This is, quite simply, a remarkable book. By setting out evidence of the power of reading and thinking among people who worked against odds to do so, Rose has written a moving tribute to the inquisitive imperative lodged in human minds. Rose charts the efflorescence of an autodidact culture, which reached its summation in the decades around World War One. His interests, however, are wider than that story suggests. Other historians have chronicled heroic struggles against adversity in selected working-class autobiographies, but Rose instead trains his lens on the inner life generated by reading, documented in literally hundreds of accounts: alongside first-hand narratives, some of them familiar to labor historians, he has examined library and school records, surveys, and newspaper accounts of the same subject. His ambit extends beyond working-class people to include the printed and aural material they ingested, along with publishing history (including the history of Dent's Everyman's Library), musical culture, the transmission of sex education, adult education, and Ruskin College. This is a book about “culture” in the widest, Arnoldian sense, and it is triumphant in its breadth and achievement.