Literacy and the Social Worlds of Writing in the Scottish Atlantic: 1750-1800
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Literacy and the Social Worlds of Writing in the Scottish Atlantic: 1750-1800 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Shawn Casey Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: Harvey J. Graff, Advisor David A. Brewer Kay Halasek Beverly J. Moss Copyright by Shawn Casey 2012 Abstract This project tracks the rhetorical status of writing as attitudes toward literacy changed in the second-half of the eighteenth century. During this period, vernacular literacy in English became a defining element for many different social groups across the Atlantic world. Two key assumptions guide the research. First, that literacy becomes rhetorical, acquires persuasive meaning, only in the context of a larger discourse on reading and writing. And second, that individual actors and agents generate, promote, and distribute multiple, and sometimes conflicting, rhetorics of literacy as a means of accessing the standards, expectations, and norms of that broader literacy discourse. To elucidate these points, this project identifies three distinct, but connected locations in the Atlantic network: Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and London. Each chapter explores the processes, institutions, and individual writers associated with the rhetoric of literacy at each location. Significantly, each chapter foregrounds the tendency of literacy rhetoric to become associated with a public figure. So, Chapter Two describes the career of Lord Kames, Henry Home; Chapter Three considers Benjamin Franklin’s close association with the social, educational, and print-based institutions of literacy in Philadelphia; and Chapter Four explores the ideal of the authority of both London and the book trade over English literacy in the lexicographical writings of Samuel Johnson. Each chapter also considers how the literacy rhetorics associated with these public figures and their contemporaries responded to the exigencies of changing ideals of social interaction, ii economic development, and national identity. The project offers new perspectives on how literacy, and the rhetorics that promote and restrict literacy, transformed transatlantic literacy discourses. iii Acknowledgments This project has benefited from the attention and support of faculty, staff, and students in The Ohio State University’s English Department; Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Program; Literacy Studies @ OSU Initiative; and Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. The English Department provided early support for my research through the Mary Stewart Lundie Vorman Scholarship for Scottish Studies. An Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship and the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing Research Award made it possible for me to travel to London and Edinburgh to conduct research. From the beginning, the faculty of my dissertation committee, David Brewer, Kay Halasek, and Beverly Moss, and especially my tireless advisor Harvey Graff, have provided unfailing support, insightful forbearance, and constructive feedback and criticism. I am grateful to the committee, and especially to Harvey, for the guidance. Finally, a project as wide-ranging and long-lasting as this does not reach completion without a considerable amount of reckless permissiveness. For this, I credit the encouragement of my friends, my partner, and my family, but especially my parents, who dropped me off at college many years ago with the advice: “Study what you like.” I haven’t stopped. iv Vita 1992....................................................Cardinal Ritter High School 1996....................................................B.A. Antioch College 2001....................................................M.A. University of Chicago 2004-2010 ..........................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University 2006....................................................M.A. The Ohio State University 2009-2010 ..........................................Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship, The Ohio State University Summer 2010 .....................................Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship, The Ohio State University Summer 2010 .....................................Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing Research Award, The Ohio State University 2010-Present ......................................Instructor, Columbus State Community College Fields of Study Major Field: English v Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................iv Vita .........................................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: The Meaning of Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic ............................1 Chapter 2: Literacy in Edinburgh: The Scottish Enlightenment ............................................47 Chapter 3: English Literacy in Philadelphia ..........................................................................128 Chapter 4: London and the Authority of Print .......................................................................197 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................269 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................................280 vi Chapter 1: The Meaning of Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic By many accounts, modern English literacy was invented in the eighteenth century. Between the English Civil War and the French and American Revolutions, literacy shed its association with elite, scholastic, and religious discourses and became more vernacular, commercial, and secular. A new literacy discourse arose to describe the value and purpose of new literacy practices, but the elite, scholastic, and religious uses and meanings of literacy were only partially subsumed by the new modern literacy. Standards and institutions associated with the old order persisted across the Atlantic world. This gave rise to a field of conflict that called forth persuasive efforts to describe, define, and unify the many practices and meanings associated with reading and writing. Throughout the English Atlantic world, popular writers offered commentary on the changing meanings of literacy. These writers contributed to the development of novel formulations for justifying or decrying the evolving purposes, promises, and threats associated with the spread of vernacular reading and writing. The rhetorical approach taken by the most popular literacy commentators of the day incorporated new approaches to audiences, texts, and modes of delivery and distribution that helped shape the new literacy discourse for the future. These rhetorical configurations were amalgamated in the nineteenth-century term, “literacy”. In the eighteenth century, individuals and populations were either literate, or “lettered” in the sense of the Renaissance definition of classical learning, or, more often “illiterate”, 1 meaning not-learned, even when possessing the ability to read and write.1 Yet, as vernacular literacy spread, and, most important for this project, as claims for social and economic “improvement” were made in the name of vernacular reading and writing, the many different uses and meanings associated with a diversity of reading and writing practices began to accelerate, shift, and converge. This process demonstrated characteristics of both continuity and change. The formulations that allowed these diverse cultural activities to be imagined as a unified category did not abandon the traditional meanings associated with the many different forms of reading and writing practiced before the eighteenth century. Instead, the constellation of modern literacy discourses, and the rhetorical acts that helped shape it, drew on long traditions of religious, academic, and elite reading and writing practices to help account for the social, economic, and cultural changes that came to be associated with literacy. The reasons for these changes in how the transatlantic Anglophone culture viewed reading and writing are multiple. The new meanings associated with literacy reflect an attempt to respond to these contradictions. As the examples in this study illustrate, the new literacy discourses were increasingly monomodal, focused on not just reading and writing but specifically models of reading and writing derived from print modalities. The new rhetoric of print literacy was distributed commercially through the publishing trade and was therefore less closely associated with religious or academic institutions and communities. These new discourses were “popular” in the sense that major transatlantic figures, celebrity literati and “men of letters”, came to represent the highest achievements in literacy possible in popular print outlets. In reality, a much wider portion of the 1 See “Literacy” and “Literate”, Oxford English Dictionary. Lord Chesterfield defined illiteracy as 2 population used reading and writing for many more diverse purposes than these popular images of literacy permitted. Nevertheless, the new rhetoric of literacy persisted and spread thanks to expanding