Dictated letters: who wrote letters for illiterate Irish emigrants

Most people who wrote letters for illiterate Irish emigrants were not professional scribes. They were family: a literate son or daughter, a neighbour who had spent a few years at the National school, occasionally a priest or schoolmaster paid in kind. The 1841 census found that just 28 per cent of the population over five could read and write at all, so dictation, not composition, was how most Irish households corresponded across the Atlantic.

Literacy rates in the Irish 1841 census

The 1841 census was the first in Ireland to ask people directly about their education. Enumerators sorted everyone aged five and over into three categories: able to read and write, able to read only, and unable to do either. Nationally, 28 per cent fell into the first group, 19 per cent could read but not write, and 53 per cent, more than half the population, could do neither.

The figure was not even across the country, or across the household. Connacht, the western province that took in County Mayo, was still overwhelmingly Irish-speaking in 1841, and in English, the language the post office and the emigrant letter required, illiteracy there ran well above the national average. Nor was it evenly split between men and women: the 1841 returns recorded around 1.28 million men able to read and write against 580,000 who could read only, compared with roughly 678,000 women able to read and write against some 829,000 who could read but not write. A household able to recite genealogies, prayers, and songs from memory might still have nobody in it able to hold a pen in the language an American postmaster could read, and if it did, that person was somewhat more likely to be a son than a daughter.

Who wrote letters for illiterate Irish emigrants

When nobody in a household could write, the task usually fell to whoever nearby could. The historian David Fitzpatrick, working through a body of some 111 letters exchanged between Ireland and Irish settlers in Australia for his study Oceans of Consolation, found that many were physically set down by an amanuensis, often, in his words, “the sender’s better-educated son or daughter,” taking down a parent’s words in the parent’s own voice. Letters from this period frequently carry more than one hand and more than one signature at the bottom, because composing a letter home was often a household task rather than a solitary one.

Where a family had no literate member at all, the writer might be a schoolteacher, a priest, or, in a town with a market and a post office, a clerk or shopkeeper who wrote letters for a fee alongside his ordinary trade. A priest was often a natural choice quite apart from his learning: parish life already required him to keep baptismal and marriage registers by hand, so pen and ink were tools of his ordinary week rather than a special favour. A schoolteacher, similarly, wrote letters and copybook exercises all day and could turn the same hand to a family’s correspondence without much extra thought. None of this made the letter any less personal. The sender still chose every word; the scribe supplied only the hand that carried it to paper. This is, in practical terms, who wrote letters for illiterate Irish emigrants whenever the household itself had no one able to hold the pen. Once the letter reached its destination, it was rarely read in private either, and the practice of gathering neighbours to hear a letter read aloud is its own chapter in this history.

A scribal habit that ran deep in Ireland

Dictation was not a novelty forced on Irish families by emigration. Ireland already had, as one study of the period puts it, “the twilight world of the scribe and the circulating manuscript”: in Irish-speaking districts, poems, genealogies, and devotional texts had long been copied out and read aloud by hand, because Irish was rarely taught as a written language even in places where reading in English was available. The scribe who copied a poem for a townland and the neighbour who took down a letter for a son in Boston were doing recognisably the same work, in a different alphabet, for a different purpose.

Formal schooling shaped who was available to do that work. By the 1820s Ireland had roughly 9,000 hedge schools, informal, fee-paying schools often held in a farmer’s kitchen or literally under a hedge, teaching something like 400,000 children reading, writing, and arithmetic for a few pence a week, with some also offering history, geography, and, in a handful of places, Latin or Greek. In 1831 the Chief Secretary, Edward Stanley, set up a national school system meant, in his own words, to be “a system of education from which should be banished even the suspicion of proselytism,” open to children of every denomination.

That system grew quickly through the Famine decade and the years just after it. In 1833 it ran 789 schools with about 107,000 pupils; by 1849, 4,321 schools taught roughly 481,000 children, and by 1870 the number had reached 6,806 schools and nearly a million pupils. National illiteracy in English fell alongside that growth, but slowly: 47 per cent of the population over five could still neither read nor write English in 1851, a figure that only dropped to 33 per cent by 1871 and 14 per cent by 1901. Any family writing or dictating a letter in the 1840s and 1850s was doing so at the very start of that long climb, not after it.

