Antar Abdellah
This chapter explores the history of literacy and
creativity in 19th century in Britain; it was a century of
enormous technological and social change and a
particularly significant time for literacy.
 As listeners and occasionally as readers, the laboring
poor had been engaged with print since at least the
Reformation, if only in the form of the Bible and
Common Prayer Book.
 What makes the 19th century so fascinating is that not
only did so many more readers gain access to so much
more imaginative literature, but that the newly
literate also began to find means of self-expression
through the written word.
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Resources for creativity ranged from
traditional oral activities and popular
vernacular texts to new opportunities for
written communication and the increasingly
available works of English literature.
This chapter , then, focuses on the literacy
practices of the newly literate mass of the
British population.
It looks at the dynamics of everyday
creativity along two axes of change.
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First, there is the interaction between the
individual reader and writer and broader
political, social and economic forces.
In promoting mass literacy the government
was responding to the pressures created by
the Industrial Revolution.
Second, the shift of emphasis between oral
and written forms of communication opportunity for imaginative discourse.
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This chapter therefore begins with defining
literacy itself.
Likewise, it looks at how new forms of
popular reading responded to the complex
communication strategies of the newly
literate.
Furthermore, it examines the most
characteristic forms of everyday writing in
the era.
The concept of literacy can be defined very broadly as
a person’s ability to read and sometimes write
down the cultural symbols of a society or social
group.
 Basically, the economic innovations of the 18th and
early 19th centuries led to important changes in the
working life of many people who were drawn to work
in factories.
 Child employment meant that many children were
denied the disciplines of schooling.
 Factory schools, Sunday schools, evening schools and
infant schools were all designed to accommodate the
consequences of industrialization.
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Two developments flowed from this. First, much attention
was given to the education, training and competence of
elementary school teachers.
Rote methods were given more intellectual methods of
instruction.
Secondly, there was a major expansion of the school
curriculum promoted alongside the spread of elementary
education.
Children began to be taught through secular as well as
religious topics.
Another educational consequence of economic change was
that writing began to enter the core curriculum of schooling.
Some argued that writing, a business skill, should not be
taught in Sunday schools, while others claimed that it would
promote crime;
Many assumed that writing skills would elevate people above
their proper station in life.
The stamp duty on newspapers and the tax on paper
were both substantially reduced in 1836 and finally
abolished in 1855 and 1861 respectively.
 Books and newspapers became more readily available
with the Public Libraries Act of 1850 and
communications were improved by the introduction
of the Penny Post in 1840.
 It is only in the course of the 19th century that reading
gradually became a private rather than a public act
for the mass of the population.
 Until the 1830s, anyone who could read, was expected
to read aloud and share their reading with family,
friends and workmates.
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Attempts have taken two main forms: a
counting of institutions and a counting of
signatures on marriage registers and legal
documents.
 Counting the number of schools tells historians
little about the education that went on in them,
the average attendance, length of the school
year or average length of school life, all of which
have a direct relevance to levels of literacy.
 Counting signatures likewise poses problems. It
may lead to an overestimation of literacy levels
as individuals may be able to sign but have little
else in the way of literacy skills.
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Reasons:
The dynamic areas of growth in the education system
were no longer the charity schools for the working
population but private fee-paying schools for the upperclasses and grammar schools for the middle-classes.
 Secondly, children were drawn into the new processes of
industrialization and there were increased opportunities
to employ them from an early age.
 This too militated against working-class children receiving
an education that would make and keep them literate,
especially in industrial areas.
 Under these circumstances it would not be surprising if
literacy rates did drop.
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From 1830, levels of literacy began to rise, a
process that continued for the rest of the
century, though inevitably with regional
variation in pace.
Literacy rates were published by the
Registrar General for each census year in
percentages.
1841
1851
1861
1871
Male
67.3
69.3
75.4
80.6
Female
51.1
54.8
65.3
73.2
The social control argument dated back to the Sunday
Schools, the Charity schools and beyond.
 These suggested that schooling and literacy would
make the poor unfit for the performance of menial
[unskilled] tasks because it would raise their
expectations.
 Even worse, the acquisition of literate skills would
make the working-classes receptive to radical and
literature.
 This was the essential dilemma: whether to deny
education to the poor and so avoid trouble, or
whether to provide ample education in the hope that
it would serve as an agent of social control.
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By the late 1830s, the latter ideology dominated the
minds of policy makers as education was seen as a means
of reducing crime and the rising cost of punishment .
 The role of the state as well as religious societies was
crucial in developing literacy levels, some historians have
pointed to the large sector of cheap private education
where the working-classes bought education for their
children outside the church and state system. I
 Many in the working-class rejected the new National and
British schools and chose slightly more expensive,
common day schools.
 Parents often regarded the teachers as their employees
and they fitted in with working-class lifestyles.
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A major factor in rising literacy was the creation of a teaching profession
in elementary schools..
