Download or read book The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England written by David Mitch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early Victorian England, there was an intense debate about whether government involvement in the provision of popular elementary education was appropriate. Government did in the end become actively involved, first in the administration of schools and in the supervision of instruction, then in establishing and administering compulsory schooling laws. After a century of stagnation, literacy rates rose markedly. While increasing government involvement would seem to provide the most obvious explanation for this rise, David F. Mitch seeks to demonstrate that, in fact, popular demand was also an important force behind the growth in literacy. Although previous studies have looked at public policy in detail, and although a few have considered popular demand. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England is the first book to bring together a detailed examination of the two sets of factors. Mitch compares the relative importance of the rise of popular demand for literacy and the development of educational policy measures by the church and state as contributing factors that led to the rise of working class literacy during the Victorian period. He uses an economic-historical approach based on an examination of changes in the costs and benefits of acquiring literacy. Mitch considers the initial demand of the working classes for literacy and how much that demand grew. He also examines how literacy rates were influenced by the development of a national system of elementary school provision and by the establishment of compulsory schooling laws. Mitch uses quantitative methods and evidence as well as more traditional historical sources such as government reports, employment ads, and contemporary literature. An important reference is a national sample of over 8,000 marriage certificates from the mid-Victorian period that provides information on the ability of brides and grooms to sign their names. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England is a valuable text for students and scholars of British, economic, and labor history, history of literacy and education, and popular culture.

Download or read book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Download or read book Victorian Publishing written by Alexis Weedon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Download or read book The Labyrinths Of Literacy written by Harvey Graff and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.

Download or read book A Companion to Nineteenth Century Britain written by Chris Williams and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain presents 33 essaysby expert scholars on all the major aspects of the political,social, economic and cultural history of Britain during the lateGeorgian and Victorian eras. Truly British, rather than English, in scope. Pays attention to the experiences of women as well as ofmen. Illustrated with maps and charts. Includes guides to further reading.

Download or read book Literacy Myths Legacies and Lessons written by Harvey J. Graff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest writings on the history of literacy and its importance for present understanding and future rethinking, historian Harvey J. Graff continues his critical revisions of many commonly held ideas about literacy. The book speaks to central concerns about the place of literacy in modern and late-modern culture and society, and its complicated historical foundations.Drawing on other aspects of his research, Graff places the chapters that follow in the context of current thinking and major concerns about literacy, and the development of both historical and interdisciplinary studies. Special emphasis falls upon the usefulness of "the literacy myth" as an important subject for interdisciplinary study and understanding. Critical stock-taking of the field includes reflections on Graff's own research and writings of the last three decades, and the relationships that connect interdisciplinary rethinking and the literacy myth.The collection is noteworthy for its attention to Graff's reflections on his identification of "the literacy myth" and in developing LiteracyStudies@OSU (Ohio State University) as a model for university-wide interdisciplinary programs. It also deals with ordinary concerns about literacy, or illiteracy, that are shared by academics and concerned citizens. These nontechnical essays will speak to both academic and nonacademic audiences across disciplines and cultural orientations.

Download or read book Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts written by Harvey J. Graff and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly 30 years the work of the Swedish Lutheran pastor and pioneering social historian Egil Johansson astonished the international scholarly world. Working initially with parish registers, especially examination registers, from northern Sweden, Johansson discovered the extraordinary usefulness of these documents to detail the history of universal literacy in Sweden. In this book a group of renowned scholars review and explore the possibilities for the wider circulation and broader application of central dimensions of the early literacy studies. The active thrust and exceptional growth in historical literacy studies over the past two decades has propelled the subject into a new prominence that has come to be the legacy of Egil Johansson's path breaking discoveries. Literacy in Sweden occurred well before any other European nation, despite the fact that Sweden was industrialised about 100 years later than the European norm. Egil Johansson also developed imaginative data analysis techniques that help historians around the world to better picture the complete human cast of the past. With the help of numerous contributors Johansson founded a giant data base of church records and other information, which now can help the understanding of pre-industrial society. Johansson's work spans over many aspects of literacy and social history and their respective relation to religion and gender. The contributors to this volume are influential academics in disciplines such as social history, history of literacy and gender research, and they work in all parts of the world - Australia, Great Britain, Scandinavia as well North America.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture written by Francis O'Gorman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially commissioned essays reflecting the current state of research in each particular field. Covering topics from music to politics, art to technology, war to domestic arts, journalism to science, the essays address multiple aspects of the Victorian world. The book explores what 'Victorian' has come to mean and how an idea of the 'Victorian' might now be useful to historians of culture. It explores too the many different meanings of 'culture' itself in the nineteenth century and in contemporary scholarship. An invaluable resource for students of literature, history, and interdisciplinary studies, this Companion analyses the nature of nineteenth-century British cultural life and offers searching perspectives on their culture as seen from ours.

Download or read book The Reading Lesson written by Patrick Brantlinger and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-22 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Brantlinger's] writing is admirably lucid, his knowledge impressive and his thesis a welcome reminder of the class bias that so often accompanies denunciations of popular fiction." —Publishers Weekly "Brantlinger is adept at discussing both the fiction itself and the social environment in which that fiction was produced and disseminated. He brings to his study a thorough knowledge of traditional and contemporary scholarship, which results in an important scholarly book on Victorian fiction and its production." —Choice "Timely, scrupulously researched, thoroughly enlightening, and steadily readable. . . . A work of agenda-setting historical scholarship." —Garrett Stewart Fear of mass literacy stalks the pages of Patrick Brantlinger's latest book. Its central plot involves the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed—especially by novelists themselves—as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay among nineteenth-century readers.

