This article explores the place of working-class women in written culture in early nineteenth-century France. The study relies on a small corpus of autobiographies by women from the popular classes – factory workers, daughters of craftsmen, and rural inhabitants – which shed light on their reading practices. Although these practices were often connected to religion, they also reveal the strong appeal that literature held for these women. These texts invite us to rethink the ways in which working-class women actually accessed the written world.
Abstract This article investigates regional and gender disparities in literacy in the eighteenth-century countryside of the Southern Low Countries, comparing the Campine area and the Scheldt Polder region. We explore the socioeconomic drivers behind divergent literacy rates by drawing on a rich combination of quantitative and qualitative sources – including marriage certificates, probate inventories, and school enrolment data. Contrary to prevailing narratives of widespread illiteracy in Catholic rural regions, the Campine area displayed unexpectedly high levels of literacy, particularly among women. The analysis reveals that this disparity cannot be attributed solely to the presence of schools but must also be understood through the lens of labour market structures and gendered economic roles. The study shows that in the Campine region, smallholder farming and especially dairy production created commercial incentives for women to invest in basic literacy skills, unlike the more unequal, arable farming-based economy of the Scheldt polders. By integrating both macro-level data and micro-historical insights, the article challenges traditional assumptions about rural education and highlights the critical role of gendered economic agency in shaping literacy outcomes.
Joseph Jenkins emigrated to Australia from his native Wales in 1869. He worked as an itinerant agricultural worker in the Ballarat and Castlemaine area of Victoria before returning to Wales in 1894. For almost sixty years, he assiduously maintained a diary, which probably comprised fifty-eight volumes in all. This article examines the twenty-five annual volumes that survive for his Australian years. The article investigates Jenkins's phenomenal sequence of diaries in order to understand the literary culture of a lower-class poet (in Welsh) and writer. I explore Jenkins's reading and his epistolary activity, as well as the dynamics of his diaries, to demonstrate the purpose and function of the written word in the life of the labourer commonly known as "The Welsh Swagman". Reading and writing preserved a connection with his distant homeland and with Welsh culture. He was an "intensive" reader, repeatedly turning to a small number of religious texts. His diary serves as an example of "ordinary writings" - the raw materials of a new history from below, one that recognizes the importance of individual experience and reveals the often-underestimated textual practices of the subordinate classes.
This article explores some of the most prevalent reading practices among the semi-literate strata of late nineteenth-century Russian society. Visual culture, rooted in the circulation of lubki - popular prints combining images and brief captions - paved the way for the widespread emergence of illustrated weeklies, which, inspired by analogous European magazines, began to appear in the 1870s. These periodicals skilfully drew on their readers' visual literacy, systematically integrating images with concise texts, and attracting new categories of readers through a rich array of illustrated supplements. Particular attention is given to the magazine The Motherland (1879-1917), which explicitly positioned itself as a tool of cultural mediation. The Motherland sought to prepare its readers for more sophisticated forms of reading, serving as a bridge between predominantly visual consumption and textual engagement. In this way, the magazine contributed both to the expansion of the reading public and to the transformation of reading practices, while also fostering a new sense of civic and cultural awareness among Russian working-class readers.
In the late 1830s, the Northern Star emerged, for a time, as the most widely circulated of all provincial newspapers in Britain. In recent years, historians and literary scholars have begun to explore an important question: how did Chartist readers read the Northern Star? Of all the different ways of reading the Star, one of the most well-documented and revealing was the group reading experience - an "underrepresented" area in the history of reading. Friends and neighbours or workmates clubbed together to buy a shared copy (at 4 & half;d.); after selecting a reader, they listened as a group to an oral reading of that week's issue and took part, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, in a far-ranging and often heated discussion of its contents. Readers and listeners engaged with a variety of different texts: the weekly letter from Feargus O'Connor, Chartist and parliamentary speeches and news, letters from Chartist prisoners, and financial accounts of the National Charter Association. Grounded in the practices and problems of working-class life, these oral and collective readings point to the interplay of print and oral cultures and to the crucial roles of sociability and discussion for Chartist listeners and readers.
