Literacy and Age in Preindustrial England: Quantitative Evidence and Implications

Abstract

This paper presents multivariate estimates of the relationship between the ability to sign and a number of individual characteristics for two groups of English men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The results generally confirm those of other historians' studies of literacy in pre-industrial England, as they indicate that, with other things equal, men were more literate than women, and that there was a positive correlation between the ability to sign and both possession of a skilled occupation and residence in London. However the results also indicate the presence of a strong positive association between an individual's age and the ability to sign. Since those in the samples were all above the normal school-leaving age, this finding calls into question the assumption of some earlier investigations that the ability to sign was normally acquired in school, and points to the possible quantitative importance of informal education in pre-industrial England.