Dyslexia

Front matter

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Part One «© Foundations

Dyslexia Discovered: Word-Blindness, Victorian Medicine, and Education (1877-1917) 15

Dyslexia Goes Global: Psychology, Childhood, and Trans-Atlanticism (1925-48) 36

PART TWO œ EVIDENCE

Dyslexia Discussed: The Foundation and Work of the Word Blind Centre (1962-72) 63

Researching Dyslexia: From the Discrepancy Definition to Cognitive Neuroscience (1964—2009) 86

PART THREE * RECOGNITION: THE EXAMPLE OF BRITIAN Tackling Dyslexia: Class, Gender, and the Construction of a Dyslexia Infrastructure (1962-97) 111

Dyslexia Legislated: Literacy, Policy, and the Achievement of Official Status (1962-2010) 134 viii Contents

PART FOUR ¢ LEGACIES 7 Dyslexia Today and Tomorrow: Discourses of Dyslexia in the Twenty-First Century 163

Conclusion 183

Timeline: Fifty Key Dates 185 Notes 189

Index 253

Preface

It’s sometimes said that there are two common opinions of dyslexia, held by two distinct groups. For group one, who either have dyslexia themselves or know a family member with the condition, dyslexia and its attendant challenges are recognised without equivocation. For group two, who do not have this first-hand experience, dyslexia is a less tangible entity; it may even be an example of the over-medicalization of contemporary society (‘In my day, you just had trouble with reading!’). These are stereotypes, of course, but they possess some truth. Much of the campaign for dyslexia’s political and societal recognition has been led by those with dyslexia in their families. The strongest views on dyslexia are often (but not always) expressed by those who feel that they or someone they love have been particularly affected by dyslexia.

Given this, it’s perhaps valuable to note our personal, as well as professional, associations with dyslexia. Both authors of this book first encountered dyslexia via a family member — our brothers. Maggie, growing up in the north of England during the 1960s, remembers vividly her mother’s struggle to get her younger brother’s dyslexia recognized, and the distress that it caused when neither recognition nor help was forthcoming. Instead, her mother was told that she should not expect her son to be as clever as his sister. In fact, he was bright, but in a very different way to his sister; he became a property developer, and she went on to academe and clinical practice. Philip, growing up in North London in the 1990s, was also introduced to dyslexia via the efforts of his parents to find support for his brother. Because

J Preface of the advocacy campaigns charted in this book, support was more forthcoming, but there were still challenges in obtaining (and maintaining) recognition from the various professionals encountered during his education.

Despite these personal connections, we have striven here to present a balanced history, which highlights not only the accomplishments of, for example, dyslexia advocacy campaigns, but also the recurring critiques of dyslexia that continue to mark discourses around the condition. This book has undoubtedly been informed by the lived experiences of dyslexia in our families, but our first duty has been to telling a fair and thorough history of dyslexia. There is plenty of emotion on both sides of the ‘dyslexia debate’ — understandably so — and we have sought here to move past some of this clamour.

We have one central ambition for the book: that it will prevent certain mistakes of the past from being repeated. Whether one favours the term ‘dyslexia’ or not — and we live in an age where ‘labels’ are being challenged and re-evaluated as never before — the difficulties presented in this book are real, and the support provided for them has undoubtedly improved lives. While the dyslexia debate seems set to rumble on, we hope that, through this book, readers may gain a better understanding of the different sides of dyslexia’s fascinating story.

Philip Kirby and Margaret J. Snowling London and Oxford

Acknowledgements

This project has been a long time in the making, and any list of acknowledgements can only be partial. At the University of Oxford, thank you to William Whyte, Kate Nation, Denise Cripps, Robert Evans, and Kieran Fitzpatrick — the Dyslexia Archive team. Steve Chinn was key to getting this project started. Robert Evans and Uta Frith provided careful and comprehensive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Lea-Sophie Steingriiber kindly provided translations of original sources in German. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Richard Baggaley deserves recognition for getting this book off the ground. Scott Howard was our excellent copy editor. Emily LeGrand put together a comprehensive index at very short notice. Thank you to the external reviewers of the manuscript for their helpful and detailed comments. The Oxford Dyslexia Archive project that inspired this book was funded by the Wellcome Trust (no. 105605/Z/14/Z) and a grant from St John’s College, Oxford. Special thanks, of course, go to our interviewees, whose oral interviews form the basis of the archive, and to those who attended two steering conferences in Oxford in 2017 and 2019, which helped to keep the project on track. Naturally, any mistakes that remain, despite the generous assistance of everyone above, are the authors’.

