Literacy begins at home
September 22,
2006
Victoria
Neumark finds evidence of a mother's love engaging with
modern methods in a fascinating account of 18th-century
family learning
Reading Lessons from the 18th century: mothers, children
and texts
By Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles with Shirley Brice Heath
Pied Piper £30, £20 pbk
To order: www.piedpiperpublishing.com
Like charity, teaching children to read traditionally began
in the home. In England, medieval samplers and hornbooks,
slates and boards, were used in informal nursery education
and home schoolrooms for many centuries. Their content
followed a set pattern of alphabets and moral rhymes.
Between 1600 and 1800 - the great age of commerce and
politeness - literacy expanded and the kinds of texts
available became more varied and aids to teaching
diversified. Reading changed, too, from a largely public
act whereby heads of households read religious texts to
family and servants or friends read fiction aloud, to a
private affair - journals, letters and commonplace books
testified to a growth in literary introspection.
The goals associated with teaching reading became more
ambitious; alongside future functionality (legal documents,
prayer books, technical information) lessons also sought to
further children's creativity, to enter into thoughts,
feelings, modes of expression. More simply, as Tennyson put
it in The Princess: "Knowledge is now no more a fountain
sealed".
Between 1600 and 1750, literacy in England increased
rapidly; as this book says, estimates suggest literacy rose
from 25 per cent of the adult male population to 60 per
cent and from 25 to 40 per cent of the female population.
These figures are speculative because of uneven
geographical distribution - 66 per cent of adult females in
London read by 1720, for example - but the trend is
indisputable. By 1800 every town had a printer and a
bookshop. London had 122 circulating libraries and there
were 268 in the provinces.
Meanwhile, newspapers and theatres also rapidly gained in
popularity and publishing, so the stakes were higher for
the more educated strata in society: the polite gentleman
or woman had to demonstrate ever more sophisticated reading
and writing skills. Merely sounding out letters, as at a
village "dame school", which was what most of the
population got for a year or two, was now insufficient.
For Isaac Watts, who published The Art of Reading and
Writing in English in 1721, reading well meant making sense
of what was read. In 1744 John Newbery (motto: "Trade and
Plumb-Cake for ever. Huzza!") published A Little Pretty
Pocket-Book, widely acclaimed to be the first book just for
children. Full of illustrations, colourfully bound and with
accompanying book-related toys, it was the Harry Potter of
its day, not to mention the Mr Men, Bob the Builder and
Roald Dahl. It also signalled a switch from beating
children into learning to tempting them, a shift forcefully
marked by the publication of Emile by French philosopher
Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1762.
How did this broad picture play out in the home? In this
book, Arizpe and Styles reveal a key source of information:
an exquisite collection of home reading aids made by an
18th-century mother and country vicar's wife, Jane Johnson
(1706-1759), dating precisely to the time of Newbery's
publication, when Jane's first children were born. She had
five children; one died in infancy, the others learned to
read at home. In 1982 her flash cards, mobiles, alphabet
grids, blocks, games, paper chains, lists of homonyms and
synonyms, all intricately cut, glued, sewn and lettered by
Jane herself, were found in a hatbox.
In 1994, US academic Shirley Brice Heath began to analyse
this treasure.
Coincidentally, Cambridge lecturers Morag Styles and Victor
Watson were uncovering letters, diaries and albums by Jane
and her children. I first came across Jane's work (TES May
22, 1998) when Styles and Watson were still on the trail of
her chef d'oeuvre, A Very Pretty Story, never commercially
published but now in the Bodleian Library. Together these
papers form a fascinating record of the relationships and
aspirations embedded in a mother teaching her children to
read, explored in this book.
So, what reading lessons can we learn from the 18th
century? A Very Pretty Story is a moral tale written to
entertain and edify Jane's two oldest children. It is shot
through with wit and sharp social observation, keenly alive
to social injustice and pretension. Although no
professional author, Jane was a diligent reader (every
member of her family spent an estimated two hours a day
reading) and a direct communicator. Her methods are not
dissimilar to those used today, despite the linguistic and
social changes.
She knew, as Arizpe and Styles put it, that "learning to
read requires frivolity, storytelling and diversion as well
as diligence, rigour and repetition". All her home-made
resources set learning to read in the contexts of
conversation, storytelling, rhyme and moral lessons. Most
of all, though, they are coloured by unabashed maternal
love.
Then as now, that appears the best fertiliser for young
minds. Jane concluded one of her letters to her young son
Robert at school, shortly before she died, with the
touching wish, "Oh! Robert. Live for ever!"
Robert, in his turn, became a successful clergyman, father
of seven children and avid reader and writer. As an adult
he notes in his journal, amid reflections on landscape and
travel, "Nothing can amuse after leaving those we love."
Reading flourishes under such care.
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