the period as a whole was one of doubt and tension. There was anxious concern about both markets and materials, but the retardation in the national rate of growth to below 2 percent per annum was even harder to bear because the growth rates of competitors were rising, sometimes in spectacula...
the Victorians imagined themselves-whether for good or ill- to be more thickly enmeshed in communication at a distance than any previous era: together, literacy rates and communications infrastructures defined their modernity. 46 this emphasis on material infrastructures should not seem entirely foreign ...
… In Europe, literacy rates tended to be higher in Protestant than in Catholic. …… The UK achieved a fully literate population just in time for everyone to be able to read the lists of the dead and missing in the First World War.引自The business of Victorian publishing 第四十三页:…...