How do you read 1800s

By reading the practical tips and working through the documents in the Tutorial in order of difficulty, you will find that it becomes much easier to read old handwriting.

You can find more documents on which to practise your skills in the further practice section. Ten documents of varying levels of difficulty, information about the documents and their historical backgrounds. You can also learn Latin with our online tutorial for beginners. All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.

Search the website Search the catalogue. Search the archives Search our website. Silent reading by the late 19th century was so popular that people worried that women in particular, reading alone in bed , were prone to sexy, dangerous thoughts.

Saenger hypothesizes that a shift in the way words were laid out a page facilitated the change. Latin words once ran all together, makingithardtoparsethem. Saenger argues that Irish monks, translating Latin in the seventh century, added spaces between words to help them understand the language better.

This key design change, he argues, facilitated the rise in silent reading. Parkes, in his book, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West , argues something similar.

This scholarship applies for the most part to the Latin-based writing and reading of Europe. Mainstream historical accounts would have us think that the end of oral reading in the Middle Ages was part of the Renaissance, a new European preoccupation with the individual. We just needed a little help getting there. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz.

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