ABSTRACT
Classical authors were comparatively accessible to the intellectually thirsty poor because they were out of copyright and available in cheap reprints. Our view of miners’ intellectual lives is however in danger of being skewed by the prevalent tropes of enslavement and escape from the pit, since numerous self-educating miners did not want to change their occupations or leave their native communities. It also risks distortion by stressing Greek and Roman Classics, since they were usually not central to autodidactic miners’ reading lists. The peculiarly dark, dangerous and oppressive atmosphere of pit life resulted in the common articulation of miners’ engagement with books and culture as a form of manumission, as a process in which chains were discarded and freedom embraced. The positive image of the highly literate miner must not obscure the grim realities of life in many pit villages: half the employees at the ‘colony’ attached to Annbank Colliery in Ayrshire were illiterate as late as 1867.
