The description and measurement of literacy can be approached from two directions. On the one hand, it is an individual skill, achieved and practiced by specific people. On the other hand, it is a social phenomenon, and societies or groups can be characterised as ‘oral’, ‘literate’ or perhaps in a phase of ‘partial literacy’ or ‘restricted literacy’. The two are not of course entirely distinct, and by and large the social phenomenon is the sum of the individual skills. But they are not identical either: groups can be literate as a collective, and participate in written culture, even when not all members, or even a majority, are literate as individuals. This occurs most often through the practice of reading aloud, or group reading, which was at least as common as individual silent reading in the nineteenth century, particularly outside the elite.

Literacy Levels: Reading and Writing

Most discussion of literacy in the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland concerns the social phenomenon, reflecting the interests of the historiography of literacy in general. This takes a country or region as the unit of analysis and characterises its level of literacy as low or high, increasing or decreasing, and at what rate. Long-established regional contrasts can form part of the characterisation of a country as a whole. In nineteenth-century Ireland a highly literate north-east contrasted with an illiterate west coast, while France has traditionally been divided along a line from St Malo to Geneva, with much higher levels of literacy north of the line.

This approach owes much to the concept of ‘human capital’ in economics, the ‘acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants and members of the society’ in the words of Adam Smith. While this is a central element in many or most explanations of economic development, it is a difficult phenomenon to measure. For periods before the twentieth century, probably the easiest way to do so is to focus on elementary education, and on the most accessible measure of that education – literacy. Literacy levels are therefore a proxy for economic development or ‘modernisation’, with literacy thought of as both a cause and a consequence of that development.