Literacy and Popular Culture

Abstract

In l750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by l9l4 England, together with a handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every corner of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.

Education in the working-class home: modes of learning as revealed by nineteenth-century criminal records

“…With regard to those self taught, the reading skill was still dominant (52%), but not to such a great extent, particularly among males (48% could only read). While it is true that the achievements of the pupil were limited by the skills of the instructor (Vincent, 1989), it is impossible to demonstrate with the available data (prison and marriage registers, not to mention autobiographies) that the partial literacy of parents was a correlative for home schooling amongst the working classes. It is conceivable that those parents who had found that the reading skill was both useful and adequate might have been content to pass on that skill to their children but have seen no reason to send their children to school to learn to write, especially where resources were tight.…”

“…Vincent has argued that literacy was an increasingly 'common element in the overall [domestic] curriculum as the nineteenth century progressed', though also acknowledges that 'it always had to compete with a wide range of skills which had equal or greater priority' (Vincent, 1989, 56). Vincent and Raey have used nineteenth-century surveys to highlight the substantial presence of books in working-class homes, not only religious texts but also primers and spelling books (Vincent, 1989, Vincent, 1983, Raey, 1991. Most recently, Humphries, on the basis of evidence in working-class autobiographies, declared that a crucial strategy for education was home teaching, and foremost among the domestic instructors were mothers, who were both 'more available' and more ambitious for their children.…”

“…First, data on presence of the skills within the 255 family groups identified confirmed the haphazardness or randomness with which literate skills were passed from parents to children, a state of affairs which Levine also identified in his study of Shepshed, Leicestershire, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not all literate artisans, tradesmen and labourers could arrange for all their children to acquire the skills (Levine, 1979, Vincent, 1989. All sorts of combinations of literacy were present amongst groups of family members at Ipswich Gaol.…”

“…Large quantitative sources, such as census enumerators' books, parish registers (births, marriages, deaths), settlement examinations, and apprenticeship indentures, reveal much about family structure, but tell us little about relationships, communication, forms of nurturing and teaching. These gaps and silences have led historians at different times to be both emphatic about and dismissive of the educative role played by the family (Vincent, 1989, Levine, 1975, Mitch, 1992, Snell, 1985, Anderson, 1972, Lane, 1996.…”

“…Some of what was learnt by family members was incidental, largely the result of absorption, observation or imitation, for example, learning to crawl or speak, developing an awareness and later knowledge of identity and community, and cultivating and expanding the imaginative faculties. Of those skills and forms of knowledge that required direct tuition, we have been told that moral values were imparted and literary skills increasingly taught, but that sons were sent away from the home to learn a trade (Vincent, 1989, Humphries, 2010. There are, however, significant problems in the use of such sources.…”