Introduction
The nineteenth century brought with it a new world of readers. It generated a wide and variegated readership that contributed to the public sphere in ways that had not been imagined in previous centuries. Mass literacy had been achieved across Europe, or parts of it at any rate, by the 1860s. Globally this was also true of China and Japan, but nowhere else had literacy reached such heights as in European societies. In this European context Ireland may fairly be ranked alongside France and Belgium in the second tier of developed Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. The change had begun pre-Enlightenment, but the eighteenth century, across Europe, was still a time when advanced reading, elongated schooling and proficient writing were all markers of middle-class to elite status. By the end of the nineteenth century access to formal and informal schooling had deepened and widened, and permeated down to the semi-skilled and labouring classes via the urban middle classes and artisans in town and country.
In addition to this, and as a further complication, we must admit that it is a difficult thing to agree on what precisely constitutes literacy. Is it a reading age of twelve or above, does it require that you can write well (if so, many of our statistical ‘literates’ are not literate) and if needed, compose in prose? Are we interested in adolescent literacy or adult literacy? Does bilingualism skew our statistics, and can we easily separate out orality from literacy? If most work on literacy has tended to depend on state statistics harvested for internal bureaucratic consumption, how seriously should we take them, and how close can they take us to literacy as a component of a lived life, or as something which cannot be neatly captured by decennial survey?
There is, of course, a link between schooling and literacy in Ireland as elsewhere, but not quite the causal link one might expect. Mass schooling in Europe came at a point when most populations were already mostly literate, in the 1880s and 1890s. What separates the Irish experience and makes it somewhat unique is that mass schooling had been available some fifty years previously, right in the middle of this hundred-year revolution in reading.