I felt the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.

— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Introduction

What’s in a Word? Dyslexia in Historical Perspective

Dyslexia is in the news again. A glance at recent headlines from around the world reveals myriad articles about the condition — including the efficacy of online dyslexia support in the wake of the cov1p-19 pandemic, the story of a leading British politician (Penny Mordaunt, a former defence secretary) who recently ‘came out’ with dyslexia, and the experiences of an American musician recording the audiobook of her latest biography (‘This was the first time I’ve read out loud without hesitation’ ).' The popularity of the topic is unsurprising: about 10 per cent of people have some degree of dyslexia and, even for those not dyslexic, most will know someone who is.* Famous celebrities who have disclosed dyslexia include the entrepreneur Richard Branson; the chef Jamie Oliver; the actors Keira Knightley, Jim Carrey, and Tom Cruise; and the musicians Noel Gallagher, Tony Bennett, and Jessica Simpson (she of the audiobook recording above).

Dyslexia is the most common specific learning difficulty globally, and probably the best understood.’ In 2009, the British Rose review of dyslexia and other literacy difficulties, prepared at the request of the then Department for Children, Schools and Families (now the Department for Education), provided a comprehensive working definition of dyslexia summarising the latest international research. Like all definitions of dyslexia, the Rose description is not without debate. However, it provides a useful starting point for this book, capturing the main difficulties faced by those with poor literacy, even if exact manifestations of dyslexia differ between individuals. In the Rose definition, prepared by the review’s Expert Advisory Group:

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Characteristic features of dyslexia are difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed. Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities. It is best thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, and there are no clear cut-off points. Co-occurring difficulties may be seen in aspects of language, motor co-ordination, mental calculation, concentration and personal organisation, but these are not, by themselves, markers of dyslexia. A good indication of the severity and persistence of dyslexic difficulties can be gained by examining how the individual responds or has responded to well-founded intervention.‘

But where did dyslexia come from? Who has been responsible for shifting dyslexia from a niche concern of a select group of doctors in the 1870s, when it was called ‘word-blindness’ (Wortblindheit, by its early German researchers), to the internationally recognised condition that it is today? What can the history of dyslexia tell us about how social groups achieve, and have achieved, political recognition for their causes?

This book tells the story of dyslexia through the records of the Oxford Dyslexia Archive, based at St John’s College, Oxford. The Oxford Dyslexia Archive includes the world’s largest collection of oral histories of dyslexia pioneers — including the first scientists to identify dyslexia in its modern form, the founders of some of the first dyslexia schools, and the politicians who offered initial political recognition of dyslexia in Britain and elsewhere. These oral histories are used here to explore, in particular, dyslexia’s history from the 1950s, much of which has gone unrecorded. The archive also contains the records of leading dyslexia advocacy, research, and teaching organisations, providing a behind-the-scenes look at how dyslexia became embedded — politically, culturally, and socially — in high-income societies, including Britain, during the twentieth century. These records include the revealing, often touching, accounts of children, born across the last one hundred years, who have struggled with a condition that for a prolonged period society refused to recognise and possessed little understanding of.

Introduction: Dyslexia in Historical Perspective 5

While the British story of dyslexia is a thread that runs through the book, this story is placed in international context. It was research by British physicians in the Victorian era, inspired by German colleagues, which laid down many of the current tenets of dyslexia’s definition. It was research, advocacy, and teaching in London, the Midlands, and Wales, beginning in the late 1950s, that influenced similar work across the world. However, this work intersected with that of teachers, researchers, and campaigners around the world, especially in the United States, but also Canada, Denmark, and France, amongst others. To date, little is known about the people, in Britain and elsewhere, who were behind this work: people whose stories are crucial not only for explaining how the awareness and understanding of dyslexia got where it is today, but also for suggesting where dyslexia might be headed.

