James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Yeah, I think, I mean, the key points there are the Education Act at the end of the 19th century, which really move us from a world in which only some people can read, and that's been growing throughout the 19th century, to a world in which literally everyone can read.
And this is like a major social transformation, like mass literacy is such a recent phenomenon.
You know, if you go back through the whole of history, literacy rate in ancient Rome, like 10%, less than that in the early Middle Ages, inching up by then.
It really is so recent that everybody has been able to read.
There's a great HG Wells quote where he talks about how the great divide between the reading and the non-reading population, like one of the fundamental divides in history, suddenly has become a minor difference in education levels.
And ordinary people who, without reading, had no access to information about politics, no access to information about their governments, no access to, like, how do you find out about science or culture or anything, suddenly...
they're as well informed about this stuff or have the potential to be as well informed about this stuff as their social betters.
And I think that is just such a... We're so used to literacy now and we're so used to it that everyone can read and we forget to find it remarkable.
There's like a major social transformation.
People suddenly have access to the same amounts of information plus, importantly, the same kinds of skills of criticism, analysis, abstraction that we know...
are totally vital.
I completely agree.
There's another great book, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose, which is a lot about literacy among working class people in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And it's exactly the phenomenon you're talking about.
This whole generation of...
working class Labour MPs, who are basically the first generation of working class legislators, almost in the history of the world.
That working class legislator had not been a category of person that existed in any society.
And what these people all talk about in their memoirs, and Jonathan Rose has tons of amazing quotations from them, is...
the importance of the library.
I was born in this desperate poverty among people who didn't read, and I was going to read Charles Dickens, John Milton, history, all kinds of stuff.
Showing 481–500 of 547 · page 25 of 28
← Previous
Next →