Hywel Francis and Sian Williams’ history of the South Wales Miners’ Library, published in 2013, is entitled Do Miners Read Dickens? It was named after a question posed thirty years earlier by a perplexed academic browsing the building’s shelves. The book provides a patient answer — yes, they do — to the eternally daft debate on culture, class, and creativity.

Even before the socio-cultural complexity identified in 2013 by the Great British Class Survey, history contradicted the assumption that if you have the time and inclination to consume culture you cannot be working-class. Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes recorded how many turn-of-the-century working-class men and women listened to opera records and read not only Dickens but also Shaw, Wells, and Thackeray. They also formed their own operatic and dramatic groups, pit-specific brass bands and sports teams, as well as unions, libraries, and mutual aid societies. Local civic and cultural initiatives meshed to form the kind of ‘big society’ that David Cameron could only dream of.