Joseph Mayett was born in 1783, one often children of a farm labourer in the vale of Aylesbury. The poverty of his family caused him to spend his childhood making lace rather than attending school:

He received further assistance from his grandmother, and from a Sunday school, where he made progress in ‘Learning hard names’; and in his early twenties, whilst serving in the Royal Bucks. Militia against Napoleon, he persuaded a fellow soldier to teach him to write, so that he could correspond with his parents. Over the century and a half covered by this study, Mayett's laborious acquisition of the skills of literacy became an increasingly common experience in English popular culture. In the middle of the eighteenth century, three hundred years after the invention of printing, half the English population could not write.