Literacy is not a deus ex machina descending helpfully from the clouds to usher in a new, more just political order. At the beginning of the twentieth century Germany had been regarded as one of the most literate and civilized nations on earth and yet in the 1930s it descended into barbarism—hence the old cliché of the concentration camp guard relaxing with Goethe after a hard day of slaughter. Communications technologies are not the only factor (or frankly even the most important factor) shaping the exercise of power.
Many things can go wrong with a society and its politics: war, famine, pestilence, economic collapse, hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding and climate change. Literacy will not invariably preserve sanity and democracy in the face of a climate disaster or a devastating economic crisis. But, for all this, I believe that history shows us that print tends to help make a society more rational, more egalitarian and more democratic overall and in the long term.
It would probably be going too far to echo the opinion of the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, who is supposed to have proclaimed, with characteristic confidence, that to invent the printing press was to make democracy inevitable. But it is no accident that modern democracy as we know it today, in which all adults can vote regardless of sex or class, first arrived in the age of mass literacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was then that working-class movements, organized and made articulate through print, began to win concessions from their governments in the form of pensions, healthcare, workplace protections and, crucially, voting rights.
I believe that history shows us that print tends to help make a society more rational, more egalitarian and more democratic overall and in the long term.
It is worth re-emphasizing what a recent phenomenon a literate, politically informed public is. The eighteenth-century explosion of journals, newspapers and scandalous pamphlets is a marvelous story but it passed many laboring people by. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, the Victorian writer George Bourne was able to discover that his gardener had “first heard of the American Civil War some thirty years after Appomattox, when he learned that a relative was collecting a widow’s pension for her husband, who had fought and died in the conflict.” To many working people the world of democratic politics, far away in Westminster or Washington or Paris, existed almost beyond the realm of imagining. The future British Labour Party leader J.R. Clynes, born in 1869, reckoned that to the cotton spinners of Oldham, among whom he had grown up, “the rest of the world was a shadowy place merging into the boundaries of unreality.”
But by the end of the nineteenth century things had already begun to change. Newspaper readership exploded in the Victorian era. Already, between 1760 and 1820, the annual sales of London newspapers had increased from 9.5 to almost 30 million. And this was only the beginning: there were similar developments on the Continent. “The circulation of the daily press in Paris mushroomed from one million in 1870 to five million in 1910,” writes the historian Richard Evans. As newspapers spread and communications improved, the ‘public sphere’ expanded far beyond the middle class, to encompass laborers and factory workers: “The increase in literacy, the spread of education, the standardization of national languages, the extension of communications through railways, newspapers, magazines, mass-produced pamphlets and flysheets—all this drew the urban and rural masses into the wider political discourse,” Evans writes. This was vital fuel for democracy.
Democracy and rights were the explicit aim of many radical writers. In the early nineteenth century in Britain, a number of radical newspapers sprang up which aimed to equip their readers with the knowledge and ideas necessary to wrest power from their social betters. As the working-class polemicist and editor of The Poor Man’s Guardian James Bronterre O’Brien argued, “The knowledge most wanted by the people is a knowledge of their rights and duties as members of society, and the wrongs committed on them by those who have usurped the Government to their exclusion.”
According to the historian Kevin Williams, a typical radical paper of the 1830s might carry “accounts of trials of political activists, reports of public meetings, addresses of celebrated orators, articles on religious abuses, critiques of parliamentary debates, correspondence from readers.” Newspapers not only informed their readers; they aimed to help them organize politically. As well as articles, they announced collections for important causes alongside all manner of political “meetings, events and occasions.”
Newspapers and books also joined the dots between apparently disconnected events and items of gossip, helping readers to see their problems in abstract, systemic and political terms. As Williams explains, the pioneering working-class journalist William Cobbett liked to tell his readers that their enemy was a ‘two-headed monster’ which he called ‘The Thing.’ Its heads were “the ‘old corruption,’ the privileges of the Church and State, which had a deep-seated hatred for the poor, and the ‘war-profiteers, the merchants and bankers’ who placed intolerable burdens on the poor labourers of Britain.” “Only reform of Parliament,” Cobbett argued, “could defeat the monster.”
Many historians are prone to view the radical press of the early nineteenth century with dewy-eyed admiration and to deplore the later erosion of standards as newspapers grew more commercial and sensationalist. As always, literacy should not be over-romanticized. Intellectuals were not being completely absurd when they recoiled in dismay from the trashiness of newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. To read the popular press of the time is not invariably to be impressed by the sober and enlightened attitude of that era’s journalists. Examining an issue of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World from 1897, one historian turned up such disappointingly unimproving items as “Baby Elephants at School,” “Fire-Horse Saves a Child’s Life. With a Girl Nesting at His Feet He Refused to Respond to Gong’s Call” and “Her Dream Came True. Mrs Mueller Had Warning in Her Sleep that Her Place Would Be Robbed.” Pulitzer aimed to publish “what is original, distinctive, dramatic, romantic, thrilling, unique, curious, quaint, humorous, odd, apt to be talked about.”
