Dickens and Paine were still talking about plain language as a issue that affected and interested the literate, privileged, property-owning classes -- a tiny triangle at the top of the social pyramid.

Something very different was coming. David Vincent, in The Rise of Mass Literacy In Europe, tells an amazing story about a quiet revolution in technology and education, both practical and spiritual, and in the end more powerful than Paine's great rhetoric or Swift's acid quill.

The literacy revolution had been brewing since the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. People had begun to teach one another to read the Bible, for themselves, in the common tongue.

Up to the mid-nineteenth century, the statistical measure of mass literacy in Europe was, according to Vincent, the simple ability of newlywed men and women to sign their names in the parish register, or of army recruits to sign their lives away, rather than making a mark, like an 'X'.

The austere, passionately devout, reformation Protestants of Sweden were way ahead of this standard. They had achieved, starting in the 1600s, the highest measurable literacy rate in the world. The authorities actually tested children on their knowledge of the catechism -- a very high standard of literacy for the times. Sweden also became the first country to declare universal literacy as a goal. [Let's welcome the Swedes in our midst. Bengt and Maria, are you here yet? Please say hello!]

Let us now leave the virtuous Scandinavians and get back to the general state of things in industrial England during the last half of the nineteenth century: Dickens's world.

In Europe, says David Vincent, working-class children (and those children worked shockingly hard) gained the right to a few years of state- or church- funded basic education, if the economy of their families could spare them.

And unlike Chaucer and Shakespeare, those children were taught to read and write the language they actually spoke. The age of mass literacy had begun.