ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that reading and learning to read, and no one who reads fluently can fully enter into the condition of someone who cannot. Deep down in many a British parent is a faint belief that John Stuart Mill, who could read when he was three, began life with certain distinct advantages. The ‘fluent’ reading of people in Dickens’s day came from reading the Bible, which was commonly heard rather than read, and although more people in the nineteenth century could read than had been taught in school, it was by no means the entire population. The general belief is that everyone has the same view of what is involved in reading and a common agreement about why it is important. Newspapers, manuals of instruction, records, sales promotion, and post-office print are all about how our society coheres, how it operates and changes in our technological age.
