In his diary, A. J. Munby records a series of encounters with a young woman called Sarah Tanner. He knew her first as a ‘maid of all work to a tradesman in Oxford’, and then met her a year or so later in Regent Street, ‘arrayed in gorgeous apparel’:

Several years later he came across her again, now soberly dressed, the respectable proprietor of a coffee house she had bought with her savings from a three-year career on the streets. In the field of work, reading and writing rarely had so straightforward and so successful an application. Even amongst her own kind, Sarah Tanner's attainments were unusual. Only 3 per cent of London prostitutes could read and write fluently, and 54 per cent were wholly illiterate.

Neither the association of specific occupations with the skills of literacy nor the long-term interaction between the technologies of production and communication can be reduced to simple generalisations.