 The 1850s saw the rapid rise of a schoolteacher class: there were 681
certificated teachers in 1849 but 6,878 ten years later.
 A further important factor was the role of Her Majesty’s Inspectors first
appointed in 1839 to ensure that the state grant was spent properly.
 Four things mopped up the illiteracy of deprived groups who would
have remained a hard core of illiterates: the ragged, workhouse, prison
and factory schools. Ragged schools began during the early 1840s and
the Ragged School Union dated from 1844.
 They charged no fees and took the poorest children for a
basic education, depending for their support on a circle of
philanthropists including Charles Dickens.
 Finally, factory schools were created by the 1833 Factory Act
that obliged factory owners to ensure that their child workers
received a regular education either in a factory schools or outside
before being allowed to work. This was firmly enforced.
All these measures helped the most disadvantaged groups .
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The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
established in 1826, issued a library of cheap, short books
on popular science, history and all types of secular
subjects to combat the strong tradition of radical
literature.
 The Society was particularly influential in spreading
science to a broad and diverse population.
 By providing the same information, in the same format,
for all readers, the Society democratized learning across
the social boundaries of the period.
 The commercial market also played an increasingly
important role for literate society with the sensationalist
‘penny dreadfuls’, serialization of novels by authors such
as Dickens, Gothic and romantic novels and the railway
reading of W.H. Smith.
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Eventually, literacy proportion had risen by the 1860s
before the advent of state secular schools or free or
compulsory education.
 However, one and a half million children, 39% of
those between 3 and 12 years old were not at school
and there was a further million children without
school places.
 The 1870 Act filled in the gaps in areas where
voluntary provision was inadequate. The building of
non-sectarian schools, the work of 2,000 School
Boards and compulsory education after 1880 finally
led to the achievement of mass literacy by 1900.
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Almost all craftsmen were educated by the beginning of the 19th
century, and some applied their literacy in the course of their
business.
The first flood of popular literature produced in response to the
rapid expansion of urban communities and the increasing
communication skills of their inhabitants were essentially hybrid
in form.
The broadsides, which were produced in response to notorious
crimes and executions, were sold for a penny in astonishing
numbers.
At this stage they were produced by hand-operated iron-frame
presses.
The broadsides included two dimensions of creativity in popular
reading: firstly, the interplay between the conventions of a genre
and the particularity of a narrative, which in these cases were
based on real events; secondly the level and form of active
response that the purchased material required or provoked in the
consumer.
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The term ‘multimedia’, = different visual and print forms
are brought together in cheap, standardized products.
The broadsides belonged to the era when the market
comprised literate, illiterate and all the intervening levels
of partial literacy.
Unlike the simple binary measures of the Registrar
General terms, the broadsides mirror an immense range
of realization in this era of transition.
There are obvious parallels between the treatment of
crime in the broadsides and in modern tabloid
newspapers. Equally, broadsides as hybrid literary and oral
form with the presentation of sensation on television or
film.
The broadsides and the Sunday newspapers which began
to appear in the I840s provoked consternation amongst
moralizing observers, but they can also be seen as evoking
ethically disciplined response from the readers.
Through his capacity to generate what would be now
termed a multimedia industry, he created what was
widely viewed as a new ‘reading public’.
 Alongside the brilliant exploitation of the format of
cheap serial publication, his characters and narratives
were translated into plays, songs, prints, plagiarized
versions and a host of three-dimensional objects such
as mass-produced a set of leading characters.
 A "reading public" embraced those who read every
line of the novels and those who never read a word
Dickens wrote but felt themselves familiar with his
literary creations and followed their adventures.
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Explorations of ‘unknown’ England were characteristic of this
period. They exploited the middle-class fears about the
rapidly urbanizing society in which larger numbers of the
laboring poor lived adjacent to but hidden from their more
educated superiors.
 Wilkie Collins was the first to address the issue of popular
reading and in anticipation of his subsequent career as a
novelist, he made a particular feature of penetrating a secret
world with its ‘mysterious publications’.
 Collins’ conclusion, that ‘the Unknown Public is hardly
beginning as yet to learn to read’, was a challenge both to his
own readers and to subsequent scholars of popular literature.
The modern study of the full range of popular reading
practices begins with Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy
in 1958
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Penny post, or penny postage, was an invention of Sir Rowland
Hill.
The first stamps cost a penny, hence the name.
Before Hill's innovation, postage was generally paid by the
recipient, not the sender of a letter.
The reforms that became known as the penny post essentially
established the framework used by post offices to this day.
Rowland Hill was a teacher and administrator at schools, and was
known for its high educational standards and groundbreaking use
of student government to handle disciplinary matters, and Hill
authored a book on his progressive education techniques.
In 1837, Rowland Hill published Post Office Reform -- Its Importance
and Practicability
Hill argued that the rate should be low, he suggested the "penny
post" and offered calculations showing that postal rates could be
greatly decreased and frequency of delivery increased, if all
deliveries within England were charged at a single rate based on
weight.
