Reformers, Literacy, and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement

p r e fa c e Reformers, Literacy, and the Canadian Reading Camp MovementAs an identification of a skill increasingly deemed necessary to society, the term "literacy" and the related term "illiteracy" came to name in the nineteenth century what were perceived as new social problems that required attention.As Raymond Williams points out in his classic account of "keywords" in culture and society, "literacy" emerged in English in the late nineteenth century as a term "to express the achievement and possession of what were increasingly seen as general and necessary skills."Formerly denoted by the word "literature," this meaning required a word of its own once "literature" came to acquire its specialized modern sense as "creative" or "imaginative" work.As Harvey J. Graff's seminal work on literacy demonstrates, the longstanding association of literacy with social and economic progress and its use as a "measure of modernity" constitutes a powerful "literacy myth" in Western societies.This myth, embedded in post-Enlightenment social thought, assumed a shape particular to early twentieth-century Canada in relation to the combined but nonetheless dissensual forces of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century utilitarianism and cultural idealism, which privileged the functional uses of literacy for their ability to engender individual and social progress, on the one hand, and reading as a source of spiritual and aesthetic encounter, on the other. 1 While the "literacy myth" is pervasive, it is nonetheless true that the attainment of mass literacy in industrializing, nineteenth-century Britain contributed significantly to existing class tensions.Education, the influence of evangelical and utilitarian ideologies, and changes in the book and periodical trades made literacy a mass phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain; however, as Richard Altick points out xvi Preface in his history of the development of Britain's "mass reading public," the spread of literacy in early-nineteenth-century Britain was enmeshed in the class conflict produced by the emergence of industrial capitalism.As the dominant classes "conceded it was impossible to prevent the lower ranks from reading, they embarked on a long campaign to ensure that through the press the masses of people would be induced to help preserve the status quo and bulwark the security and prosperity of the particular sort of national life that they, its upper-and middle-class rulers, cherished."Books and the ability to read them were championed by evangelicals and utilitarians alike as a means of producing, in the former case, better Christians, and in the latter case, better workers, but both of these groups insisted that the emerging lower middle class should have highly circumscribed and directed engagements with print.Both also agreed that guided education could smother working-class discontent and radicalism.The well-known work of Terry Eagleton on the "rise of English" in nineteenth-century Britain adds another layer to Altick's analysis insofar as it narrows in on the particular ways that middle-class reformers such as Matthew Arnold viewed literature in the English vernacular, in particular, as a "humanizing" antidote to "political bigotry and ideological extremism" in the context of religion's declining influence.The prophylactic functions of books, literacy, and, finally, literature, are thus deeply rooted in the emergence of industrial capitalism and the class conflict and consciousness it engendered.2 British North Americans were also largely literate by the beginning of the twentieth century.Provisions for public education in both Canada West and Canada East in the decade preceding Confederation led to rising literacy levels (measured by the ability to sign one's name).As measured by the 1861 census in Canada West, urban, anglophone Protestants in Hamilton had one of the highest literacy levels in the western world.By the 1870s, literacy was a "majority phenomenon" in Quebec, and Ontario recorded almost full literacy by the end of the nineteenth century; according to the census, nearly full literacy had been achieved in Canada by 1921. 3 The provision of mass elementary education in Ontario preceded industrialization, which paved the way for a transition to industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was relatively peaceful compared with England's.Shaped by the views of Egerton Ryerson, Ontario's public schools promoted "discipline, moral values, and the 'training in being trained' which mattered most in the preparation of a modern industrial

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