Reading a Corner (Walking); Or, Reading the Signs (redux)

I love to walk and watch and read. It's not a new phenomenon. Lots of people learn to read this way. Tombstones and advertisements.


















I can provide one example -- of the 18th century British labouring class poet, novelist, playwright, Ann Cromartie Yearsley.

As [Hannah] More claims, other than a translation of Virgil's Georgics, Yearsley had no substantial exposure to classical writing but what she "had taken from little ordinary prints which hung in a shop window" (Yearsley 1787, xii).

This could be a false claim. Labouring-class writers were often promoted as 'natural geniuses', their histories rewritten by patrons who preferred the notion that genius sprung out of the natural world and that if cultivated by the proper patron/gardener, it might bear fruit. I'm not sure where Yearsley was supposed to have picked up Virgil's Georgics though...