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Article: To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. By Christopher Hilliard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 390 pp. $29.95).
This monograph is a thoroughly researched, well-written study of writing by ordinary middle- and working-class people in Britain between about 1900 and 1960. Christopher Hilliard argues that in twentieth-century Britain, writing became democratized, in the sense that it was taken up by significant numbers of people outside the highly educated cultured elite. Drawing on research in a wide range of archives, Hilliard shows remarkable familiarity with the organizations and writing of hitherto forgotten (and ...