describe the efforts to promote reading habits among children women and workers during the 19th century
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Answer:
I n the nineteenth century, the reading public of the Western world
achieved mass literacy. The advances made towards general literacy
in the age of Enlightenment were continued, to create a rapidly
expanding number of new readers, especially for newspapers and cheap
fiction.
These figures hide considerable variations between town and country,
and between the highly literate capital cities and the rest of the country.
In Paris, for example, on the eve of the French Revolution, 90 per cent
of men and 80 per cent of women were able to sign their wills; and in
1792, two out of three inhabitants of the popular faubourg St Marcel
could read and write." Such high levels of literacy, however, were found
only in the largest western European cities before the mid-nineteenth
century. This was the 'golden age' of the book in the
The new public devoured cheap novels. In the eighteenth century, the
novel was not regarded as a respectable art-form, but in the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, its status was assured. It became the classic
literary expression of triumphant bourgeois society. In the early years of
the nineteenth century, novels were rarely produced in print runs of
more than 1,000 or 1,500 copies. By the 1840s, editions of 5,000 copies
were more common, whiie in the 1870s, the cheapest editions of Jules
Verne appeared in editions of 30,000.6 In the 1820s and 1830s, Walter
Scott had done much to enhance the reputation of the novel, and had
become an international success in the process. By the 1870s, Jules
Verne was beginning to reach the global readership that made him a
colossus of the growing popular fiction market. The mass production of
cheap popular fiction integrated new readers into national reading
publics, and helped to make those reading publics more homogeneous
and unified.
Cheap monthly instalments could reach a wider public '
than the traditional, well-bound, three-decker novel. The serialization
of fiction in the press opened up a new market . A new relationship !
was created between the writer and his or her public.
The new readers of the nineteenth century were a source of profit, but a
they were also a source of anxiety and unease for social Clites. The
revolutions were partly blamed on the spread of subversive and socialist
literature, which reached the urban worker and a new audience in the
countryside. In 1858 the British novelist Wilkie Collins coined the
phrase 'The Unknown Public' to describe 'the lost literary tribes' of
3 million lower-class readers, 'right out of the pale of literary civilisation'.' He referred to the readers of illustrated penny magazines,
which offered a weekly fare of sensational stories and serials, anecdotes,
readers' letters, problem pages and recipes. The readers of the penny
novels included many domestic servants and shop-girls, 'the young lady
classes'. According to Collins, 'the future of English fiction may rest
with this Unknown Public, which is now waiting 30 be taught the difference between a good book and a bad'. England's new readers, who
never bought a book or subscribed to a library, provided middle-class
observers with a sense of discovery, tinged with fear.
The Female Reader: Occupying a Space of her and finally eliminated by the end of the nineteenth century.Perhaps more women than we realize could already read. The signar ture test, commonly used by historians to measure literacy, hides from t view all those who could read, but were still unable to sign their own name. This group was essentially female. Perhaps for this reason, many women could read but not sign or write. In some families, there was a rigid sexual division of literary labour, according to which the women would read to the family, while the men would do the writing and account-keeping.