Laudator Temporis Acti

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 141, with notes on p. 483:

While working in the great railway factory at Swindon, Alfred Williams taught himself enough Greek and Latin to translate Ovid, Pindar, Sappho, Plato, Menander, and Horace. He mastered the Greek alphabet by chalking it up on machinery, and faced down a resentful supervisor who tried to make him erase it. In 1900 he began a Ruskin College correspondence course in English literature, beginning with Bede and ending with Wordsworth. It was an astonishing feat of self-education—and it left out the whole Victorian era. Even a reviewer for the WEA magazine, trying hard to be positive, advised him to write less anachronistic verses: "Poems where shepherds and shepherdesses are of Arcadia and not of Wiltshire, and rhymed translations of the classics, are part of a literary output which is necessarily and frankly imitative."¹⁰⁶ But Williams stubbornly resisted the new. As he put it, W.B. Yeats, Robert Bridges, Thomas Hardy, Richard Le Gallienne all "produced in me a veritable disgust of modern 'tack.' FORTY LINES OF DRYDEN CONTAIN MORE POETRY THAN TWELVE LARGE VOLUMES OF THE MODERN MUDDLE. I cannot help it one bit, but I can get more pleasure out of a page of Ovid than out of a bundle of our moderns."¹⁰⁷

106. K. T. Wallas, review of Alfred Williams, Songs of Wiltshire, Highway 2 (December 1909): 36–37.

107. Leonard Clark, Alfred Williams: His Life and Work (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), 15–22, 28, 45.

Alfred Williams, Life in a Railway Factory (1915; rpt. London: Duckworth & Co., 1920), pp. 289-290:

At the forge, however, the steady persistence of my efforts towards self-improvement was not appreciated. Day after day the foreman of the shed came or sent someone with oil or grease to obliterate the few words of Latin or Greek which I had chalked upon the back of the sooty furnace in order to memorise them.

Alfred Williams (1877-1930)