It has always been this way; the educated have read these works, studied these works. There is a difference between going to school and being educated; although the vast majority of people go to school and even pursue what some call "higher education", still the truly educated are the minority...and that is because it is hard and people are lazy.
Re:Classics for the People
by mayiplease on Thursday November 28, 2019 @02:52PM
(#21659776)
Chomsky has written about how there were quite a few remarkably literate working-class journals in the 19th century. Unfortunately I don't have a link to where he said that.
> aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics
How many working class Britons did so and when? By 1800, was it 1%? 10%?
For instance, the article mentions the British Museum in 1782. But there was an entry fee until the 1830s, so I strongly doubt millions of working class people went there, even once in their life.
The anecdote about the slater reading a newspaper on a roof may be true, but it could very well be an urban legend from the 1730s. It's part of the collection of short and amusing notes from Montesquieu, the first one being: "London's people eat much meat; it makes them very strong; but when they reach 40 to 45 years, they kick the bucket." in https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Notes_sur_l’Angleterre
All of the very remarkable people that self-taught the classics just show that some people born from the working-class managed to read the classics and acquire a culture that was the prerogative of others. But without any estimation on quantity, it shows nothing more.
By the way, today, how much of these classics are left in the popular culture? How many people have read all of the most representative classics, Odyssey and Aeneid? Who reads the authors mentioned in this article, like Plutarch, Herodotes and Xenophon? Even with modern translation easily and freely available, I suppose it amounts to little, even if you can find counter-examples.