How widespread was the practice of having someone read aloud to 19th/early 20th century factory workers, and what would sort of material have been read?

by vauntedsexboat

I was recently listening to a talk by Noam Chomsky where he claimed that many factory workers would have been very well-versed in popular literature and political thought due to the practice of having someone read aloud in factories; it was part of a larger claim about the intellectual isolation of the working class. (He makes a similar claim in this excerpt, in the portion where he talks about the "factory girls of Lowell.")

Obviously this is part of a political/philosophical argument, but I'm curious about how historical this particular fact is. I've heard about reading aloud in factories before (often in the context of cigar factories), but was this a general and common practice? And what exactly would have been read to the workers -- was it as political and highbrow as Chomsky seems to be implying here? I suppose I always assumed it would've been mostly basic newspapers or popular fiction.

vertexoflife

I would like to take a brief moment to here as a book historian and note that silent reading was the oddity rather than the norm until the mid-eighteenth and not formalized until the twentieth century. Most books and reading would have been done aloud to an audience and as a performance of sorts, it was rather uncommon for someone to read silently or quickly and that is something that took awhile to develop.