The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen

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or accounts of experiences as prisoners of Indians, were extremely popular, and the most famous of these, Mary Rowlandson’s, was published in chapbook form in 1682. “Richard Rum” tales, seriocomic stories about temperance that were published throughout the eighteenth century, were also a largely American phenomenon. Eventually chapbooks became associated with children’s literature, and remained available in this form through the nineteenth century.13

      In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were two major ways for literary products to be distributed: shops and peddlers. The former were largely based in the cities and sold printed matter alongside a variety of other products; the latter carved out a marginal existence by visiting inland settlements. In early Massachusetts, such people were stigmatized and even barred from bookselling, but by the late eighteenth century hawkers had become an important source of gossip, political discussion, and reading material. Occasionally all three would intertwine. The astounding success of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary manifesto Common Sense—which sold 100,000 copies between January and March 1776, or one copy for every twenty-five people in the colonies—was at least partially the result of the peddlers’ distribution network. Peddlers also knew their market. In 1799, the itinerant Mason Locke (or “Parson”) Weems had enjoyed success selling a variety of books, mostly in the mid-Atlantic states. But it was not until he got the idea of writing a biography of George Washington—and convincing Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey to back it—that he really hit the jackpot. The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, published immediately after the president’s death in 1799 (the fifth edition of which included his apocryphal cherry tree story) became a huge hit and had gone through at least eighty-four printings by 1829. Weems also wrote successful biographies of Ben Franklin, William Penn, and Chief Justice John Marshall, although none could compare with the Washington biography.14

      Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, there arose another form of literary distribution that had powerfully democratic ramifications: the lending library. Once again, Benjamin Franklin was at the vanguard, when he established a subscription library in Philadelphia in 1731. This was a private affair that required participants to put up a large sum of money in order to gain lending privileges. But before long the elitist subscription library was supplemented by the institutional library, which lent books to members (such as schools) and, more importantly, by the circulating library, which rented books at rates affordable to a common laborer. This contributed dramatically to an expansion of literary culture: as more books became available, growing numbers of people read them, and publishers then increased production. Wealthy merchants referred to lending libraries as “slop-shops of literature.”15

      Yet there remains the larger question of exactly who could read by 1800. Certainly, the mere proliferation of books contributed to the growth of literacy in colonial America by giving more people access to reading materials. But other factors were also at work, factors that need to be taken into account for a fuller understanding of the creation of a large reading audience by the early nineteenth century.

      The question of literacy in colonial New England has been strenuously explored by literary scholars, but no one has been able to come up with decisive figures. In part this is because there is no widely shared definition of the term. Do we measure literacy by the ability to read a legal contract, a personal letter, or a spelling book? And even if we have a clear definition, not all historical subjects were willing to be counted—slaves and some white women, for example, surely concealed what they (often illegally) knew. Finally, there is the matter of what means we use to count literacy, and how reliable they are. One modern study, for example, uses New Englanders’ ability to sign wills with their initials as an index of the ability to read. Even by this standard, literacy was low: barely one-half of white men and less than one-third of white women could read in 1660. Some studies contend that using a broader range of documents would yield higher rates, while one argues that reading and writing were separate skills and that women were far more likely to be able to perform the former than the latter. All of this demonstrates the ongoing resistance of history to empirical quantification.16

      Nevertheless, some plausible generalizations can be made. Whatever we consider the baseline of literacy, it is clear that New England led the colonies (and perhaps even the world). As early as 1642, Massachusetts passed a law requiring reading instruction for all children. Connecticut followed in 1650, New York in 1665, and Pennsylvania in 1683. Many of the instructors hired to fulfill this task were women. Nevertheless, for quite some time “all children” only included a fraction of young people, and usually meant boys. Even when girls were taught, their training was not taken as seriously as that of boys. Massachusetts added a writing requirement for boys in 1703, but it was not until 1771 that a similar provision was made for writing instruction for girls.17

      Despite such inequities, reading instruction was greatly facilitated by the growing availability of teaching materials. At first, hornbooks (single pages tacked onto a wooden board) were used, as were psalters (books of psalms), primers, and bibles. These texts were gradually replaced by spellers, the most famous of which, Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, sold 24 million copies between 1783 and the author’s death in 1843, making it the best selling book in U.S. history before 1850. As these and other kinds of reading matter gave students an incentive to master the skill, literacy grew in the colonies and the fledgling United States in a manner unprecedented in the Western world. It has been estimated that by 1790 over 90 percent of the nation’s white population was literate.18

      Again, the exact meaning of this statistic, if accurate, remains unclear, and also probably obscures the differential between men and women. On the other hand, some historians have noted the interest in—and official sanction of—female literacy that was part of the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” that emerged after the Revolution. According to this ideology, the success of the new nation rested on a virtuous, educated white male citizenry devoted to the common good, but the keystone for the development of such a populace was the virtuous, educated mother, who would inculcate the proper values and provide an atmosphere that would encourage the development of a leadership class (in some versions) or a more egalitarian population (in others). Thus, although Republican Motherhood fit into older patriarchal models that confined women to specific private, domestic tasks, its advocates also called for women to be provided with the opportunities and skills that would allow them to secure the future of the state.19

      That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the constrictions on women were still considerable—women did not approach equity with men as readers or as teachers of readers until the second quarter of the nineteenth century—and U.S. education remained unequal in class and gender, not to mention racial, terms, a situation that still holds true today.20 Yet while it would be a mistake to overestimate the possibilities afforded by these developments, it would also be a mistake to minimize their potential. “I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government,” said Virginia governor William Berkeley in 1619.21 A century and a half later, many colonists no doubt found such sentiments unrealistic, but the anxieties they reflected had by no means disappeared. Once people could read, there was no telling what they might think—or do. And while elites wanted women and working people to read and write so that they could contribute to the national economy, it was difficult to control the uses to which people would put these skills. This was particularly the case for a new kind of culture that was beginning to generate both attention and condemnation: the novel.

      OPENING CHAPTERS: THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

      As its name implies, the novel is a relatively new form. Its roots can be traced back to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, published in 1605. It arrived in English in the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. The developments that have been described in this chapter—urbanization, cultural mixing across national/class/racial lines, technological innovation, and rising literacy—were preconditions for the novel, and all were at least to some degree present in imperial Spain in the seventeenth century and industrializing England in the eighteenth. In our own day, the

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