ABSTRACT
The Royal Commission on Employment of Children in 1864 plumbed some astounding depths of ignorance among working children. In the Midlands at one metalworks factory an investigator found that nearly three-quarters of the 80 7-16-year-olds there were completely illiterate.1 Even where they had received a smattering of schooling, the scraps of knowledge retained by such children were vestigial and muddled. Replies to various inter-viewers’ questions included such answers as ‘I’ve heard that [Christ] but don’t know what it is’; ‘The devil is a good person; I don’t know where he lives’; ‘Christ was a wicked man’; ‘The Queen has a name; it is “Prince”’; ‘Have not heard of France or London‘ (from a 12-year-old Midlands girl) and ‘Have not heard of Scotland’ (from a 19-yearold). One limited Leeds survey in 1859 revealed literacy rates of 24 per cent among 13-16-year-olds, and of those who could not read just under a quarter had worked as part-timers between 8 and 13 and therefore had experienced some half-time education.2 Full-time schooling, as it developed after 1870, was destined to face some initial uphill struggles to raise basic levels of literacy. In the early years of the board schools, despite the pounding in the three Rs, literacy standards remained below Standard 1 for over a quarter of pupils in some schools serving the poorest districts; that is, they could not read simple sentences.3 At the most rudimentary levelthe ability to sign one’s name-there were distinct advances through the century even before the era of state schooling. In 1840 66 per cent of males could sign their names; in 1870, just before the board schools were established, 80 per cent could do so, and in 1900 97 per cent.4 Among juvenile prisoners in 1842-53 nearly 43 per cent were totally illiterate, just over 30 per cent could read and
write imperfectly, 24 per cent could read but not write, and only the small residue were fully literate.5 In 1891 of youths sent to reformatories (presumably of the same social class as the juvenile prisoners of the 1840s) 17 per cent were totally illiterate and 70 per cent could read and write imperfectly,6 showing a definite advance through schooling. However, the magistrate J.W.Horsley in 1913 reckoned from observing young offenders that the high proportion who were of the reading standards of 8-and 9-year-olds indicated a regression in their literacy since leaving school;7 school, he concluded, had only a temporary effect on mental development. The abysmal spelling of mothers in notes to school explaining their children’s absence was to him further evidence of the fading of school influences. For example, absences due to children being sent on an errand were rendered variously to To go of anarrand’, ‘To get some arrants’ and ‘To go on an arreind’. Other reasons for absence were penned as ‘Ceapt by his father’, ‘Whas kept away becos he was hill’, ‘Very pooly so I keep him Atomb’ and ‘He plad the truent’.8 Such were the jottings by 1913 of people who had certainly experienced full-time education. However, against Horsley’s scepticism we can set the recollections of others. Edna Bold who was born in 1904 into a respectable working-class family remembered her starchy, strict schoolteacher armed with chalk and stick: ‘Both these instruments of her trade were used to such effect that by the time I left…. I could read, write and spell. Everyone could read, write and spell.’9 Robert Roberts recalled likewise how in the pre-1914 Salford slums children were more literate than their parents and might have to perform chores for them like reading the racing lists in the newspapers and filling in their betting slips. With the advent of silent movies children were taken to the cinemas to serve as ‘readers’ for illiterate or short-sighted elders: ‘When a picture gave place to print on the screen a muddled Greek chorus of children’s voices rose from the benches, piping above the piano music. To hear them crash in unison on a polysyllable became for literate elders an entertainment in itself.’10
