I'm studying a course in Adult Literacy Education in New Zealand and we're looking at historical literacy rates and the introduction of literacy to New Zealand. In 1815 the first written attempt to record the Maori language was published and in 1841 the first Maori language newspaper was published, showing a rapid uptake of literacy among Maori. This is compared to today where Maori struggle with education and perform poorly compared to Pakeha, or European New Zealanders, largely due to the impact of colonization. The material we're using claims that literacy rates among Pakeha in 1840 were actually quite low and that the Maori had observed that the Pakeha who could read and write were the ones with power, motivating a race among different Maori tribes to become literate and participate in modern life. These two documents:

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/files/documents/peopling2.pdf

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/files/documents/peopling1.pdf

...talk about the ethnic composition of early European settlers before 1840 and from 1840 to 1852. The second has a table saying about 64.3 percent from a random sample of deaths in 1841 were from England, about 20 percent from Scotland and 13 percent from Ireland. So I'm mostly interested in the literacy rates in those countries; some sources say literacy rate in England in 1840 was in the sixty percent range for men and the 50 percent range for women, and Scotland looks better, but I can't find similar information for Ireland so I can complete my crude estimate of literacy rates.