Literacy in the eighteenth century

A horn book from the Derby Museum,
by Mainlymazza -
Own work.
Licensed under Creative Commons
via Wikimedia Commons

For the pre-eighteenth-century background, this post owes a great deal to David Cressy, ‘Literacy in context: meaning and measurement in early modern England’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (Routledge, 1993), 306) and to Margaret Spufford's famous and ground-breaking, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Methuen 1981). For the eighteenth century, Susan Whyman's The Pen and the People: English Letter writers 1660-1800 is a ground-breaking study.

A problem for historians

Literacy is difficult to define.  Does it just mean reading very simple sentences or does it require more sophisticated reading skills? It is a problem for historians because it is  an ambivalent indicator of cultural attainment  It was by no means a necessity as a mark had the same legal standing as a signature, and many activities, particularly rural ones, did not need literacy. Every community contained at least one literate person, who could meet the needs of his illiterate neighbours.  

Far from being distinctive, the oral and print cultures interacted and fed off each other. Jests and proverbs that originated in folklore appeared in printed editions. Printed ballads were heard by illiterate bystanders. Sermons were delivered orally but many of them were also printed. Proclamations were proclaimed as well as posted. The town crier, a walking bulletin board, had to be literate as he had to deliver his information from a text delivered in writing.

There was a spectrum between illiteracy and full literacy, and a hierarchy of skill may have developed as readers learned to decipher writing in different forms. The commonest was Black Letter (Gothic) print, used in the ABC horn book, the catechism and much popular literature. In the eighteenth century this was giving way to Roman type.

Reading, by its nature, leaves no direct record, so there is no reliable guide to the extent of reading ability within the population. But it seems certain that more people could read than could write. Reading and writing were taught as separate skills and often by separate masters. Reading was seen as a skill that could be taught by anyone; writing required masters; it also required a high level of manual dexterity and initiation into the arts of cutting quills and preparing ink. Only the more privileged reached this level. 

Figures 

The statistical evidence for literacy comes from personal signatures. For all their problems as evidence, a clear and convincing pattern emerges. The groups that signed their names are the groups we would expect to possess literacy; it was closely associated with social and economic position and with gender. 

There was a long-term trend of growing literacy. By the end of the 17th century 50 per cent of men could sign and 25 per cent of women. The most reliable figures show a gradual though not unbroken improvement in male literacy from 10 per cent in 1500 to 25 per cent in 1714 and 40 per cent in 1750. 

Within this trend, there was considerable variation. The aristocracy, gentry, professional classes and the higher tradesmen and shopkeepers were almost entirely literate. Many labourers and even some farmers could not read at all. The highest literacy levels were in London: female literacy rose from 22 per cent in the 1670s to 66 per cent in the 1720s. Literacy was higher for City-born women than for immigrants, higher for those born after 1660 and higher for those engaged in needle trades and shop keeping than as servants, hawkers and washerwomen.

How to write

Writing needed paper, made from rags and bought at a stationer’s, ink, a pen, a penknife, and a 'dust-box'. Ink was a mixture of galls from oak leaves and iron salt or copperas (iron sulphate) laced with gum arabic (a natural gum made from the sap of the acacia tree). A right-handed person would choose a quill from the left wing of a goose. Quills wore down quickly and were in constant need of repair.  They could be bought ready-cut from a stationer's shop, but they were expensive and the less well-off would become skilled at sharpening with a steel knife. Copybooks showed the right way to hold a pen. 

The Post Office

Once the Post Office was reorganised in the 1660s the demand for its services never flagged. In the late eighteenth century the post boy was replaced by the mail coach. Research into letters in local record offices has shown that the Post Office was used by a wider range of people than was previously thought. Farmers and servants, as well as the upper classes and the middling sort, wrote letters. 

The characteristic eighteenth-century literary genre, the epistolary novel, provides indirect evidence of the popularity of letter-writing and the importance of the Post Office. The heroine of Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a letter-writing servant. Recent research suggests that there might have been more literate servants than was previously thought.

Title page of Samuel Richardson's
epistolary novel,
Pamela (1741)

Popular literature
From their opening in 1557 the presses of the Stationers’ Company show the production of a large number of printed ballads, almanacs and chapbooks to feed a popular market. By the 1660s as many as 400,000 almanacs were coming out annually. One family in three could be buying a new almanac annually. Old Moore’s Almanac was first published in 1697.

An eighteenth-cenury 'tragical ballad'
Public domain

Ballads were sung at street corners and then sold for 1d. From the 1660s, however, chapbooks were selling better than ballads and continued to be popular well into the nineteenth century.

Chapbooks were small books selling at 2d, aimed to appeal to a very wide cross-section of the urban and rural lower sections of society from merchants to apprentices in towns, and from farmers to day-labourers in the country. They were called chapbooks

 because they were sold by travelling peddlers (chapmen). Alehouses were also centres of distribution, places where ballads and chapbooks were handed round or read aloud. Because they contained woodcut illustrations, even the illiterate could enjoy chapbook stories. 

One popular chapbook was The Compleat Cookmaid. Another, Mother Bunch's Closet, taught simple spells to discover one’s future husband, to be practised on St Agnes’ Eve and Midsummer Eve. Apprentices enjoyed stories such as Aurelius, the Valiant London Prentice. Chivalric romances such as Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton were universally popular. In 1621 Tom Thumb was published, the story of a diminutive neo-Arthurian knight, the son of a ploughman and a milkmaid. A substantial proportion of the chapbook stories were religious.

"Tom Thumb Adventures" by Unknown -
Licensed under Public domain 
via Wikimedia Commons 

Education

Elite boys and girls learned the alphabet from a parent, tutor or governess.   The better off boys could attend an endowed grammar school. (Andrew Marvell and William Wilberforce were educated at Hull Grammar School.) They could also go to a public school before attending university.

Jane Johnson (1706-59), the wife of the Revd. Woolsey Johnson of Olney in Buckinghamshire, prepared a range of teaching materials for her son, George William, and presumably as well for her two other sons and daughter. There are 438 items in her collection, ranging in size from tiny fingernail-size books to letter and word cards that measure three inches by one inch.

Jane decorated the cards with illustrations of people, birds, animals, and objects that she cut from magazines and newspapers and painted by hand with watercolours. It is thought that she hung the cards on an easel and then had her children arrange the sentences.

The material was discovered in Indiana in 1982 and handed over to the university, where it can be viewed here.

Lower down the social scale, the bulk of the population would have learned to read in a dame school, though some children attended free schools or charity schools, funded by endowments. Generally a child would be able to read by the age of seven, and if the school taught writing he had acquired this skill by the age of eight.  

Children began by memorizing the alphabet a letter at a time, using a hornbook, a paper sheet pasted on a board covered with horn and fixed in a frame.  After memorizing vowels and consonants, they combined them into syllables then joined syllables into words. The basis of all teaching was repetition.

Conclusion

1. There was no system of state education in England before the nineteenth century. Schooling was patchy with only the elite being provided with a prolonged period of education. Boys received a far more systematic education than girls. However, there were many informal schools that are not recorded. Home education is also largely unrecorded, yet it was probably extensive.
2. Evidence of literacy is hard to come by, the most reliable being signatures on legal documents or in parish registers. 
3. The existence of cheap popular literature and the growing importance of the Post Office both suggest a reasonably wide reading public. Many people who could not write nevertheless possessed a basic literacy.