"Ahr've goh' me lettahs!" protests Eliza Doolittle the flower girl indignantly, when Henry Higgins, the great "Professor of Phonetics" in Bernard Shaw's 1910 play Pygmalion suggests that Eliza might not be fit for his instruction.

She had to "have her letters" in order to transfer her understanding of what vowels sounded like as an inner city dialect speaker, so that she could then make herself sound like Henry, an Oxbridge dialect speaker. The fact that Eliza came pre-loaded with basic literacy was essential to the development of Eliza as a person, and of the play as a whole.

"It's "eow," and "g'ong" that keep her in her place,
Not her wretched clothes and dirty face,"

-- sings Henry in the popular musical version of this story. But both Higgins and Shaw were quite wrong. What distinguished Eliza from other street girls was not her accent, but three years or so of public education.

Vincent argues that the rise of mass literacy was about public education combined with the huge migration of people from Europe to North America, Australia, New Zealand and many other parts of the world. To that, add a technological change so simple that it will make you laugh.

The postage stamp.

In 1875, the Universal Postal Union was created under the Treaty of Berne. This treaty brought about a flat-rate, 'penny postage' system. Ordinary people -- families, lovers, businesses -- from Russia to Ireland, from Scandinavia to Egypt, and across the ocean to the new dominion of Canada and the American republic -- could now correspond with one another, regularly and cheaply, through the mails.

They did so with astonishing volume. We know this because the Treaty of Berne had also mandated a system for keeping records of letter- and postcard-writing. The Postal Union's records meant that literacy could now be defined as the ability to send a message and understand the answer. Against this higher standard, the rates of literacy skyrocketed. In 1876, about 2,500 Europeans wrote letters. By 1913, about 25,000 Europeans used the mails each year.⁽⁵⁾

Were these letter-writers "literate" in the way we define literacy today?