ABSTRACT
The drama and history of those earlier days, when literacy was at the forefront of the battle for democracy, are a lesson about literacy that often goes missing in schools today. The formation of the English working class during this period, E. P. Thompson has argued in his great work on the period, was based on the principles which have traditionally linked literacy to democracy: 'The working class ideology which matured in the 1830s put an exceptionally high value upon the rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty'. Although literacy rates improved considerably over the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not a steady progress. Literary societies formed and other organizations held lecture series which almost always included mention of literature, along with science, the fine arts, theology, morals, social and political economy. This account of literacy among the working class during this half-century is riven with pathos.
