Reading and Freedom in Lyddie's America

An essay in the NPS series Lyddie: Voices from the Field, on chapter 5 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie, set in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.

For Lyddie, education is freedom. Unlike many girls her age, she never went to school, and words come hard to her; she admires, even envies, those who can read.

A nation learning to read

• Public schools: their numbers grew after the American Revolution. The 1840 Census reported that about ninety percent of white men and women were literate.
• New England: by 1840, around 82% of white children aged 5 to 19 were enrolled. The school term averaged 24 weeks in 1849, though some districts kept school eight to ten months, according to Vermont's state superintendent. But attendance was irregular — and Lyddie couldn't go at all, which is why she is both glad and envious when she learns her brother Charlie has been sent to school while working at a mill.
• A reading culture: people still learned at home and church, but more and more at school; cheap books and magazines made reading part of American life — and made not reading all the more isolating.

Why people read

• Citizenship: public-education advocates argued that voters needed literacy to understand current affairs and act for the common good.
• Novels and empathy: Horace Mann, the leading champion of public schools, called novel reading an "epidemic" that loosed the imagination without moral concern — a view echoed by one of Lyddie's fellow mill girls. Yet novels let readers see through others' eyes — what Americans then called sympathy and we call empathy. Exhausted after work, Lyddie devours Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin moved Northern readers to empathize with enslaved people; Abraham Lincoln is said to have called Stowe the "woman who wrote the book that started" the Civil War.
• "Self-culture": reading enriched one's inner life, offered pleasure and self-improvement, and marked the growing middle class.

Literacy denied

• Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography Lyddie buys as her reading improves, learned his letters from his mistress in Baltimore until her husband stopped her, saying reading would "unfit him to be a slave." Douglass kept learning from white boys on the street and from The Columbian Orator, a schoolbook of moral and political pieces on liberty and equality that made him long for freedom.
• Laws against reading: after Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion — Turner was a minister inspired by the Gospel to seek freedom — southern states made it illegal to teach enslaved and free Black people to read or write. Still, an estimated 5–10% of enslaved people could read, learning from enslavers, from one another, on their own, or in secret schools, sometimes hidden pits in the ground, at the risk of punishment.
• In the North: free Black children could attend integrated or segregated public schools in many places, but not everywhere, so Black families founded their own schools and, when they could, sent children to private academies. White resistance could turn violent: in 1835, in Canaan, New Hampshire, about 100 white people used 95 yoke of oxen to drag the integrated Noyes Academy off its foundation and into a swamp.

Lyddie's freedom

By the novel's end, reading has become part of Lyddie's life and of American life — meaning citizenship, power, status, freedom, self-culture and enjoyment. Like Douglass, Lyddie resolves never to be enslaved, not even by her own limits; her freedom comes through reading, and she knows that a woman like her has a mind that deserves an education.

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 05 Reading," by Dr. Johann N. Neem, Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Passages from the novel are paraphrased; the author's portrait is left out.