Peter Elson looks at how a regular dose of Tolstoy can improve our well-being
WHEN Dr Jane Davis introduced a new group of people to the pleasure of reading, she experienced an Educating Rita moment.
She opened with a very accessible story to ensure nobody felt excluded and all went well.
Then an old man called Frank, a retired rivetter from Cammell Laird shipyard, pulled her up short.
“Very good, Jane,” he said, “but when are you going to bring out the good stuff what the posh knobs read, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy?”
It took her by surprise, but here was living evidence of Willie Russell’s eponymous heroine, Rita the hairdresser.
Just like the intelligent but frustrated fictional Rita, the real Frank and many others like him felt a hunger for rewarding literature they realised was out there.
Jane is director of The Reader Organisation, the Liverpool-based charity pledged to bring about a “Reading Revolution”.
It’s been singled out by the Government for best practice in helping to improve mental health and well-being.
“We are making it possible for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to enjoy and engage with books,” says Jane.
This hardly describes the reality of the changes that her leadership and team is bringing even to marginalised people, who feel alienated from life.
That her formula is so simple could be the reason why it has taken so long to be deployed. With a trained leader, a group tackles an acclaimed book or poem.
They voluntarily read in turn, with regular breaks to discuss the text, its meaning and relationship to their experience.
The results are phenomenal in raising individuals’ self-awareness, giving insight, increasing self-confidence and aspirations.
One barman told her his lifetime’s reading amounted to what was on the back of a sauce bottle and, she says, “most people are in that state, but it’s no obstacle to their learning.”
She adds: “Another man told me after reading Jane Eyre with us that he’d ‘learned more about bloody women than in 40 years of being married’!”
It’s not just organisations like Mersey Care NHS Trust, Wirral NHS and Wirral Council which employ The Reader Organisation’s services. It also provides a writer in residence for Bibby Line Group.
But there is more to it than even this. A world study by Unesco found that reading for pleasure is the single greatest determinant of social mobility.
“It’s more important than someone’s class or where they went to school, and we must keep talking about that fact,” says Jane.
“The Reader Organisation exists to promote reading for pleasure and we want to create a reading revolution that puts great books into the hands of people who need them.
“We start groups with an easily understood book, but well-written with depth, such as Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Millions, or Framed.
“It would take about eight weeks to read Millions in two- hour sessions. Then we move onto something like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which took a Wallasey group a year to read aloud.
“Millions has plenty of humour, characters and situations which people will recognise from their own experience, like having a brother, or how your dad would cope if he lost your mum.”
