Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914
Abstract
In l750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by l9l4 England, together with a handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every corner of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.
Integrity signals
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Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The volume of correspondence handled annually by the Royal Mail rose from 76 million items in 1839 to 3,500 million in 1914.
“Nevertheless, the volume of correspondence handled annually by the Royal Mail rose from 76 million items in 1839 to 3,500 million in 1914 (Vincent, 1989, p. 33).”
From Understanding the Writing Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century (2025) · cites this paper as Vincent, 1989, p. 33
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Information and digital literacies: A review of concepts
Bawden, D. (2001) · Journal of Documentation · doi:10.1108/eum0000000007083 · Cited by 1,207 · see citing works
Understanding the Writing Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century
Lyons, M. (2025) · Culture & History Digital Journal · doi:10.3989/chdj.2025.404
- Authors
- Vincent, D.
- Corresponding author
- Vincent, David
- ORCID
- Vincent, David
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1989-11-02
- OpenAlex
- W4244204476
- Cited by
- 406
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 40 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 29 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 61
- FWCI
- 19.76
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
- Social Sciences › Education › Historical Education Studies Worldwide
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Historical and Literary Analyses
- Keywords
- literacy, popular culture, history of literacy, English society, ordinary people, mass literacy, reading and writing, 19th century, social history of education
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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