The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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percent and women’s about 30 percent in the latter half of the seventeenth century,
while another suggests the rates are about 5 percent lower. In the early eighteenth
century, the elite colonists are thought to have been entirely literate, while overall
rates for men rose to roughly 65-70 percent and rates for women may have actually
declined to about 27 percent. These rough estimates are based on signatures in
court records, so one may assume that ability to read is even higher, albeit
impossible to determine with any precision. 70
An increase in reading ability is also reflected in the number of books sold.
One estimate is that twenty thousand books were imported into Virginia alone in
the seventeenth century, and that perhaps one-third to one-half of all Chesapeake
settlers actually owned books. That pace picked up in the next century, with 40
percent of all books shipped from Britain to the colonies going to Virginia. 71
The expanding print culture combined with education appears to have
helped erode the social hierarchy. Our farmer’s son, Devereux Jarratt, is a good
example. Learning to read was difficult, but could be accomplished by a poor, yet
enterprising individual. He attended some neighborhood schools from age 8 or 9
until he was 12 years old. After that, he learned more reading, writing, and
mathematics on his own, until he found an elite patron for further studies. In the
process, he became an educated man and rose above his “poor farmer” roots. 72
Jarratt was not unique in learning to read and rising from his lowly social status. He
was part of what scholars allude to as a “printing revolution” in the colonies in the
69 Warner, Letters of the Republic, 14 and 31.
70 The higher numbers come from Darrett and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time Explicitus,
(New York: Norton, 1984), 165-170. The lower numbers are from Philip Alexander Bruce,
Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Putnam, 1910), 1: 450-459,
quoted in Rawson, “Contextual History of Print Culture in Virginia Society,” 54. He has perhaps
the best analysis of Virginia literacy, but the more concrete numbers come after the Revolution.
71 Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American
South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 6-7.
72 Jarratt, Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, 5-82. See also Rawson, 29-31.