A Brief History of Dyslexia

The first reference to dyslexia (as ‘word-blindness’) was made in 1877 by the German physician Adolph Kussmaul.’ Six years later, the word ‘dyslexia’ was coined by his contemporary and countryman, Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist based in Stuttgart, who published the first book-length treatment of the subject in 1887.° In the years that followed, the research of these two Germans was continued by a series of British physicians, whose work laid the foundations for later discussion of the condition in the United States and elsewhere. James Kerr, James Hinshelwood, and William Pringle Morgan were the prominent names in Britain at this time, and their stories — and the stories of their patients — provide a fascinating insight into why dyslexia emerged when it did, and how the first (faint) definitional lines were drawn around this new medical condition in the late nineteenth century.’

From the late 1910s to the early 1950s, there was a lull in British discussions of dyslexia — in part, as the wars between Britain and Germany channelled medical and psychological research elsewhere — until the dawn of what might be called dyslexia’s ‘golden age’ from the late 1950s. In Britain, this saw the creation of the Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children in 1962, one of the first teaching-research centres in the world focused on dyslexia, followed by a series of parent-led organisations, including the British

Dyslexia Association (BDA ) and the Dyslexia Institute in 1972. In substantial part, these emulated the model of the Orton Society in the United States, formalised in 1949 as one of the world’s first organisations dedicated to better understanding of dyslexia.’

During the same period (the 1960s—70s), research on the condition expanded, with population studies of children’s educational attainment in the Isle of Wight and London (1964-74), led by the psychiatrist Michael Rutter and the psychologist William Yule, proving especially influential. In the United States and elsewhere, researchers such as Frank Vellutino began to devote serious and sustained attention to dyslexia. Gradually, a series of dyslexia advocacy organisations, drawing on this growing evidence base of research, effected political recognition of dyslexia, with substantial state support rolling out from the 1990s onward, albeit proceeding at different rates in different countries. Today, dyslexia recognition has reached something of a peak in high-income countries, but cuts to funding for special educational needs, and the recurrent ‘dyslexia debate’ in which the very existence of dyslexia is disputed, suggest possible storms on the horizon.’

The Aims of This Book

Despite the prevalence of the condition, the history of dyslexia has attracted little scholarly attention. As of 2020, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) mentioned dyslexia in just fifteen of over 75,000 entries on leading figures of British social and political history, with only two entries related to dyslexia specialists — a remarkably small number given the proportion of people affected by dyslexia. The majority of published work on dyslexia’s history has come from those involved in this history themselves, including researchers, campaigners, and teachers, who have authored their personal reflections." The small amount of research on the history of the condition has focused on specific periods, such as dyslexia’s emergence during the late-Victorian era, or offered succinct sketches of dyslexia’s longer trajectory.” This body of work takes the first steps in understanding aspects of dyslexia’s past — and is drawn upon throughout this book — but as yet, there has been no comprehensive account of dyslexia’s history." This book puts dyslexia on the map, joining historical accounts of other dif-

Introduction: Dyslexia in Historical Perspective 7 ficulties that affect learning, and can affect self-esteem, such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

As such, the book has two central aims, empirical and theoretical. First, it seeks to add dyslexia to the broader history of learning difficulties and disabilities, recording the personal recollections of those who have witnessed and contributed to dyslexia’s history over the past sixty years. As we will show, dyslexia has a fascinating history that tells us much about Western social and political history from the Victorian period onward, and about how literacy has expanded across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, who this expansion has left behind, and how those with dyslexia and their advocates have sought to adapt.

Second, through the history of dyslexia, this book reflects on how social change is accomplished. Specifically, it seeks to reiterate the importance of individual agency to theories of social change. The main historical work on dyslexia to date has theorised its emergence as part of larger, capital-driven societal shifts in the West, including the expansion of literacy and compulsory education, and hence the creation of a more economically productive workforce. In the formulation of the sociologist Tom Campbell, ‘Literacy became central to [economic] production [in the early twentieth century], and dyslexia came to describe a difficulty with a key characteristic of the newly dominant style of labouring in the West’. While structural changes like this have certainly been important in highlighting the problem of dyslexia, especially in schooling, and in creating the contexts for change, they do not alone explain dyslexia’s emergence. The grassroots work of dyslexia advocates, teachers, and researchers, seeking to achieve dedicated state support for people with dyslexia, has also been crucial in bringing dyslexia to societal attention.