But the dissemination of even sensationalized knowledge could be vital for the political participation of ordinary people. The World ’s commercial aspirations were not at all at odds with Pulitzer’s aim to “expose all fraud and sham,” “fight all public evils” and “battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” His was a crusading paper. The World campaigned on all manner of social issues: infant deaths caused by contaminated milk, conditions in mental hospitals (one reporter was told she could have a job at the paper on the condition she successfully infiltrated an insane asylum), more progressive taxation.
An increasingly divided, polarized and poorly informed public lacks the information necessary to hold its leaders to account. Today, all too many of us risk becoming the prey of political tricksters and knaves.
In Britain, George Bourne observed first-hand the importance of the growing influence of even downmarket newspapers in rural communities in the early twentieth century. “Thanks to the cheap press,” he wrote, “ideas and information about the whole world are finding their way into the cottages of the valley.” For Bourne,
newspapers, besides giving information, encourage an acceptance of non-parochial views. The reader of them is taken into the public confidence. Instead of a narrow village tradition, national opinions are at his disposal, and he is helped to see, as it were from the outside, the general aspect of questions which, but for the papers, he would only know by his individual experience from the inside.
This meant, for instance, that a laborer might begin to understand that “unemployment is a world-wide evil, which spreads like an infectious disease, and may be treated accordingly.” As Jonathan Rose comments: “Coal-heavers could now be surprisingly knowledgeable about working conditions, wages, royalties, transport, and trade unionism in the mining industry.” For as well as circulating information, print spread habits of analytic thought. As Bourne noticed, “all unawares, the people fall into the momentous habit of thinking about abstract ideas which would have been beyond the range of their forefathers’ intellectual power.”
In the twentieth century many national newspapers sold millions of copies every day. In 1937, 90 per cent of Americans described themselves as regular newspaper readers. There were morning newspapers, evening newspapers, weekly newspapers, specialist newspapers and local newspapers. At one point, seventeen separate newspapers covered New York alone. Six were dedicated to Chicago. Never had information been more widely diffused among ordinary people. In 1942, Britain’s Mass-Observation program found that “the upper working classes did not lag too far behind the middle class in their ability to name government ministers.” They had come a long way from the relatives of J. R. Clynes for whom the wider world was ‘shadowy’ and unknowable, and an even longer way from the Roman plebs we encountered in Chapter Two who believed their leader was the mythical Agamemnon.
The relationship between reading and democracy is not direct or simple. It has never been the case that a nation of responsible citizens has rushed down to breakfast ready to apply its critical and literate intelligence to detailed newspaper reports of last night’s debate in Parliament or Congress before dashing off a letter to the local MP or Representative. But the story of twentieth-century democracy from Watergate to the Pentagon Papers is inconceivable without print. To read even a downmarket newspaper, especially one from the mid-twentieth century before newspapers were compelled to compete with TV, is often to be surprised at the serious-mindedness of its journalism.
Tabloid newspapers, for all their much-lamented faults, report on politics in depth, draw attention to obscure foreign conflicts, carry on investigative journalism and lead campaigns to overturn injustices. As late as the early 1970s, the British tabloid the Daily Mirror ran a four-page supplement ‘Mirrorscope,’ which aimed to brief its working-class readers on “international affairs, politics, industry, science, the arts and business.” And even if mass literacy did not turn every citizen into an eager breakfast-time browser of the latest deliberations of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, it gave the more ambitious members of the working class a chance to acquire the knowledge and critical-thinking skills necessary to effectively advocate for their interests. Highly literate working men and women were almost always in the vanguard of campaigns for social and democratic change. The memoirs of twentieth-century working-class politicians across the Western world echo with testimonies to the power of words.
“Ideas are power,” argued the union activist John Brophy, who had begun working in Pennsylvania’s coal mines at the age of twelve. Education and reading were required to produce the “leaders, the tacticians [and] the philosophers” of the labor movement. In Britain, J. R. Clynes reckoned that words were the “mighty levers whereby the power of the whole world could be more evenly and fairly distributed for the benefit of my kind.” In his days working in a factory he saved up his scanty income to buy books—first a dictionary, then a Bible, followed by Shakespeare’s plays and the essays of Francis Bacon.
These men understood that a population that does not read will find itself ripe for exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. Charles Duncan was another of the pioneering and highly literate Labour politicians of the early twentieth century who “invested his spare cash in books, promoted the creation of public libraries, and urged workers to read the ancient classics.” He believed that “the unread man has a narrow outlook, and easily goes astray; he is the sport of political tricksters and the tool for all knaves.” In the screen age, inequalities of knowledge we once thought we had banished are returning. An increasingly divided, polarized and poorly informed public lacks the information necessary to hold its leaders to account. Today, all too many of us risk becoming the prey of political tricksters and knaves.
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From The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society by James Marriott. Copyright © 2026. Published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.