This article examines the social role of literacy in a period of rapid commercial development and growing economic inequality. It shows how tradesmen and others of similar rank used reading and writing to create a powerful identity that cut across some of the sharpening divisions in wealth in England from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Growing numbers of precariously positioned ‘middling’ men and women took advantage of the spread of literacy to construct social roles for themselves based on godly work, vocational knowledge and occupational fraternity. Using a uniquely voluminous collection of notebooks produced by one Essex tradesman as a foundation, the article draws on other examples of non-elite writing and cheap print to reveal a broad literary culture that was emerging in provincial towns at this time. Through this, it connects the historiography of social structure and economic change to the growing research on non-elite literacy and life-writing. Taken together, these findings suggest that the existing narrative of early modern ‘social polarisation’ should be revisited.

中文翻译：

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“我自己创作的诗篇”：早期现代英格兰的识字、工作和社会认同

本文考察了在商业快速发展和经济不平等加剧的时期识字的社会作用。它展示了商人和其他类似等级的人如何使用阅读和写作来创造一个强大的身份，从而跨越了从 16 世纪末到 18 世纪初英格兰一些日益尖锐的财富划分。越来越多处于不稳定地位的“中等”男性和女性利用识字率的传播为自己构建基于敬虔工作、职业知识和职业博爱的社会角色。这篇文章以埃塞克斯一位商人制作的大量独特的笔记本为基础，借鉴了非精英写作和廉价印刷品的其他例子，揭示了当时在省城出现的广泛的文学文化。通过这个，它将社会结构和经济变化的历史编纂与对非精英文化和生活写作的日益增长的研究联系起来。综上所述，这些发现表明应该重新审视早期现代“社会两极分化”的现有叙述。