarded as a prodigy and the subject of countless newspaper articles called ‘From donkey-boy to Professor’ or ‘Mill-boy’s rise to fame’. ‘The English Universities are huge masses of magnificence and form, but ill-calculated to promote the cause of science or of liberal inquiry.