Download or read book Authors of Their Lives written by David A. Gerber and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-07 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2008 United States Postal System’s Rita Lloyd Moroney Award In the era before airplanes and e-mail, how did immigrants keep in touch with loved ones in their homelands, as well as preserve links with pasts that were rooted in places from which they voluntarily left? Regardless of literacy level, they wrote letters, explains David A. Gerber in this path-breaking study of British immigrants to the U.S. and Canada who wrote and received letters during the nineteenth century. Scholars have long used immigrant letters as a lens to examine the experiences of immigrant groups and the communities they build in their new homelands. Yet immigrants as individual letter writers have not received significant attention; rather, their letters are often used to add color to narratives informed by other types of sources. Authors of Their Lives analyzes the cycle of correspondence between immigrants and their homelands, paying particular attention to the role played by letters in reformulating relationships made vulnerable by separation. Letters provided sources of continuity in lives disrupted by movement across vast spaces that disrupted personal identities, which depend on continuity between past and present. Gerber reveals how ordinary artisans, farmers, factory workers, and housewives engaged in correspondence that lasted for years and addressed subjects of the most profound emotional and practical significance.

Download or read book Anatomy of a Nation written by Dominic Selwood and published by Constable. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an obscure, misty archipelago on the fringes of the Roman world to history's largest empire and originator of the world's mongrel, magpie language - this is Britain's past. But, today, Britain is experiencing an acute trauma of identity, pulled simultaneously towards its European, Atlantic and wider heritages. To understand the dislocation and collapse, we must look back: to Britain's evolution, achievements, complexities and tensions. In a ground-breaking new take on British identity, historian and barrister Dominic Selwood explores over 950,000 years of British history by examining 50 documents that tell the story of what makes Britain unique. Some of these documents are well-known. Most are not. Each reveal something important about Britain and its people. From Anglo-Saxon poetry, medieval folk music and the first Valentine's Day letter to the origin of computer code, Hitler's kill list of prominent Britons, the Sex Pistols' graphic art and the Brexit referendum ballot paper, Anatomy of a Nation reveals a Britain we have never seen before. People are at the heart of the story: a female charioteer queen from Wetwang, a plague surviving graffiti artist, a drunken Bible translator, outlandish Restoration rakehells, canting criminals, the eccentric fathers of modern typography and the bankers who caused the finance crisis. Selwood vividly blends human stories with the selected 50 documents to bring out the startling variety and complexity of Britain's achievements and failures in a fresh and incisive insight into the British psyche. This is history the way it is supposed to be told: a captivating and entertaining account of the people that built Britain.

Download or read book Education in Britain 1750 1914 written by W B Stephens and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise study covers the development of education throughout Great Britain from the Industrial Revolution to the Great War: a period in which urbanization, industrialization and population growth posed huge social and political problems, and education became one of the fiercest areas of conflict in society.

Download or read book The British Industrial Revolution written by Joel Mokyr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Industrial Revolution remains a defining moment in the economic history of the modern world. But what kind and how much of a revolution was it? And what kind of ?moment? could it have been? These are just some of the larger questions among the many that economic historians continue to debate. Addressing the various interpretations and assumptions that have been attached to the concept of the Industrial Revolution, Joel Mokyr and his four distinguished contributors present and defend their views on essential aspects of the Industrial Revolution. In this revised edition, all chapters?including Mokyr's extensive introductory survey and evaluation of research in this field?are updated to consider arguments and findings advanced since the volume's initial 1993 publication. Like its predecessor, the revised edition of The British Industrial Revolution is an essential book for economic historians and, indeed, for any historian of Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Download or read book Reader s Guide to British History written by David Loades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 4319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

Download or read book Institutions Innovation and Industrialization written by Avner Greif and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

Download or read book Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany 1770 1914 written by Jeffrey T. Zalar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogates the belief that the clergy defined German Catholic reading habits, showing that readers frequently rebelled against their church's rules.

Download or read book Living Standards in the Past written by Robert C. Allen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Europe experience industrialisation and modern economic growth before China, India or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic History and one that has provoked intense debate. The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. The established view, dating back to Adam Smith, is that the gap emerged long before the Industrial Revolution, perhaps thousands of years ago. While this view has been called into question - and many of the explanations for it greatly undermined - the issue demands much more empirical research than has yet been undertaken. How did the standard of living in Europe and Asia compare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The present book proposes an answer by considering evidence of three sorts. The first is economic, focusing on income, food production, wages, and prices. The second is demographic, comparing heights, life expectancy and other demographic indicators. The third combines the economic and demographic by investigating the demographic vulnerability to short-term economic stress. The contributions show the highly complex and diverse pattern of the standard of living in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging is not one of a great divergence between East and West, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity to economic fluctuations. In addition to these similarities, there were also pronounced regional differences within the East and within the West - regional differences that in many cases were larger than the average differences between Europe and Asia. This clearly highlights the importance of analysing several dimensions of the standard of living, as well as the danger of neglecting regional, social, and household specific differences when assessing the level of well-being in the past.