LITERACY

Reading and writing were widely taught in western Europe before the French Revolution. Demand from parents and teachers for learning aids sustained a large and diverse market for alphabets and primers. Publishers produced a range of simple texts upon which the inexperienced readers could practice their skills. Folk tales and devotional texts were carried by chapmen and colporteurs (book peddlers) through the countryside and sold for little more than the cost of a loaf of bread. If a peasant or a laborer could not read, he would know someone who did. If he owned no print himself, he would have some sense of its power, and would know some way of gaining access to it, if only as a listener at first or second hand. In the more developed northern and western countries, there were by the eighteenth century few communities entirely cut off from the written word and the skills of decoding it. The gentry, bourgeoisie, and urban artisans already had a tradition of universal literacy, at least among men, and even the laboring poor possessed in their midst a scattering of educated or self-educated readers. Only on the eastern and southern fringes of Europe were there to be found men in possession of property but deprived of the ability to compile and use the documents upon which their power was increasingly dependent.

Literacy was an invention of the nineteenth century more as a concept than a practice. The skills of reading and writing were separated from the broader spiritual and practical elements of education, and subjected to quantification. Historians have found ways of counting literacy in the early modern and medieval eras, but except in the Swedish church registers from the seventeenth century, this knowledge was denied to contemporaries. Literacy as it is now understood was a product of the rise of the modern state. The French Revolution produced little lasting educational reform either in France or in the countries influenced by its ideas. It did, however, give birth to the ideal of a universally schooled society, sustained and policed by governments and their bureaucracies. The emphasis given to the official curriculum was at the expense of the agencies that had borne the burden of instruction in previous centuries: the church, the educational marketplace, and the family. Even in the more developed countries it took most of the nineteenth century for the state to achieve effective control over elementary education. In this struggle, counting literacy became a key weapon. The case

for government intervention was displayed by literacy tables that demonstrated the scale of the task. Even the sprawling, barely governed Russian Empire knew where it stood in the European league table, although it was incapable of doing much about it. The criticism of the rival church structures, and still more of the long-standing informal systems of instruction, focused on their inability to count the effect of their labors. Literacy tables stood at the center of the transaction between the emergent state and taxpaying electors. The product of public expenditure could be measured in columns of marriage register signatures and marks or in the census returns. Literacy was a performance indicator. It simplified the meaning of education, but also for the first time enabled contemporaries and subsequent historians to measure change over time within and between countries.

The first attempts at counting literacy demonstrated that in terms of the capacity to sign a name, northern and western Europe began from a base of 50 percent or more for men, and embarked on a fairly even course of improvement during the nineteenth century, arriving at virtually universal nominal literacy in the years immediately before World War I. To the east and the south the first attempts at counting literacy rates were made around the middle of the nineteenth century. They demonstrated a much greater challenge and often initiated a steeper rate of improvement. As Figure 1 indicates, relative literacy levels remained much the same across Europe, but the gaps between the top and bottom countries narrowed as the decades passed. By 1914 even the more backward countries had universal literacy in sight, although in Spain, Italy, and even more so Russia and the Balkans, it would take a generation or more before some kind of victory could be claimed.

At one level, the statistics reveal a process of European cultural homogenization. In this key area of communication, countries were increasingly coming to resemble each other as the twentieth century commenced. All appeared to be embarked on the same journey, passing through the same stations, heading for the same destination. Behind the statistics were national school systems whose

differences were less important than their similarities. Educational reformers visited other countries, bringing back an enthusiasm for trained teachers, inspected classrooms, and systematic curricula. In most countries, conflicts with the families of pupils and with the churches led to compromises on the state's terms. Adjustments were made to the ambitions of parents and the power of religious institutions in return for an acceptance of a centrally subsidized and policed drive to mass literacy.

Figure 2 suggests that the growing homogeneity embraced gender as well as national origin. Women were everywhere behind men in the early returns, by around ten points in the more advanced countries and often much more where any kind of literacy was still uncommon. But unlike higher education, which remained almost exclusively a male preserve in this period, there was a growing equality of opportunity in elementary education. The same profile of descent from nominal illiteracy is present in both sets of figures. In many countries the rate of progress for women was often more rapid than that of men and in some cases, as in parts of midcentury England, brides were on average more literate than grooms. In informal educational systems, scarce cultural resources tended to be allocated first to boys, but when governments embraced the goal of universal schooling they tended to commit themselves to equal if frequently separate provisions for the sexes. Pressures within family economies under-mined the attendance of girls, and the widespread absence of opportunities beyond elementary schooling profoundly affected the meaning of the lessons in the inspected classroom. But if a wide view is taken of the distribution of privilege, power, and status between men and women over their lifetimes, the provision of basic literacy stands out in this era as an area of relative equality.

