Reading publics had long existed as aggregates of readers. As a social and cultural act, however, reading underwent a fundamental transformation in the eighteenth century. Not only did the production of print rise significantly; what readers read also changed. Not only did more people read; people also read more. And as the quantitative and qualitative effects of these changes became increasingly evident to contemporaries, “the reading public” became an object of discussion, dissection, and debate. Even as Enlightenment writers and critics assigned this public unprecedented importance as an arbiter of taste, they also grappled with the intractable problem of how to shape, control, and even define it.

Literacy in the eighteenth century

Literacy is notoriously difficult to measure or even define. Is it the ability to sign one's name? Read a newspaper? Understand a governmental regulation or comprehend a scholarly text? Part of the problem is that literacy is not one skill but a hierarchy of discrete ones. In early modern Europe these could include the capacity to read but not write, or conversely, the ability to sign one's name without knowing how to read a relatively simple text. In some cases reading was an extension of memory. Here individuals were able to “read” certain Biblical passages they had once memorized, but not others less familiar.

Compounding the problem are the limits of the sources. Historians have traditionally used the ability to sign one's name as an index of literacy.