19th Century Literacy and Popular Fiction by KM Rockwood

In the 1800’s, an interesting idea took hold in England and Wales. Perhaps the entire population, not just a select few, should know how to read.

Schools were established, and by 1880, school was compulsory, generally for children ages 5 through 10.

By 1891 publicly supported schools provided a free education.

Despite a compulsory education being available to all children, some managed to emerge into adulthood without learning to read. That unfortunate phenomenon continues today.

But the vast majority of the population in 19th century England and Wales could read. The idea spread to the United States, and by the end of the 19th century, the literacy rate there approached 90%, despite differing standards for education in the various states.

The demand for popular leisure reading material exploded.

In fact, the 1800s saw an enormous expansion of inexpensive printed literature for ordinary working people.

Much of the most popular reading material was sold not as complete books, but as inexpensive pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and stories published in installments. The form depended considerably on the period and the intended audience.

Penny Dreadfuls were particularly popular from the 1830s onward. These were inexpensive illustrated stories, often sold in weekly installments for a penny. They featured crime, adventure, horror, and sensational mysteries. Young working-class readers were an important audience.

Many famous Victorian novels appeared in monthly or weekly parts before publication as complete books. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in monthly installments beginning in 1836. Readers could buy one part at a time rather than paying for an entire book.

Newspapers, weekly magazines, and illustrated periodicals became enormously popular. They offered news, fiction, humor, political commentary, and serialized novels. One, The People’s Friend, was first published on January 13,1869 and continues today. Newspaper readership grew particularly rapidly after reductions in printing and newspaper taxes during the 1850s and 1860s.

Chapbooks and pamphlets were small, inexpensive publications, often just a few pages or a few dozen pages long. They contained folk tales, ballads, religious instruction, jokes, sensational crimes, and adventure stories. Chapbooks were particularly important in the early 1800s.

By the middle and late 1800s, cheap editions of novels became increasingly available. The colorful paper-covered boards of yellowback novels were familiar at railway bookstalls. These books, identifiable by their garish yellow covers, were published largely by George Routledge in the Routledge’s Railway Library series, which issued 1,277 titles over 50 years. Public libraries and commercial lending libraries also made books available to readers who could not afford to buy them.

A novel might have three distinct publishing lives. It first appeared in weekly or monthly installments. It was then published as a complete bound book. Eventually, it appeared in a cheaper edition intended for a much wider audience.

This meant that a story could reach readers across different income levels over several years.

By the late Victorian period, magazines and newspapers probably reached more readers regularly than separately purchased novels. Reading was increasingly an inexpensive, habitual activity rather than an occasional luxury.

Other forms of easily available entertainment are popular today, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American watches TV/video for 2.6 hours a day while devoting only 16 minutes to reading. That includes all types of reading, including reading for information, instructions, leisure reading, and back-of-the-cereal-box type reading.

We are a literate society now, but how we access information and entertainment is changing.