Letter-writing manuals and the wider culture of correspondence

Ireland’s dictated letters were part of a much larger Victorian shift in who wrote letters and how often. Postal reform in 1840 replaced a system of distance-based charges, which could run to a shilling or more for a single sheet and left recipients rather than senders liable for the cost, with a flat penny rate that made sending a letter affordable to ordinary households for the first time. As postage grew cheaper and expectations around correspondence grew more formal, published letter-writing manuals such as The Universal Letter Writer and The Wide World Letter Writer circulated widely, offering model letters and set phrases for everything from a job application to a declaration of affection.

These manuals were aimed chiefly at people who could already write but wanted the right form of words. For a household relying on a neighbour or a schoolteacher to take dictation, the same formulas travelled by a different route: a scribe who had seen dozens of such letters, or who had been taught set openings and closings at a hedge school or a national school, brought a ready-made structure to a family’s own words. The result was a correspondence that could sound formal in its greetings and farewells and entirely plain-spoken in between, because two different registers, the scribe’s learned formula and the sender’s own voice, sat side by side on the same page.

What a dictated emigrant letter sounds like

A dictated letter tends to read differently from one composed alone at a desk. Fitzpatrick’s collection of Irish-Australian correspondence shows sentences shaped for the ear as much as the eye, and closing lines that address the scribe as much as the reader, thanking a son or a neighbour for setting the words down. He describes the resulting documents as semi-private rather than fully private, letters in which a sender’s feelings were, in his phrase, “bared self-consciously before a mixed audience,” aware that the scribe, and often other listeners, would hear the words before the intended reader ever did. Some letters name their writer directly; many give no clue at all, and a scribe’s presence has to be inferred from a shift in handwriting mid-letter or a signature that does not match the hand above it. Most dictated letters were still written in the first person, in the sender’s own “I,” rather than reported at a remove, because that was the whole point of the exercise: the scribe’s task was to carry a voice across, not to summarise it. Where the sender could not even sign a name, letters and other documents of the period often carry a simple mark or cross instead, the accepted substitute for a signature at the time. Collections of surviving emigrant letters held in archives on both sides of the Atlantic preserve many examples of exactly this kind of layered authorship, a plain-spoken “I” carried to the page by someone else’s hand.

What historians cannot know

The written record cannot say how often dictation happened, only that it must have been common given how few people could write. No index exists of who held the pen for whom; a scribe rarely announced the role unless thanked directly in the text. A shift in phrasing, an unusually formal turn, or handwriting that looks older or younger than the signature can suggest a second author, but none of it proves collaboration on its own. For every dictated letter whose authorship can be traced, an unknown number survive with that detail lost entirely, and a further, larger number, composed in a kitchen with paper too dear to spare, were never written down at all. Fitzpatrick’s own study, built from just over a hundred surviving letters, is itself a reminder of how small and unrepresentative any surviving archive is against the volume of correspondence that must once have existed. Reading these letters closely, and knowing what their gaps do and do not tell us, is its own discipline within Irish emigration history.

What the surviving letters do confirm is that literacy was never a strict gate on communication. A household with one reader and one writer between them could still keep faith with a son in Boston or a daughter in New York, one dictated line at a time, in a correspondence that ran on trust in a scribe as much as on ink and paper. Why those same letters were so often read aloud to a room rather than in private is the natural next question this one leads to.

Sources and further reading

• History Ireland, “The 1841 census,” historyireland.com, for national literacy figures from the 1841 census of Ireland.
• History Ireland, “‘Inciting the lawless and profligate adventure’: the hedge schools of Ireland,” historyireland.com, for hedge school numbers and the 1831 national school system.
• “Education: Primary Public Education, National Schools from 1831,” Encyclopedia.com, for Edward Stanley’s 1831 letter, national school growth figures, and English-literacy census returns for 1851, 1871, and 1901.
• David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork University Press, 1994), discussed in “Emigrant letters: ‘I take up my pen to write these few lines,’” History Ireland, historyireland.com.
• Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (eds.), Oral and Printed Cultures in Ireland, 1600-1900 (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2010).
• The Victorian Web, “Letter-Writing Manuals,” victorianweb.org, for the genre of Victorian model-letter guides such as The Universal Letter Writer and The Wide World Letter Writer.