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Literacy in Literature and in Life: An Early Twentieth-Century Example

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Harvey J. Graff
Harvey J. Graff*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas
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Extract

Ironically perhaps, literary evidence has often proved a misleading or inadequate basis for the study of popular literacy in the past. The reasons for this observation include the approaches and assumptions of researchers, the types of literary sources examined, biases of both students and their data, researchers' misplaced emphases and expectations, inadequate notions of the meaning of “literacy” as well as that of the “popular” among reading publics, and the literary materials available for perusal.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Fall 1983 , pp. 279 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by History of Education Society 

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References

Footnotes

1. I have in mind principally the examples of the work of Neuberg, Altick, and Engelsing. See Neuberg, Victor E., Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harmondsworth, 1977) and Popular Education in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1971); Engelsing, R., Analphabetum und Lekture, Zun Sozialgeschichte des Lesen in Deutschland Zwischen feodaler und industrielle Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973) and Der Burger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974); Altick, Richard, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957). Many of the French “histoire du livre” studies are best classified here too.Google Scholar

2. For intelligent use of the genre of autobiographies, see Vincent, David Bread, Knowedge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981). The work of Barbara Finkelstein is also interesting in this respect. See her “Reading, Writing, and the Acquisition of Identity in the United States, 1790–1860,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective , ed. Finkelstein, B. (New York, 1979), 114–139, “The Moral Dimensions of Pedagogy,” American Studies, 15 (1974): 79–89, and “Pedagogy as Intrusion: Teaching Values in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century America,” History of Childhood Quarterly, 2 (1975): 349–378. See also, note 22, below.Google Scholar

3. Schofield, Roger, “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial Societies,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge, 1968), p. 314.Google Scholar

4. Schofield, , “Measurement,” 314–315. See also, as examples, the work of Neuberg, Engelsing, and Altick cited above, among many other examples.Google Scholar

5. For further examples and analysis, see Graff, Harvey J., The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York and London, 1979) and The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture, forthcoming; Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1980); Lockridge, Kenneth A., Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974); Furet, François and Ozouf, Jacques, Lire et ecrire (Paris, 1977); Johansson, Egil, The History of Literacy in Sweden (Umeå, 1977); Soltow, Lee and Stevens, Edward, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School, (Chicago, 1982). For specific examples, see my review of Neuberg, and Lockridge, , “Literacy in History,” History of Education Quarterly, 15 (1975): 467–474.Google Scholar

6. On Cremin's approach to literacy, see Lockridge, , Literacy; Graff, , The Legacies of Literacy. Google Scholar

7. “The Literature of the Streets,” in The Victorian City, ed. Dyos, H. J. and Wolff, Michael (London, 1973), I: 191. See also, for other examples, Laqueur, Thomas W., “The Cultural Origins of Literacy in England, 1500–1850,” Oxford Review of Education, 2 (1976): 255–275; Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981). This approach is usefully compared with those of Levine, David and Wrightson, Keith, Poverty and Piety in an English Village (New York, 1979); Levine, , “Illiteracy and Family Life in the First Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Social History, 14 (1980): 25–44 and “Education and Family in Early Industrial England,” Journal of Family History, 4 (1979): 368–380; Graff, , The Literacy Myth, esp. ch. 7; Calhoun, Daniel, “The City as Teacher,” History of Education Quarterly, 9 (1969): 311–325 and The Intelligence of a People (Princeton, 1973). The second set of citations offer differing, but suggestive paths to grounded and controlled analysis.Google Scholar

8. My own thinking on these issues has been influenced by the experience of team-teaching a graduate seminar on “Women in the Nineteenth-Century,” at The University of Texas at Dallas with Lilian Furst, a professor of comparative literature. Professor Furst deserves my thanks but none of the responsibility for my conclusions. Ellen Dwyer, Indiana University; Milling, Jill, University of Texas at Dallas; and Paul Mattingly, New York University, offered critical readings which I appreciate. Women's history offers important parallels to this approach.Google Scholar

9. Publisher's Forward to the 1955 British Edition, p. 6. The edition used here and cited throughout is the Monthly Review Press edition, published in New York, 1962 a reprint of the Lawrence and Wishart edition, 1955.Google Scholar

10. Tressell, Robert, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) pp. 11–12. See also Alan Sillitoe's Introduction to the novel. For important information on the author and the novel, see Bell, F. C., One of the Damned (London, 1979).Google Scholar

11. See also The Legacies of Literacy.Google Scholar

12. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, p. 1, 2, 3.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 54, 54–55.Google Scholar

14. Commission on Popular Education, Report, 1861, p. 243. See also, The Literacy Myth, Chs. 1, 7, and the literature cited there.Google Scholar

15. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

16. Gramsci, , Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Hoare, Quentin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell, (London, 1971), p. 12; Cammett, John M., Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967), p. 204; Williams, Gwyn, “The Concept of “Egemonia' in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 21 (1960), 587. See also Graff, , The Literacy Myth, esp. 34–36, 28, Ch. 1, and the literature cited there. The best exposition of Gramsci's thought in English is Adamson, Walter L., Hegemony and Revolution (Berkeley, 1980).Google Scholar

17. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, pp. 87–88.Google Scholar

18. Ibid, p. 223. See also Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (Boston, 1961); Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour (Farnborough, 1977).Google Scholar

19. See, on schooling, for example, Hurt, J. S., Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918 (London, 1979); McCann, Phillip (ed.), Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977); Reeder, David (ed.), Urban Education in the 19th Century (London, 1977), among a large literature.Google Scholar

20. See The Literacy My th, The Legacies of Literacy. See also the brilliant nineteenth-century criticism of Hodgson, W. B., Exaggerated Estimates of Reading and Writing as Means of Education (London, 1867). I am reprinting this in a forthcoming issue of the History of Education Quarterly. See also the new and important book, Scribner, Sylvia and Cole, Michael, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).Google Scholar

21. Vincent, , Bread, Knowledge and Freedom; see also, Vincent, (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism (London, 1977); The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (London, 1978); Neuberg, Victor (ed.), Literacy and Society (London, 1972); Burnett, John (ed.), Useful Toil (Harmondsworth, 1974); Spufford, Margaret, “First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers,” Social History, 4 (1979): 407–435. The latter is reprinted in my Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

22. See for example, Hurt, , Elementary Schooling; Graff, , The Literacy Myth, Chs. 5, 7. For a literary example of contemporary evidence and tension, see Kosinski, Jerzy, Being There (New York, 1972). The novel, as usual, is a much better source than the film. Other evidence today is legion.Google Scholar

23. See, for example, The Literacy Myth, Chs. 5, 7; Vincent, , Bread, Knowledge and Freedom; Johnson, Richard, “Really Useful Knowledge,” Radical Education, 7–8 (1975–1976); Tholfsen, Trygre R., Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (New York, 1977); the work of Brian Simon, among many other examples.Google Scholar

24. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, pp. 514–515.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 515.Google Scholar

26. Hamilton, Ontario, Palladium of Labour (24 November 1883); Fincher's Trades Review (18 March 1865). See also The Literacy Myth, Ch. 5.Google Scholar

27. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, pp. 223–230, for example.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., pp. 299–300.Google Scholar

29. Graff, , The Literacy Myth, Ch. 7. There is also a rising amount of contemporary evidence, for example, Shirley Heath's studies and Walter J. Ong's several papers on “orality” in “literature” culture. Ong, Walter J., “The Literate Orality of Popular Culture Today,” in his Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca, 1971), pp. 284–303 and “Literacy and Orality in Our Time,” Journal of Communication, 30 (1980): 197–204; Heath, , “The Functions and Uses of Literacy,” Journal of Communication, 30 (1980): 123–133.Google Scholar “Protean Shapes in Literary Events,” in Spoken and Written Language, ed. Tannen, D. (Norwood, N.J., forthcoming), and her forthcoming monograph.Google Scholar

30. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, pp. 394–395; see also, pp. 424–425. Calhoun, , The Intelligence; Davey, Ian, “Educational Reform and the Working Class,” Unpub. PhD. Diss., University of Toronto, 1975.Google Scholar

31. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, p. 495.Google Scholar

32. See, on these issues, for example, Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900,” Journal of Social History, 7 (1974): 460–508; Baily, Peter, Leisure and Class in Victorian Society (Toronto, 1978); Best, Geoffrey, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1854–1875 (New York, 1972); Thompson, Paul, The Edwardians (Bloomington, 1975); Meacham, Standish, A Life Apart (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Malcolmson, Robert, Popular Recreations in English Society (Cambridge, 1973); Harrison, Brian, “Religion and Recreation in Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 38 (1968): 98–125; Lees, Lynn H., “Getting and Spending: The Family Budgets of English Industrial Laborers in 1890,” in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Merriman, John M. (New York, 1979); Graff, The Literacy Myth, Ch. 7, The Legacies of Literacy, esp. Ch. 7. See also Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, p. 496.Google Scholar

33. Tressell, , Ragged Trousered, p. 630.Google Scholar

34. Laslett, Peter, The World We have Lost (London, 1965; 2nd ed., 1971), “The Wrong Way through the telescope: A note on literary evidence in sociology and historical sociology,” British Journal of Sociology, 27 (1976): 319–342. But, see also Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971) Laslett's article is must reading for all concerned. It should be noted though that his posture is self-contradictory, and his calls for theoretical perspectives are piously empty in this presentation. The concern for “confidence” and assumption that one ought best, but not always, begin with historical rather than literary evidence, I want to underscore. For a new effort at social historical use of literature related to the history of literacy, see Spufford, , Small Books. Google Scholar