after the Revolution, and not until the mid-nineteenth century was there a flourishing periodical culture. Yet like newspapers, magazines reached far beyond urban elites. One study of New-York Magazine, a moderately sized monthly that counted George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay as readers, found that a significant percentage of the 370 subscribers in 1790 were shopkeepers and artisans—members of professions that had begun (or would soon begin) to experience proletarianization as a result of industrialization. Cartmen, laborers, and mariners also subscribed—a subscription cost $2.25 a year, at a time when the average workingman’s daily wage was $.50. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of wide readership concerns women, for while there were only seven who subscribed in their own names, there were numerous articles about or even specifically directed at women (such as “On the Choice of a Husband”), which indicated a wider readership.11
The most popular form of reading material for poor and working people was the chapbook. The term “chapbook” did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, and these small, inexpensive books—pamphlets, really—at first went by a variety of names: “small books,” “chapman’s books,” or “small histories.” They were usually between sixteen and thirty-two pages, and were illustrated with simple woodcuts. Most were imported from England, and since they didn’t go out of date, like almanacs, they were profitable for the publisher. Paper shortages made chapbooks difficult to manufacture in the colonies, although they were sometimes published on the backs of sheets recovered from pirated Spanish ships, or on paper made from old rags. Ironically, their very availability then makes them very rare today. They were so commonplace that few people bothered to preserve them, and so cheaply made that the vast majority were, in the words of one scholar, “read to pieces.” Most evidence of their popularity comes from accounting records, advertisements, and other retailers’ documents.12
The subjects of chapbooks ranged from religious instruction to light entertainment. The reputedly factual story of Dick Whittington, a poor English boy who moved from rags to riches in medieval London, was widely read in the colonies and was a forerunner of Horatio Alger tales. But an indigenous chapbook tradition took root very early. Captivity narratives, or accounts of experiences as prisoners of Indians, were extremely popular, and the most famous of these, Mary Rowlandson’s, was published in chapbook form in 1682. “Richard Rum” tales, seriocomic stories about temperance that were published throughout the eighteenth century, were also a largely American phenomenon. Eventually chapbooks became associated with children’s literature, and remained available in this form through the nineteenth century.13
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were two major ways for literary products to be distributed: shops and peddlers. The former were largely based in the cities and sold printed matter alongside a variety of other products; the latter carved out a marginal existence by visiting inland settlements. In early Massachusetts, such people were stigmatized and even barred from bookselling, but by the late eighteenth century hawkers had become an important source of gossip, political discussion, and reading material. Occasionally all three would intertwine. The astounding success of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary manifesto Common Sense—which sold 100,000 copies between January and March 1776, or one copy for every twenty-five people in the colonies—was at least partially the result of the peddlers’ distribution network. Peddlers also knew their market. In 1799, the itinerant Mason Locke (or “Parson”) Weems had enjoyed success selling a variety of books, mostly in the mid-Atlantic states. But it was not until he got the idea of writing a biography of George Washington—and convincing Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey to back it—that he really hit the jackpot. The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, published immediately after the president’s death in 1799 (the fifth edition of which included his apocryphal cherry tree story) became a huge hit and had gone through at least eighty-four printings by 1829. Weems also wrote successful biographies of Ben Franklin, William Penn, and Chief Justice John Marshall, although none could compare with the Washington biography.14
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, there arose another form of literary distribution that had powerfully democratic ramifications: the lending library. Once again, Benjamin Franklin was at the vanguard, when he established a subscription library in Philadelphia in 1731. This was a private affair that required participants to put up a large sum of money in order to gain lending privileges. But before long the elitist subscription library was supplemented by the institutional library, which lent books to members (such as schools) and, more importantly, by the circulating library, which rented books at rates affordable to a common laborer. This contributed dramatically to an expansion of literary culture: as more books became available, growing numbers of people read them, and publishers then increased production. Wealthy merchants referred to lending libraries as “slop-shops of literature.”15
Yet there remains the larger question of exactly who could read by 1800. Certainly, the mere proliferation of books contributed to the growth of literacy in colonial America by giving more people access to reading materials. But other factors were also at work, factors that need to be taken into account for a fuller understanding of the creation of a large reading audience by the early nineteenth century.
The question of literacy in colonial New England has been strenuously explored by literary scholars, but no one has been able to come up with decisive figures. In part this is because there is no widely shared definition of the term. Do we measure literacy by the ability to read a legal contract, a personal letter, or a spelling book? And even if we have a clear definition, not all historical subjects were willing to be counted—slaves and some white women, for example, surely concealed what they (often illegally) knew. Finally, there is the matter of what means we use to count literacy, and how reliable they are. One modern study, for example, uses New Englanders’ ability to sign wills with their initials as an index of the ability to read. Even by this standard, literacy was low: barely one-half of white men and less than one-third of white women could read in 1660. Some studies contend that using a broader range of documents would yield higher rates, while one argues that reading and writing were separate skills and that women were far more likely to be able to perform the former than the latter. All of this demonstrates the ongoing resistance of history to empirical quantification.16
Nevertheless, some plausible generalizations can be made. Whatever we consider the baseline of literacy, it is clear that New England led the colonies (and perhaps even the world). As early as 1642, Massachusetts passed a law requiring reading instruction for all children. Connecticut followed in 1650, New York in 1665, and Pennsylvania in 1683. Many of the instructors hired to fulfill this task were women. Nevertheless, for quite some time “all children” only included a fraction of young people, and usually meant boys. Even when girls were taught, their training was not taken as seriously as that of boys. Massachusetts added a writing requirement for boys in 1703, but it was not until 1771 that a similar provision was made for writing instruction for girls.17
Despite such inequities, reading instruction was greatly facilitated by the growing availability of teaching materials. At first, hornbooks (single pages tacked onto a wooden board) were used, as were psalters (books of psalms), primers, and bibles. These texts were gradually replaced by spellers, the most famous of which, Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, sold 24 million copies between 1783 and the author’s death in 1843, making it the best selling book in U.S. history before 1850. As these and other kinds of reading matter gave students an incentive to master the skill, literacy grew in the colonies and the fledgling United States in a manner unprecedented in the Western world. It has been estimated that by 1790 over 90 percent of the nation’s white population was literate.18
Again, the exact meaning of this statistic, if accurate, remains unclear, and also probably obscures the differential between men and women. On the other hand, some historians have noted the interest in—and official sanction of—female literacy that was part of the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” that emerged after the Revolution. According to this ideology, the success of the new nation rested on a virtuous, educated white male citizenry devoted to the common good, but