Conceptualising Dyslexia and Its History

While the Rose report provides a working definition of dyslexia and its common characteristics, the instability of the term ‘dyslexia’ and the contingency of dyslexia’s emergence are key elements of the dyslexia story. To this end, it is important for any account of dyslexia to reflect on how the condition is to be conceptualised. Providing a point of approach is the literature of disability studies, the discipline that has considered in greatest depth the conceptualisation of physical and cognitive differences, and which informs the understanding of dyslexia in this book.

In disability studies, a key idea is the social model of disability. Through this lens, ‘disability, meaning any kind of physical or cognitive difference from a commonly understood norm, is considered a socially produced and conditioned entity. ‘At its core, the social model questions the parameters of normalcy, including who defines and enforces those borders, and most crucially the repercussions for those both inside and outside of these culturally drawn and fluctuating lines.’° Thus, the social model challenges ‘medical’ models of ‘disability, which see difference as rooted in the body of the individual. Instead, to use a conventional example from the discipline, an individual who uses spectacles is disabled not by a particular visual impairment, but by the lack of, for example, books available in an accessible print. In this way, disability studies (the field) is reticent about medicalising physical or cognitive differences, preferring instead to differentiate between impairment (the bodily difference) and disability (the ways in which this impairment disables because of societal structures and conventions).”

Dyslexia is especially amenable to the social model of disability, being a difficulty associated principally with a social product: literacy. In approaches to dyslexia that have employed the social model, those with dyslexia are disabled not by their own personal difficulties with reading or writing, but by the almost universal requirement in high-income countries for certain levels of literacy to obtain educational and career success.” Thus, for the disability studies scholar Craig Collinson, ‘we should not let “dyslexia” disguise or cloak Lexism [discrimination against those with dyslexia], which is the real issue.” At one extreme of this perspective, the ‘biologizing’ of dyslexia has been construed as part of an overly medical agenda to separate those with dyslexia from other ‘normal’ learners, to the detriment of the former.”

The social model of disability does much to show how society frames, and, in part, produces, ‘conditions like dyslexia. However, there are limits to the application of the social model to dyslexia, in isolation. Perhaps the main limitation of the social model is that, in interpreting the difference between those with and without dyslexia from a social perspective, it does not fully address the views and understandings of those with dyslexia them-

Introduction: Dyslexia in Historical Perspective 9 selves. As this book explores, it has often been those with dyslexia, and their advocates, who have campaigned for the dyslexia label, invoking medical and psychological research to achieve their aim of greater political and societal recognition. The dyslexia movement, throughout its history, has drawn attention to the social conditions that exacerbate dyslexia (such as strict exam times, poorly designed school workbooks, and a general lack of societal awareness), but it has also stressed the underlying biological reality of dyslexia. As such, this book employs a conceptualisation of dyslexia that goes beyond the either/or binary of medical/social models of disability, instead contending that dyslexia is something of both, but more than either.” This more ‘ambivalent’ understanding of dyslexia and of what it means to have dyslexia, to borrow a characterisation from the sociologist Per Solvang, is well-captured by the oral histories in the Oxford Dyslexia Archive.” Three examples of interviewees reflecting on their ‘diagnosis’ are illustrative. For Susan Hampshire, a celebrated British actress and one of the first public campaigners for dyslexia rights, there was a slight psychological benefit in better understanding the difficulties that she faced, ‘but of course it [dyslexia] was [ultimately] just a word I could use’. *4 For a former chairperson of the BDA, ‘at the point of diagnosis, there is a phase of emotions that you go through: the anger, there is the acceptance, and then there is the moving forward. For a student growing up in Britain in the 1990s, there was ‘a mixture of relief and I was a bit upset.” Put another way, ‘the moment of diagnosis is ambiguous: a point in which both difficulties are explained (at least through one [medical] model of understanding) and support becomes more forthcoming, but also an external label of disability is enshrined, beyond the control of the individual affected.” This ambiguity makes charting a pathway between medical and social models of dyslexia necessary.