In other respects, the sense that the growth of mass literacy was collapsing the differences in European societies is profoundly misleading. At any point in this period of change, the lineaments of entrenched inequalities are still visible. For instance, the Geneva–Saint-Malo line that divided the better-educated north and east of France from the south and west remained apparent throughout the nineteenth century. Towns had always been and remained centers not only of education but also of access to the benefits that education created. The surrounding countryside was less literate, and tended to take its lead from the towns as to when and at what rate it improved. While the traditional gulf between the nominal attainments of artisans and laborers was closing, occupation remained the most powerful predictor of literacy throughout the period. A more significant gulf was that of age. A period of fundamental change in the possession and use of communication skills separated the generations. Gaps of twenty points or more are visible between children and parents in countries such as England, where population growth was steady over a given period, and by twice as much where there was a sudden population expansion, as in late-nineteenth-century Belgium. The pre-1914 victory over illiteracy in northwest Europe applied only to the young. Their less-educated parents and grandparents were still present in large numbers in the postwar societies. It was a difference not only of attainment but also of authority. With print, as later with computers, the instructed became the instructors. Those born too late to learn found themselves dependent upon their children for such access as they could gain to the benefits of the new mode of communication.

The greatest variation of all was in the range of skills measured by the single test of signing a marriage register or completing a census form. Comparative analysis of different modes of recording literacy suggests that the tests were a fairly consistent measure of a basic capacity to make a few words with a pen, which for the majority of the laboring poor corresponded to all the use they would be likely to make of writing. They under-estimated to varying degrees the distribution of the ability to read. In Sweden, for instance, which before the nineteenth century taught reading efficiently and largely ignored writing, the early statistics said nothing at all about access to print. In many countries, such as France, classroom reading lessons started a couple of years before writing, and pupils had often left for the fields before they attempted to form letters. Even in England, where the official curriculum taught the skills alongside each other, reading ability may have been 50 percent higher than writing at the beginning of the period.

The neat tables of attainment floated on a sea of improvisation. This was true of the basic question of capacity. The statistics counted individuals, but the ceremonies and households from which they were derived lay at the heart of the social lives of the laboring poor. As with all other material and culture possessions, the dispossessed begged, borrowed, and shared the skills and artifacts they needed. The more literate read to the less literate, the fully literate wrote and deciphered letters for their neighbors. Books were loaned or sold on through a flourishing secondhand market. This meant that until the arrival of cheap reprints at the end of the nineteenth century, poor readers lived their intellectual lives several decades behind those of their wealthier counterparts. The key forms in the transition from the possession to the use of literacy in this period were the mass circulation newspaper and the picture postcard. The former meant that for the first time the poor could purchase and privately consume up-to-date print. The latter meant that for the first time the barely literate began to use writing with some regularity. Both innovations had their origins in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when steam power was applied to the printing presses and facilitated the flat-rate postal systems. But they only began to engage with the newly educated on a large scale around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This culture of appropriation challenges the association of literacy and progress that the decreasing rates of illiteracy shown in the figures helped to reinforce. Historians have now dispensed with much of the conceptual framework that informed the compilation and interpretation of those statistics. The contrast between a backward oral and an advanced literate culture has been undermined partly by a closer examination of the statistics, which reveals how rare wholly illiterate communities were in most of late-eighteenth-century Europe, partly by a recognition of how literacy skills were shared, and partly by a critical examination of the association of literacy with rationality and illiteracy with superstition. Ironically, mass education facilitated the expansion of many emblematic irrational vices, such as gambling and the consumption of unlicensed medicine. At the same time, the sharp division between elite and popular or mass cultures fades as attention is paid to the complexities of how access was gained to and meaning derived from the printed word.

The European governments that set about creating mass education systems took a gamble that a combination of disciplined schooling, capitalist cultural production, and variable levels of censorship would eventually produce voters who would accept the rules of orderly political debate. There was no guarantee of success, but the extremities of political stability and crisis in this period cannot of themselves be explained by the growth or distribution of literacy. Just two generalizations survive. The first is that the greatest use made of the skills taught by the nineteenth-century schools was in the consumption of fiction. Whatever else, mass literacy expanded the realm of popular relaxation. The second is that material deprivation was the single most potent force in shaping the potential of the written word to transform the lives of the newly educated. Not until the rise of credentialed and bureaucratized employment after 1914 did the potential for schooling to challenge inherited inequalities begin to become evident.

See alsoEducation; Libraries; Popular and Elite Culture.

bibliography

Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. Princeton, N.J., 1985. The standard account of change in Russia.

Chartier, Roger. "Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France." In Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, edited by Steven L. Kaplan, 229–253. Berlin, 1984. Important conceptual discussion.

Cipolla, Carlo M. Literacy and Development in the West. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1969. The first major European study, still influential.

Furet, François, and Jacques Ozouf. Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry. Cambridge, U.K., 1982. The standard work on France.

Graff, Harvey J. The Literacy Myth. London, 1979. Influential iconoclastic study.

——. The Legacies of Literacy. Bloomington, Ind., 1987. Detailed and thorough survey of Europe and the United States.

James, Louis. Print and the People 1819–1851. Harmonds-worth, U.K., 1978. Sparkling anthology of the materials produced for new readers in England.

Johansson, Egil. "The History of Literacy in Sweden." In Literacy and Social Development in the West, edited by Harvey J. Graff, 151–182. Cambridge, U.K., 1981. The standard study of Sweden.

Maynes, Mary Jo. Schooling in Western Europe. Albany, N.Y., 1985. Best short survey.

Schofield, Roger. "Dimensions of Illiteracy in England 1750–1850." In Literacy and Social Development in the West, edited by Harvey J. Graff, 201–213. Cambridge, U.K., 1981. The standard statistical analysis of English literacy.

Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge, U.K., 1989. In-depth study of the British case.

——. The Rise of Mass Literacy. Cambridge, U.K., 2000. Survey of modern European development.

David Vincent