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For the mass of the population , the principal arena for self-expression
on paper lay in correspondence.
In 1840, the Whig government attempted to transform the engagement
of the laboring poor with the practice of writing.
With Hill’s reform, a letter would now cost the flat rate of a penny, with
the payment signified by the new device of an adhesive postage stamp.
The Penny Post reduced revenues by 75 per cent, losing the
government nearly £l.2m in revenue, many times more than it was
directly investing in schooling.
Charles Dickens was particularly disappointed. He had seen the reform
as a means of creating a writing public as extensive and as active as the
reading public he had called into being.
Instead, the Penny Post had revealed how little progress had been
made, in spite of all the schools and writing manuals. The occasional
letter which was attempted served only to highlight the deficiencies of
the working class’s grasp of the basics of written communication drew
the newly educated into the postal system.
READING B.
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A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. It entails
more than basic facts , such as education, work, relationships, and death, a
biography also portrays a subject's experience of these events.
One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing.
The genre of working-class autobiography constituted the most sustained
form of prose writing by the newly literate in the 19th century.
Research has located about a thousand texts written by men and
sometimes women born during the 19th century. Their authors lived in
varying conditions. In their ranks are to be found beggars, thieves and
labourers, and also the relatively prosperous amongst the working class,
such as skilled artisans.
Their authors engaged with broad currents of socio-economic and political
change, and in doing so they organized their narratives in ways which
reflected wider currents of understanding about the formation of
character in the period.
Two short extracts from autobiographies have been selected which have a
multiple significance for the issues of literacy and creativity. They are a
product of a growing sense by working people that they could make their
own lives, outside the narrative of religious destiny and in spite of the
socio-economic and political conditions .
The growth of local newspapers from mid-century also
provided part-time or even full-time opportunities for
those whose horizons otherwise remained confined to
manual labour.
 The acquisition of some kind of proficiency as a writer
assisted the task of writing a memoir, but there
remained crucial questions of purpose, truth and
structure.
 In the hands of the least experienced autobiographers
the task could look simple. Anthony Errington[ 1823, p.
26]dealt with the question of intention in a single
sentence. ‘The reason of my wrighting the particulars of
my life and Transactions are to inform my family and the
world’.
 Another early autobiographer, Benjamin Shaw[1826],
wrote with home-made spelling in a home-made book
with home-made pen and ink, and fashioned his own
defense of the reliability of his enterprise.
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Every account of a life dealt with the limitless range
of recollected events and experiences by deploying
a narrative strategy derived from an oral or literary
discourse.
 The genre was fed by two streams, the spoken
tradition of family reminiscence and the religious
tradition of spiritual self-examination.
 Benjamin Shaw began in the first tradition,
supplying conserved biographies of his relatives,
and then tried the second.
 Shaw taught himself to write at the age of twenty in
order to correspond with a literate sweetheart.
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He became a classic case of the literate mentality, fascinated with
printed learning in all its aspects, and with the organizing power of
writing.
 His memoir was not only structured by his search for hooks but
fully indexed, as were the collections of aphorisms and medical
cures he made in separate notebooks.
 Leatherland (1862, p. 1) presents himself as moral lesson,
showing his readers ‘the blessed results of virtuous actions, and
warning them to shun the breakers upon which others have been
wrecked’.
 Whilst Leatherland was saving up pennies to buy fairy stories his
mother was reading to him, ‘Bunyan, Addison, Watts, Cowper,
and others were known for their simplicity’. Just as their schooling
was a matter of inconsistent attendance and incomplete learning,
so their lives as readers were hand-to-mouth existences, with no
final control over what could be read or how it could be connected
together.
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The defining characteristics of the age were abundance
and the absence of control.
 The combined impact of state intervention, technological
advance, economic growth and the development of a new
literary market offered the labouring poor possibilities of
reading and writing.
 Those who sought to engage in literary creativity in its
modern sense struggled both to earn a living and to make
sense of cultural traditions that embraced fairy tales and
folk songs and the flowering of the novel form in the 19th
century. Their autobiographies bear witness to the
possibilities of the first phase of modern mass
communication, and to the immense difficulties faced by
those most determined to exploit them.
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Learning to read in an early 19th century classroom was in its
substance and implications utterly unlike the contemporary
British system .
 The pedagogy, the availability of texts in the home and the
market, the nature of other non-literate modes of expression and
imagination, the impact of material deprivation on the process of
learning to write and the implications of becoming literate for an
occupational future, were all particular to the period.
 In each case there are the complex journeys between bare
competence and sophisticated command, between scarce and
unrestricted access, between passive possession and active use of
skills, between the intervention of the person and the
standardization of the product, between old and contemporary
mechanisms for generating, transmitting and storing ideas and
information.
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