The Structure of This Book

This book is ordered chronologically, tracing dyslexia from its Victorian origins through to the present day, and is organised into four parts. Part 1, “Foundations; considers the origins of dyslexia at the end of the nineteenth century; part 2, Evidence’, addresses the development of the scientific basis for dyslexia; part 3, “Recognition: The Example of Britain’ provides a case study of dyslexia’s political and societal recognition; and part 4, “Legacies, looks at the ways in which dyslexia’s past may shape dyslexia’s futures. Each chapter within these sections is thematic, drawing out a key aspect of that part of the dyslexia story.

Chapter 1 considers dyslexia’s Victorian beginnings. In 1896, William Pringle Morgan, a doctor from Seaford, Sussex, authored the first detailed account of a child with dyslexia in Britain, drawing on the evidence base established in Germany by Adolph Kussmaul and Rudolf Berlin. Pringle Morgan’s contribution was joined by other important studies, including those of his fellow Britons, James Kerr and James Hinshelwood, who together laid the foundations for dyslexia’s first science. During this period, an initial version of the influential “discrepancy diagnostic model’ was established, wherein dyslexia was identified as a marked difference between reading and general abilities. This period also saw the first suggestion that dyslexia was a developmental difficulty that might run in families and that dyslexia was related to the phonological component of language. This chapter profiles the groundbreaking work of these doctors, shows how changes in Victorian society and schooling enabled dyslexia to emerge, and considers what it was like to possess reading difficulties during this period.

By the 1920s, dyslexia research in Britain was waning. Elsewhere, though, the mantle of these early researchers was taken up by others. Chapter 2 considers several of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s, including Samuel Orton, Anna Gillingham, and Bessie Stillman in the United States, whose research further developed understanding of dyslexia and laid the foundations for the resurgence of interest in Britain from the late 1950s. It also examines the contributions of Edith Norrie in Denmark, who founded one of the first dyslexia schools in Copenhagen and helped instruct a new generation of specialist dyslexia teachers. Simultaneously, it looks at the experiences of growing up with dyslexia in the first half of the twentieth century, when, despite the work of these individuals, educational, societal, and political recognition of dyslexia around the world was slight. It also considers the first concerted criticism of dyslexia, notably that of the British educational psychologist Cyril Burt.

Chapter 3 explores the formation of the first dedicated dyslexia organisation in Britain: the Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children. In the early 1960s, a disparate group of physicians, psychologists, and academics founded

Introduction: Dyslexia in Historical Perspective 11 the centre to bring together their interests in reading difficulty and its causes. The centre’s principal director was a psychologist, Sandhya Naidoo, who published the first detailed analytical account of children with dyslexia from the perspective of psychology in 1972. The Word Blind Centre also served as a meeting place for others who became key figures in the dyslexia story, including the founders of further dyslexia organisations and specialist schools. This chapter explores how interest in dyslexia became a centralised, if not yet state-acknowledged, concern in Britain, drawing on and contributing to an emerging international interest in the condition. In addition, it considers how the Word Blind Centre laid down several gendered and classed associations of dyslexia that marked dyslexia’s later history.

Chapter 4 considers the history of dyslexia’s science from the period of the Word Blind Centre onward. Scientific work on dyslexia, by medical professionals, psychologists, and neuroscientists, amongst others, has intersected with dyslexia’s social, political, and cultural histories. For campaigners, it has formed the bedrock of dyslexia’s existence and has challenged political intransigence in recognising the condition. At the same time, dyslexia’s science possesses a fascinating history in its own right, which has, gradually across the twentieth century, shone further light on a difficulty that in the Victorian period was marked by its opacity. Who has been responsible for this scientific research, and how have they undertaken it? In what directions has dyslexia’s science developed over time? Emerging from the middle of the twentieth century, dyslexia science has expanded in the decades since into an international research effort to better understand the condition.

Chapter 5 explores how dyslexia was institutionalised in Britain: how an initial infrastructure of support was created. By the early 1970s, after helping several hundred pupils and providing a research base for dyslexia, funding for the Word Blind Centre expired. However, in its wake, Marion Welchman, professionally qualified as a nurse, brought together local dyslexia associations from across the country to form the British Dyslexia Association in 1972. A sister organisation, later rival, was founded the same year: the Dyslexia Institute. The early 1970s also saw the formation of several other specialist dyslexia organisations — in London and the South East, in the Midlands, and in Wales. Together, these organisations embedded dyslexia in British society, creating a research, teaching, and advocacy base upon which a dedicated advocacy movement for dyslexia rights was founded.

