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)