Chapter 6 considers the campaign for political recognition of dyslexia in Britain, which built on this expanding dyslexia infrastructure. As dyslexia awareness increased in society, so too did attempts at achieving political acknowledgement. The first lobbying was undertaken by the Word Blind Centre in the early 1960s, who were told by the then Ministry of Education that the evidence base for dyslexia was too thin to provide dedicated support. In refusing to acknowledge dyslexia, politicians and civil servants drew on the associations that had marked dyslexia’s social history in Britain, including its associations with ‘worried mothers’ and the middle classes. Nevertheless, with concerted campaigning by the dyslexia support organisations, the advocacy movement was successful in achieving political recognition, unlocking the door to state support.

Chapter 7 considers dyslexia’s present and future through three key discourses of dyslexia in the twenty-first century: first, dyslexia’s place in popular culture, which, for better or for worse, is increasingly the mode through which the majority of information about the condition is disseminated; second, the resurgent claim that dyslexia is a myth without scientific foundation, legitimated by private educational psychologists willing to offer a diagnosis (for a fee); and third, the place of dyslexia in emerging debates over neurodiversity, and how best to characterise difficulties such as dyslexia. Bringing these strands together, a final section considers what the future might hold for dyslexia, and the possibility that the term might one day be replaced. This chapter illustrates how understandings of dyslexia in Western societies have now proliferated into an almost immeasurable diversity, with both positive and negative effects on those with dyslexia.

Part 1

Dyslexia Discovered: Word-Blindness, Victorian Medicine, and Education (1877-1917)

Dyslexia, as the behavioural manifestation of a difference in brain development and cognitive functioning, has likely existed for far longer than modern science has imagined. It was only with the emergence of widespread literacy, though, that problems with learning to read were noticed and that the condition became prominent in society. Dyslexia is a curious phenomenon in this respect, blurring distinctions between nature and culture, the body and the environment, the medical and the social. Dyslexia manifests differently in different languages, cultures, and contexts, and could not occur in the form we understand it today outside of literate societies.: The scant attention paid to those with cognitive difficulties in centuries past, and an absence of records of their experiences, means that identifying people with dyslexia prior to the late nineteenth century is a perilous, likely impossible, undertaking.’ It was only in the late nineteenth century that the symptoms modern researchers would confidently ascribe to dyslexia fully emerged. Dyslexia can, however, be contextualised with historical accounts of reading difficulty. In the sixteenth century, St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), a Spanish noblewoman who entered monastic life as a Carmelite nun, lost the ability to recognise words and letters during her states of ecstasy.’ In 1676, a German linguist, Johannes Schmidt, published the first account in Europe of a person unable to read for non-optical reasons. In all likelihood, this was because of a stroke, rather than an underlying developmental difficulty, but it marks one of the first occasions when reading was thought to be differentiable from general cognitive skills, recognised as a process in its own right and an ability that could be impaired.‘ In 1834, a Professor Lordat of the

University of Montpellier described his recovery from a speech disorder some years earlier, during which he had found it impossible to make sense of printed symbols.’ The aetiology (underlying causes) of such acquired reading difficulties is very different from dyslexia, but together they illustrate how, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, as the Enlightenment brought about immense change to scientific and medical epistemologies, bodies increasingly came to be seen as a form of machinery, judged according to their ability (or otherwise) to fulfil societally ascribed functions.°

Other widespread societal shifts were equally important. As late as the early nineteenth century, reading was a skill of the elites, not of the people.” During the latter half of the nineteenth century, this view changed with the expansion of elementary schooling in Europe and America, and with the rise of a professional class. For this newly educated stratum of society, literacy was crucial and the flexible orthographies of Chaucer and Shakespeare faded out to be replaced by consistent, agreed systems of spelling.’ Between the mid-1600s and the mid-1800s, British literacy rates, for example, rose from around one-third of the population of males to approximately twothirds, with a national average for women of about one-half; by the end of the century, as elementary education became widespread for both sexes, illiteracy had been mostly extinguished. ° Following the Education Acts of the 1870s onwards in Britain, the stage was set for compulsory elementary education up to age twelve. While the quest against illiteracy proceeded at different paces in different Western countries, this general pattern of progress was similar.”